I am someone who prefers to use simple rich text editors such as WordPad on Windows or TextEdit on OS X when taking notes on my computer. As such, Microsoft's deprecation and planned removal of already-installed copies of WordPad has left me somewhat uneasy, especially as there are no plans for a replacement¹. All hope is not lost for the future of familiar rich text editors on Windows 11, however:

1. Apple used to distribute the TextEdit.app sources with a FOSS license
2. A fork of the old FOSS version still exists as part of the GNUStep project
3. GNUStep has a Windows port

And that's the story of how I ended up running Apple's rich text editor on Windows 11

¹ You are expected to either lose the text formatting and use Notepad, or go all the way to Word.

I don't really have nostalgia for windows xp the way a lot of people do (I ran windows 2000 until late 00s, then went to linux) but I have recently acquired an old windows xp laptop (without the original HDD) so yesterday I decided to install xp to finally check it out

couple amusing/interesting things from during the install process:

• when I selected support for "complex scripts" (not enabled out of the box on the finnish install) it warned me that supporting arabic, armenian, georgian, hebrew, hindi, thai, and vietnamese would take at least 10 megabytes (second picture)
• in the time zone selector it first of all uses GMT instead of UTC, and secondly kyiv is rendered as "Kiev" instead of the normal finnish "Kiova" (third picture)

my home networking just uses normal ethernet, so getting an internet connection is not very hard. however, tls 1.2 with something better than aes-cbc is nowadays required for connecting even to wikipedia, so the built-in internet explorer 6 is not very useful in modern day internet (google still works tho!)

I first tried to see if I could bootstrap tls 1.2 capable browser using only windows xp. this is possible on os x 10.4 – macintosh garden allows non-https requests if you are on an old mac, and they host the most up to date browser for the system. you can even get all the way to latest openssl staying 100% on os x 10.4

as best as I can tell, it is not possible on windows. everything able to do tls 1.2 is behind tls 1.2 (and in several cases, behind github, which is completely unusable even on the tls 1.2 enabled browsers that do run on these old systems). so I just copied firefox 52.9esr (last version that supports windows xp) installer over on an USB stick, and ran that

except it turns out, that requires SSE2 (second picture). and my laptop has athlon xp-m, which only does up to the original SSE. and the latest version of firefox that did not requires SSE2 was 3.6, far too old to have tls 1.2. I then set out to look for a browser without an SSE2 requirement

my first lead was chrome, which added SSE2 requirement in version 35, and tls 1.2 support in 29 (with chapoly in 33). I quickly determined the version I wanted was 34.0.1847.137 so now it was only the matter of finding that. that turned out to be harder than expected

google does not host old builds due to security reasons (fair enough), so if you need an old build for development reasons you are supposed to find the matching chromium CI run and get that. however, using the linked tool for finding the base position (which is deprecated, because of course it is) does not find a base position for 34.0.1847.137. after some time a friend came to the conclusion that chromium no longer hosts CI builds that old

at this point another friend suggested k-meleon, the on-off updated windows-native gecko (now goanna, pale moon's engine, after mozilla killed off support for gecko in third party applications) browser. this did in fact work, as you can see in the latter two images, though goanna is clearly showing the lack of developers compared to gecko and it is not able to for example view individual toots' pages on mastodon

(said friend also suggested the mypal web browser, which is based on pale moon and targeted specifically for windows xp. it however died on an illegal instruction, which suggests to me that it too requires SSE2)

I don't really have nostalgia for windows xp the way a lot of people do (I ran windows 2000 until late 00s, then went to linux) but I have recently acquired an old windows xp laptop (without the original HDD) so yesterday I decided to install xp to finally check it out

couple amusing/interesting things from during the install process:

• when I selected support for "complex scripts" (not enabled out of the box on the finnish install) it warned me that supporting arabic, armenian, georgian, hebrew, hindi, thai, and vietnamese would take at least 10 megabytes (second picture)
• in the time zone selector it first of all uses GMT instead of UTC, and secondly kyiv is rendered as "Kiev" instead of the normal finnish "Kiova" (third picture)