my first attempt used frogfind, and while frogfind DID work, it was fucking awful and required a lot of manually inputing addresses. it was hardly browsing, but in a pinch it could work as long as you knew what to type in.
i then looked to see if there was something that could strip off the https bullshit from modern websites, and that led me to webone. its a proxy that takes modern websites and converts it into old stupid websites. i had my lead.
after gathering all three fleas in my brain to remember how the hell home networing works, i set up the proxy on my laptop, connected my dsi to the proxy, opened e621, and it started loading! on the dsi! very very very very very slowly! turns out the proxy by default has a whitelist for https websites for..... security reasons? idfk i put e621 and its database thing in the whitelist and it is now only very very very slow. after that i learned the proxy has a disabled thing in the config that can downscale every image it sees and compress it with jpeg. after setting that up, the site now simply loaded very slow.
the browsing experience is not great. search results are single column view, you have to wait for the page to render whenever you scroll, and you can practically make a sandwich while you let the page finish loading all the data, but it works on a dsi. to be fair, thats what browsing on the dsi when i was a kid felt like in the first place anyways, so i guess it sticks with tradition or something.
i should see if i can browse cohost next. im not confident with that because clearing your browser history is a literal thing you have to manually do if the dsi is running low on memory and cant display a page. i might be able to log in but thats it.
