The modern web, on a 25-year-old Mac.

A native web browser for Classic Mac OS 9 on PowerPC — real CSS3, modern JavaScript, and HTTPS, running on a G3 iMac. No proxy, no second machine.

MacSurf 1.68 on a Power Mac G3 iMac, rendering home.macsurf.org over native HTTPS.

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MacSurf is a full-time project. If it brought your old Mac back to the web, a few dollars keeps development going — and you'll get the dev logs.

  

_{Thanks to our supporters: Shlooom (Patreon) · kilgeist (Ko-Fi)}

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Note

1.68 "macQJS" runs a real modern JavaScript engine, speaks TLS 1.3 natively, keeps you logged in, and renders full desktop forums on a 233 MHz G3. It's at its best on hand-built pages, retro sites, and forums. Very heavy modern apps — GitHub, video, React-heavy SPAs — still don't render. This is honest, in-progress software. Got a G3 or G4? Load it up and tell us what breaks. See docs/status.md for the current punch list.

Why this exists

The web outgrew Classic Mac OS twenty years ago, and modern HTTPS finished the job around 2016. Pull a G3 or G4 out of the closet today and it can barely reach a single live site.

MacSurf fixes that on the machine itself — no screenshot proxy, no remote-terminal trick. It's a native browser built with the tools that shipped on the platform: CodeWarrior, Carbon, QuickDraw, Open Transport. It speaks TLS 1.3 straight to the modern web through macTLS, a BearSSL-based stack baked into the binary with the full Mozilla CA bundle, and runs modern JavaScript through macQJS, a QuickJS port for Mac OS 9.

As far as we can tell, it's the first serious NetSurf port to Classic Mac OS, and the first Mac OS 9 browser with native CSS Grid, CSS custom properties, and an on-device modern JavaScript engine.

Real sites, on real hardware

Every shot below is a live site, captured on a Power Mac G3 running Mac OS 9.2.2.

68kmla.org A full XenForo forum — logged in, full-width, posting replies.	macintoshgarden.org The classic Mac abandonware library.
macintoshrepository.org Thumbnails, tables, and all.	machut.net Vintage Mac archives, over native HTTPS.
lobste.rs Reading its own thread — nested comments and all.	DuckDuckGo Search that works.

How it got here — a couple of early milestones

v0.2 — JavaScript on Mac OS 9 The first JS-bearing page evaluating live, on-device.

CSS Grid Real Grid layout — spans, full-row heroes, auto-wrap.

The pieces

Component	Language	Purpose
browser/	C (C89, CW8)	NetSurf fork with a macos9 frontend. Carbon for the UI, QuickDraw for drawing, Open Transport for networking, macQJS for JavaScript.
macTLS sibling repo	C (CW8)	Native TLS 1.3 (1.2 fallback) for OS 9 — HTTPS straight from the Mac. BearSSL underneath, full Mozilla CA bundle baked in.
macQJS sibling repo	C (CW8)	A QuickJS port for Classic Mac OS — modern ES2023 JavaScript on PowerPC.

What works today

Rendering Full NetSurf fetch → parse → cascade → layout → plot Native libcss with var(), ~150 properties consumed in layout Flexbox, CSS Grid, gradients, border-radius, box-shadow, opacity, transforms, z-index stacking PNG (real alpha), GIF, JPEG, BMP, TIFF Downloadable web-font icon glyphs Full status →

JavaScript — macQJS (QuickJS, ES2023) let/const, arrows, classes, template literals, Promises, generators, modern regex Runs real site bundles on-device Networking HTTP/1.1: chunked, keep-alive, 3xx follow, connection pooling HTTPS via macTLS — TLS 1.3, 1.2 fallback, full CA bundle Cookies and logins that persist Chrome Address bar, back / forward / reload / home, bookmarks menu, downloads manager Text input: caret, selection, cut / copy / paste, Tab between fields Multi-window, smooth scroll bar, keyboard scrolling

Download

MacSurf 1.68 "macQJS" (2026-07-07) — the JavaScript engine was replaced (Duktape ES5 → macQJS / QuickJS ES2023), plus working text input, persistent logins, a bookmarks menu and downloads manager, the split-scrollbar render fix, downloadable web-font icons, and a big performance pass (near-instant startup, image / font disk cache). Named for 68kmla.org, the community that drove the cycle. Full release notes →

• Download the .sit → — expand with StuffIt Expander on Mac OS 9.1+ (CarbonLib 1.5+) and double-click. No installer.
• Already on a Mac OS 9 machine? Grab it from the plain-HTTP macsurf.org — GitHub doesn't render on-device yet.
• All releases →

Building

MacSurf builds on Mac OS 9 with CodeWarrior 8 Pro (8.3 update). The source is cross-compile-clean against Retro68 PowerPC GCC, which we use for fast Linux-side syntax checks.

• Mac-side build guide
• Linux cross-dev workflow

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_{Native HTTPS via macTLS · JavaScript via macQJS · built on NetSurf · intro video}

For Gary & Kaija