I don't see the point of providing a life-support system for these old, insecure, outdated web browsers.
It's not really analogous to, say, driving old, restored cars. These browsers are rootkit magnets. The people who use this unmaintained software are inherently less safe.
It's just intended to be a fun hack that works surprisingly well, not a serious solution to the problem of providing support for older browsers.
Although come to think of it, if all the rendering is being done on the server side, and nothing but an image map is being delivered to the older browser it should be perfectly safe for these ancient browsers to navigate to even the most dangerous websites, provided that the server side component doesn't get hacked, because the server side component will be delivering nothing but safe images.
Say you wanted to make a film set in 1997? You could probably buy a period computer easily enough from eBay, you could probably get Windows 95 on there with Internet Explorer 4, but to display some content? You could make some Photoshop mockups for period 'Google', 'CNN' et all, but to actually serve those pages would require a period server. This little trick of rendering would make it all slightly easier for the film maker. They would not have to hand millions over to ILM just to make a few retro screenshots.
If you're making a film, just have your art guys make mockups of the entire thing in photoshop and have it display like a fullscreened slideshow or video on an old monitor. The other old hardware needn't be functional.
This makes everything reproducible for multiple takes, lets your art guys have ultra-fine control over the presentation of everything, and lets the actor focus on acting, not driving a computer.
Of course! Don't even have the keyboard actually attached, have some guy in the gallery push the buttons too... Add those sound effects in post-production as well. No wonder there are no themes that enable your computer to beep and chirp like in the movies.
> "Don't even have the keyboard actually attached, have some guy in the gallery push the buttons too..."
Alternatively have the keyboard set up as one big "anykey" to advance the animation. The advantage of this being that keyboard strikes would be synced with screen updates, if there is ever a shot where you can see both the fingers and the screen (which is typically avoided, but still).
Although this one example might not be a very practical way of doing it, anything that keeps old hardware out of the trash and still in useful service is a big positive in my opinion.
One thing the software industry has been very good at doing is driving the sales of hardware, by requiring more and more resources --- only to do much of the same things as before, maybe with some improvement in specific areas. Many users have no need for the latest hardware nor software, yet they're constantly encouraged to upgrade for security, "new features" they'll never use, etc. (I'll admit that some of these, like security, could be valid concerns.) Upgrading to newer software with higher resource consumption, they wonder "why is it so slow?", and that eventually leads to perfectly fine hardware going to waste. In particular, the extremely fast upgrade cycles of browsers makes their contribution to this gross waste a bigger part than a lot of other software.
> The people who use this unmaintained software are inherently less safe.
A lot of exploits today won't even run on older systems. Older browsers also having less features is also a reduction in attack area - e.g. if there was something vulnerable in HTML5 video or CSS3 animation, a browser that didn't support those features would be inherently immune.
I'm interested in using this for my (original) iPad. As time progresses, more and more websites cause the browser to crash. The latest example was when I tried to view the new apple iCar thingy on apple.com.
Never could get it to load.
I don't think that my tablet is a root kit magnet, nor that I'm inherently less safe. I just find that this hardware works well enough for most of my needs, except now for browsing the web, which I never thought would happen...
Any number of people could have their own idiosyncratic reasons for needing, or at least wanting such a hack.
The general diversity of ways people connect to the internet on all kinds of different hardware is enough of a reason, provided there is someone interested in putting the hack together. And there was such a person, so, yay. There's no Court of Hack Justifications one must appeal to, to do this stuff.
It's not really analogous to, say, driving old, restored cars. These browsers are rootkit magnets. The people who use this unmaintained software are inherently less safe.