GoKawiilThe modern web, on a 25-year-old Mac.
MacSurf is a web browser for Classic Mac OS 9 PowerPC. CSS3, ES5 JavaScript, PNGs with alpha, running on a G3 iMac.
Warning MacSurf is early alpha. It runs, it renders, it talks TLS 1.2 natively to real HTTPS sites (as of May 2026), and it executes JavaScript on a 233 MHz G3. That doesn't mean it's ready for daily driving — most of the modern web still won't work in it. Heavy SPAs, modern CSS features we haven't shipped, missing form interactions, slow JS on real hardware. Plenty is rough. But it's ready for people to try. If you've got a Power Mac G3 or G4 sitting around, please load it and see what breaks. Bug reports and screenshots from real hardware are exactly what this project needs. Contributors welcome too — there's a lot of CSS, DOM, and JS surface left to fill in, and the code is plain C89 (the same C you'd have written in 1999). See docs/status.md for the current punch list. What you can expect: hand-built pages, retro-style sites, a respectable chunk of CSS Grid, native HTTPS with the full Mozilla CA bundle, and the strange thrill of running ES5 JavaScript on a PowerPC. What you shouldn't expect yet: smooth browsing on arbitrary modern sites, video, audio, WebGL, service workers, anything heavy on React. First numbered release was 0.1a1 in May 2026. Latest is v1.3.1 — Forward, refined (2026-05-29): multi-curve ECDHE in TLS 1.3. macTLS now offers X25519, secp256r1 (P-256), and secp384r1 (P-384) in supported_groups , with HelloRetryRequest handled cleanly so servers that mandate a NIST curve can drive the rekey. That unblocks 68kmla.org — one of the largest active Classic Mac communities, XenForo on nginx with NIST-only curve config — which now renders fully on a G3 iMac via TLS 1.3 + P-384. Predecessor v1.3 — Forward landed the first native TLS 1.3 implementation on Classic Mac OS, ever — RFC 8446 handshake on BearSSL primitives, ChaCha20-Poly1305 + AES-128-GCM, verified end-to-end on a G3 iMac by Cloudflare's /cdn-cgi/trace , Akamai, BrowserLeaks, and How's My SSL. The day before, v1.2 — Sealed closed the documented insecure-stub entropy hole with macEntropy v1.0, wired POST forms through both fetchers, and shipped a real download manager. Full v1.3.1 notes in docs/release-notes/MacSurf-1.3.1.md. Predecessors: v1.3 notes, v1.2 notes, v1.0 notes.
Why this exists
The web outgrew Classic Mac OS twenty years ago. Modern HTTPS finished it off around 2016. Pull a G3 or G4 out of the closet today and it can barely reach a single live website.
MacSurf is an attempt to fix that on the machine itself — no screenshot proxy, no remote terminal trick. A native browser, built with the tools that were already on the platform: CodeWarrior, Carbon, QuickDraw, Open Transport. Real CSS3 layouts and real JavaScript, running inside the 64 MB memory floor of a 1999 iMac. Since late May 2026 it speaks TLS 1.2 directly to the modern web through macTLS, a BearSSL-based stack that ships inside the browser binary with 121 trust anchors from the Mozilla CA bundle. No proxy needed anymore.
As far as we can tell, this is the first serious NetSurf port to Classic Mac OS, and the first browser ever shipped on Mac OS 9 with native CSS Grid, CSS custom properties, and ES5 JavaScript.
The progression
Each shot below is a real milestone, captured on a Power Macintosh G3 running Mac OS 9. The fix-number annotations match this repo's commit history.
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