Floodgap HELP: Using a web browser to access gopher space updated 10 September 2010 Gopher support in many web browsers is not what it used to be: either they used to support it and don't, or they never did in the first place. Fortunately, there are still some browsers that support it natively, and many others for which it can happily be a build-in option. Here's how you can get the best of both worlds! LYNX Lynx is probably the best browser for surfing both the Web and Gopherspace in terms of its elegance. Text mode may be a limited oeuvre, but Lynx makes it shine. It seamlessly shifts between both protocols without crufty helpers or proxies, is fast and respectful to servers, dizzyingly configurable, and interestingly is the only web browser that recognises GET gopher selectors as web pages and automatically maps them into URLs. This is more exciting than it sounds, trust me. :-) It also supports the gamut of Gopher features, including search servers. The only thing it lacks is Gopher+ (oh, okay, and images ;). MOZILLA FIREFOX, ICEWEASEL, AND FRIENDS For many years Mozilla was the best choice for a graphical client that offered Gopher along with its usual superior browsing experience. This is ending with the introduction of Mozilla 2.0 and Firefox 4.0, which finally removes support for the protocol. We're not happy about it, but at least we kept it in there on life support for a few years (bug 388195). Fortunately, Mozilla's powerful add-on system allows you to restore Gopher support! Grab OverbiteFF, and you can visit Gopher servers natively (no proxies! no cheating!) on any system, including Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. OverbiteFF natively supports ports other than port 70, has inline viewing and skinning, and supports hURLs and CSO searches -- all features that Mozilla never supported! WE CONSIDER THIS THE BEST WAY TO SURF THE WEB AND GOPHERSPACE. It's what we do -- we eat our own dogfood at Floodgap. Get Firefox: http://www.getfirefox.com/ then, Get OverbiteFF: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/overbite/ http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/7685/ (Add-on Link) OTHER MOZILLA BROWSERS AND FIREFOX 3 (CAMINO, SEAMONKEY, ETC.) Firefox 3.5.x and 3.6.x (Mozilla 1.9.1 and 1.9.2) are still supported as of this writing, and still support Gopher natively. However, they do lack useful modern Gopher features with their current support (such as hURLs and CSO/ph queries), and have only basic navigation and rendering, and are limited to port 70. Fortunately, OverbiteFF is compatible with them too. Camino 2.0 is based on Mozilla 1.9.0, and the forthcoming 2.1 is based on 1.9.2, both of which support Gopher natively. SeaMonkey 2.0 is based on Mozilla 1.9.1, and still supports Gopher. Fortunately it is also compatible with OverbiteFF. 2.1 will be based on Mozilla 2, so it will lack gopher support; when 2.1 becomes beta, OverbiteFF will be extended to SeaMonkey 2.1 also. OMNIWEB OmniWeb 5.9.2, released on 1 April 2009, adds Gopher support! Although there are no icons, it fully renders i itemtype and supports most other item types, and is NOT an April Fools joke! If you like Safari, then you should be using OmniWeb for your Gopher/surfing needs, since it is built on the same core (WebKit). It appears this support has made its way into the main WebKit archive, but Safari does not support it :-( (see below). http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/ GOOGLE CHROME Google Chrome does not support Gopher natively, and its extension system is primitive compared to Mozilla such that an extension cannot add *native* support back per se. However, the Overbite Chrome extension will automatically intercept gopher:// URLs typed in the omnibox and send them to the proxy of your choice automatically, plus rewrite gopher:// URLs in web pages, such that the experience appears seamless. You can get it from gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/overbite/ http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ Chrome 5.x or higher is required. Remember, your requests are forwarded to a proxy. Only use proxies you trust. CLASSILLA Classilla, a Mozilla-based browser for Mac OS 9, supports basic Gopher as of version 9.0 (disclaimer: I am the project lead). Additional support is in progress, and the port 70 restriction was removed in version 9.2.1 to use an internal whitelist. Its level is on par with current versions of Firefox and Camino. You can get it from http://www.classilla.org/ NETSCAPE (< 5.0) Pre-Mozilla Netscape (not the current codebase) is not spectacular but certainly functional as a gopher client. Examining version 4.8's support, it doesn't know how to understand Gopher+ but it's tolerant, and like Lynx, supports the gamut of Gopher features. It properly (or at least sensibly) formats gopher menus, accepts i itemtype, and doesn't try to mess with selectors. It is also very quick, simple and painless to use. While it isn't as seamless as Lynx, it gets the job done. Even though it is aging rapidly in terms of its standards support, where gopher is concerned it's a decent choice, and for older systems is probably still the best all-around option for Web and gopher in a single application. MOSAIC-CK Mosaic-CK is a branch of NCSA Mosaic that yours truly maintains. This version has Gopher support up to Netscape 4 standards, plus hURLs, in versions 2.7ck7 and higher. You can get it from gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/gopher/clients/src or http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/machten/mosaic/ NCSA MOSAIC, VMS MOSAIC NCSA Mosaic, all prior versions tested, supports Gopher, but does not properly handle i itemtypes, which are used for displaying informational text; instead, it renders them as links, which invariably fail when clicked on. However, it is otherwise functional, and has most functions supported except for Gopher+ (tested 1.x, 2.x and up). VMS Mosaic is based on the same code and has the same drawbacks, but George Cook has stated he is considering using my patches for VMS Mosaic. We'll let you know if he does. MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER And now, Internet Explorer. If you are using Internet Explorer 7 and up, there is NO MORE GOPHER SUPPORT (disabled at the WinINet level) -- you will need to use a proxy (keep reading) or an external application. Internet Explorer 6 can access gopher sites, but because of security bulletin MS02-047, if patched up, Gopher support is DISABLED BY DEFAULT. -047 suggests that this buffer overrun reported in the security advisory is corrected, but disables Gopher in any case. This is nonsensical by any stretch of the imagination. To reenable Gopher, you will need to insert a registry key; either download the registry file from the clients directory here at Floodgap, or go into RegEdit, drill down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings, and enter a key named EnableGopher with type DWord and value 00000001. The reg file is available from gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/9/gopher/clients/ie6/iegopher.zip It has been tested to work on Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. You may read Microsoft's brightly boneheaded corporate burble on why they did that at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS02-047.asp ***If you're getting an error from IE about all gopher sites, resulting in an inexplicable error message 'Cannot find server or DNS' which is totally spurious (I get many complaints about floodgap's DNS, which is completely functional, because of this completely inaccurate explanation), that's the symptom of this error. Patch your IE, or better yet, ditch it for something better like Firefox or Camino.*** Assuming you patched Internet Explorer 6 to reenable gopher support, or you are still using Internet Explorer 4 or 5 for gopherspace, the news doesn't get better: IE in any incarnation is miserable as a Gopher client. Because it inherits the NCSA Mosaic codebase, it does not handle the i itemtype correctly, which is used for displaying informational text, but that's just the least of your worries. It does not allow access to TCP ports other than 70, which is a VERY crippling limitation, and you can even outright *crash* IE 4 through 5 completely (and even Microsoft Web Proxy) by going to any gopher selector that has a question mark '?' in it. This seems to have been repaired, finally, in some versions of 5.0 but I still observe this bug from time to time. There are also some reported problems with using itemtype 7 search servers, such as Veronica-2, where some versions just hang. Interestingly, this does not apply to Macintosh IE 5, which *doesn't* seem to have any of these limitations other than the improper rendering of i itemtype. Also, older versions of Internet Explorer, apparently v2.x and before, and possibly v3.x, may not suffer from the problems that 4.x and 5.x do (quite strange, as IE was allegedly based on Mosaic). Some users have reported that the original webTV can also surf Gopherspace unfettered, since it's based on an older version of IE; it appears very similarly to Netscape's presentation. (I can't confirm this on my webTV emulator, but the functionality may be disabled. Unfortunately, using an old IE makes your web experience suck even worse.) Regardless, IE is such a worthless web browser in just about every other respect that I strongly suggest you jump to something like Firefox or Camino -- a far faster, more secure and more capable browser -- than remaining with IE for your web browsing tasks. KONQUEROR Konqueror, the KDE browser, doesn't seem to work at all out of the box. Although it will connect, some screen shots I was kindly sent by a contributor show that it only displays the first line sent by the server. Not much help. This is from version 2.1.1. However, enterprising users have come through for the Konqueror gopher community and generated a kioslave that in my cursory evaluation seems to cover just about all the basic tasks. I have been told by Konqueror users that gopher support works very well with it installed, so if you'd like to try it out, you can download kio_gopher from its home site at http://kgopher.berlios.de/ It does not seem to support Gopher+, but supports all other features accurately. HYPERLINK (COMMODORE 64) In the shameless plug department, HyperLink 2.5a and 2.5e for the Commodore 64 (disclosure: yours truly is the author) renders Gopherspace modeled on Netscape, and does support indexed search servers. CSO searches are not available in HL yet, however. i itemtype is supported. No Gopher+ yet. See http://www.armory.com/%7Espectre/cwi/hl/ ARACHNE The now-open source Arachne DOS web browser supports Gopher (tested on 1.70 and up) but also does not handle i itemtype correctly, giving them all links and (inappropriate) content icons which makes navigation a little tricky. It also does not properly support itemtype 7, meaning you cannot search sites like Veronica-2 with it. If you are a DOS user, try Lynx for gopher instead. The Arachne home page is http://www.glennmcc.org/ OPERA, SAFARI, iCAB, ... Of the remaining major browsers, neither Opera nor Apple Safari nor iCab support Gopher at all, and I am not aware of any other browsers other than the ones mentioned above that do. Although WebKit does have Gopher support, Safari and iCab do not integrate it. I am told by Opera users, however, that Opera does support gopher proxy servers. That brings us to: PROXY SUPPORT So what do you do for browsers that utterly lack Gopher support at all? For that case, use a proxy to do the conversion and spit out pre-rendered menus. Besides the Public Proxy we offer here at http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ open source also can help; a Squid developer has recently informed me that Squid has gopher support built into it, modeled on Netscape 4.x's gopher rendering. This is an excellent proxy server and should provide good capabilities. Look for it in versions >=2.5. Again, user comments invited. Please note that not all proxy servers are created equal; I am also informed that Apache's proxy server does not support gopher at all (403 error). THE BOTTOM LINE: Serious exploration of Gopher still demands a more-than-basic client to get the most out of the protocol, and we offer some here. Nevertheless, if you'd like to go for an all-in-one browser solution, or if you're just playing around and don't want to install something else, we strongly recommend using Lynx, Firefox or Camino (current versions) with OverbiteFF where possible. You can also check out a standards-based proxy that we offer at http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ if you cannot upgrade, or just want a taste of gopher; and if you use a Mozilla-based browser, look at http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ or gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/overbite/ Send your questions and your suggestions/test cases (particularly with browsers we haven't mentioned here) to: gopher@floodgap.com