(this is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka tenox)
TL;DR
Firefox with TightVNC server in a Docker container.
https://github.com/tenox7/vncfox
I often work on vintage Unix Workstations and other obsolete systems. I have a need to browse modern web on old computers somehow. In the past I developed Web Rendering Proxy to help with this. While WRP is awesome as a showcase, and some light browsing, unfortunately it falls little short of being practical for a daily driver.
Like many others I have been cheating and using a VM with a web browser and remotely connecting to it via VNC or RDP. This is rather obvious and mostly works, but a VM is hard to run and upkeep. Takes time to boot and eats resources. You need to customize it, install updates and other nonsense. I wanted something much simpler, leaner and not requiring any maintenance. I also need to run it on ARM based hosts like a Mac or Raspberry PI.
Enter VNCFOX – a Firefox browser with TightVNC server packaged as a Docker container. It’s small, lean, easy to run and there is no boot time and lengthy updates. You can mount Firefox .mozilla profile in a Docker volume to preserve your settings, plugins like uBlock, history, cookies and cache, across container restarts! I also typically bind mount a folder exported over NFS in to /home/vncfox/Downloads.
TightVNC version of VNC is rather crucial, especially for older computers. Without the “Tight” protocol, VNC screen refresh consumes a lot of CPU on the client side and the session is laggy. TightVNC works incredibly smooth. For ease of use I have compiled clients for some older operating systems.
Overall this approach works really well, including stuff like Perplexity/ChatGPT/Claude, Google Docs, Email, even Discord and other web based chat clients. I regularly now post and edit this very blog from a HP-UX workstation!
The container is dual platform for both AMD64 and ARM64. It can be run even on Mac host with Apple Silicon. Raspberry PI maybe?
Is it future proof? Maybe. Apparently Wayland supports VNC, including Tight protocol. Some day I will migrate the server. But for now x11 vncserver works pretty well.
Useful keyboard shortcuts:
- F8 – TightVNC Menu – Including clipboard transfer etc
- F11 – Firefox Full Screen Mode
More info and customization, including dealing with retarded scrollbars:
https://github.com/tenox7/vncfox
I have a few older systems that only use the older security protocols. The current browsers will no longer connect.
It would be useful to have a proxy that downgrades output to the older security.
By security you mean SSL/TLS? Also are they running old web servers and you can’t connect modern web browser to it? Or do you browse on the old systems?
Yes. The device web server cannot do modern SSL/TLS.
A modern web browser has disabled older SSL/TLS and can’t talk to the device.