(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

For those not familiar, WRP is a “proxy” that allows vintage web browsers to surf modern web. Some details in old post and another one.

It works pretty well for casual use, however it always been a little slow, and not only on the old computer side. Screenshot capture and encoding to GIF image has always been little time challenged. As of version 4.6, Hill Ma added a fast gif encoder with optimized palette. This has been a game changer. However the image encoding was still single threaded bottleneck.

In v4.9 I have added a parallel, multithreaded GIF encoder that uses Hill’s fast palette optimization. The improvement is about 100x faster encoding on my 20 core Mac Studio. In addition the file size is also about 30-40% smaller than the original. It’s actually faster and smaller than PNG image! This encoder works both in ISMAP and Simple HTML mode. It finally allows for fast and snappy browsing experience!

In addition I have added support for Brave Browser, DuckDuckGo search, as Google had Captcha nightmare. Finally the default, automatic “headless” User Agent has been replaced with jnrsbsn allowing some rudimentary anti-headless browser detection.

Happy browsing!