Old browsers - old OS - TLS

legg · 2026-08-03T19:40:30+00:00

I tend to use the obsolescent Seamonkey for browsing, unless forced otherwise. Firefox will then usually answer in that case, though even they have recently refused to maintain compatibility with older (my) operating systems; something about TLS changes.Today I was pulling old data sheets from the Analog Devices website - the pages of which Seamonkey can now only display as text indexing, so resorting to Firefox: - Using Firefox I got denied access to the direct .pdf links.- Using Seamonkey, the downloads progressed without issues.. . . this all in now-venerable W7 OS.Any speculation about what's tripping up the 'compatible' browser?Are recent security changes tripping over themselves in maintaining basic function?RL

Aug 03, 2026 Last reply: 2 weeks ago 22 Replies

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legg 2 weeks ago

Like I said, there was no issue with the ADI website's pdfs.

Issue was access to the download, by web address - why I suspected mishandling of TLS 'handshake' (under recent changes to that standard of which only later Wx-OS-Firefox are supposedly capable).

A completely obsolete Mozilla product functioned, where the newer Firefox variant didn't. The pdfs I mentioned (elsewhere) that were useless in text retrieval produced non-iso characters when their text was copied and pasted into old NOTEPAD.EXE's text files. Chinese?

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Waldek Hebisch 2 weeks ago

You are exagerating or possibly mixing PDF with Postscript. PDF allows embedding programs, but AFAIK this is not frequent with normal PDF (as opposed to PDF forms) and AFAIK is not supported by several viewers. PDF allow flexible placement of content inside the file and viewer is supposed to follow internal references to find what it wants to show, but that is mot much different to what happens in other file formats.

Yes, this seem to be normal practice.

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Waldek Hebisch 2 weeks ago

What you see depends on fonts in use. If fonts have weird encoding the character codes may look like rubbish. IIUC this some people ply tricks on purpose, to discourage "Web scrapping". This probably can also happen by accident, when creator software mangles embedded fonts to respect copyright restrictions of font creator.

Or as Don Y wrote, this may be due to imperfect OCR.

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