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Nowadays, browsing any website with obsolete browsers such as IE5 or Firefox 2 from emulated environments is an impossible mission due to unsupported TLS versions as shown here:

enter image description here

Due to the prevailing "security" paranoia, which is totally unjustified in 95% of the cases, most sites erroneously block HTTP browsing and force HTTPS, but to make it worse they also enforce the newest TLS versions such as 3.x, ensuring the site is inaccesible in old browsers.

The only explanation I can find to enforce HTTPS+TLS2/3 on simple web pages with no login forms is the webmaster's own ignorance and unneeded Cloudflare's default SSL-paranoid settings.

Before the Android days, there was a "google web translator" service which converted any URL to simplier, XHTML 4-strict pages, to browse them on WAP browsers. Unforunately this service seems to have vanished, any attempt to locate it results in language translation services only.

The question is if someone knows if this service is still active, or any similar service exists to convert HTTPS websites to browse them on old browsers as regular HTTP.

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    Just a small nitpick: It's TLS 1.3. Only its predecessor standard, SSL, reached 3.0.
    – Daniel B
    Feb 25, 2023 at 12:43
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    You should also tone down the rant. There are perfectly good reasons to enforce https and using words like paranoia and ignorance are unjustified and distract from your question.
    – doneal24
    Feb 25, 2023 at 15:40
  • Solved it with WebOne proxy as suggested here (and by the way, the question was not closed in that case)
    – andreszs
    Mar 1, 2023 at 14:59

1 Answer 1

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This is how it works:

  1. Create your own root certificate using old key lengths and hash functions. Maybe it's also necessary to create an intermediate certificate. Everything is self signed. You can use openssl to do this.
  2. Import the root certificate into Firefox. You don't have to import the intermediate certificate.
  3. Set up a proxy server on your host OS or on any computer in your LAN. This proxy server downloads any HTTPS site using new TLS and redirects it to the client using old TLS/SSL.
  4. Change the VM network settings to bridged mode so it can connect to the proxy.
  5. Enter the proxy settings in Firefox.

Now you can connect to any website using https://. You don't have to replace it by http://.

Maybe the easiest way is to create another VM (also in bridged mode) and install Ubuntu. Then you can setup Squid proxy there.

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  • Bridged networking is not required to reach anything the host can reach anyway. NAT networking for the VM will do just fine.
    – Daniel B
    Feb 25, 2023 at 13:46
  • @DanielB It's neccessary to reach the proxy in the LAN.
    – zomega
    Feb 25, 2023 at 13:53
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    Even if a root CA were created, it would have to only use a cipher that the browser could understand, but that would create a problem where the client and server would not agree on which cipher to use. Creating a new root CA would NOT solve the author's problem. There actually is NOT a solution to the author problem. There are a handful of security vulnerabilities again previous version of SSL and TLS by allowing older versions of SSL and TLS, so any secure website, is actually configured to NOT allow those connections. TLS 1.2 an TLS 1.3 are the only versions that should be used.
    – Ramhound
    Feb 25, 2023 at 17:26
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    @Ramhound I’m not sure I follow. You just need a MITM proxy (hence the CA) that speaks “legacy SSL” to clients and modern TLS to servers. Disregarding HTTP, this is trivial to implement.
    – Daniel B
    Feb 25, 2023 at 22:06
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    Thanks, I ended up using WebOne proxy because the CA procedure is too complicated.
    – andreszs
    Mar 1, 2023 at 15:00

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