Chrome meets Netscape in this unusual new browser

Open most browsers and they look almost identical. Tabs at the top. Address bar in the middle. A few small icons pushed into the corners. Everything feels clean and familiar, but not especially distinctive. Reframe Browser takes a very different route. It lets you browse the current web through interfaces inspired by some of the best-known browsers from the 1990s and early 2000s. That includes Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, Opera, Safari, Firefox and NCSA Mosaic. The key detail is easy to miss. Reframe isn’t running an ancient browser engine. Underneath those old-style buttons and toolbars sits Chromium, the same modern rendering technology used by several mainstream browsers. Current websites, JavaScript-heavy services, video platforms and secure connections can still work as expected. What changes is the frame around the page. That makes Reframe far more interesting than a simple retro skin.

Old controls, current websites

Reframe is built with Electron and uses Chromium to display web pages. The visible browser interface sits in a separate layer, which means the application can replace the controls without replacing the engine. You can switch themes while the browser is running. There’s no need to close the application, restart it or reload the page.

One moment, a site can appear inside a Windows 98-style Internet Explorer window. A few seconds later, the same page can sit inside the brushed-metal design associated with early Safari. It’s a surprisingly effective trick.

The themes don’t just change the background colour or add a few old icons. They can alter toolbar layouts, button labels, fonts, tabs, status bars, address fields and loading animations. Even the familiar animated browser logos, often known as throbbers, make a return.

Each interface follows the habits of the browser it represents. That helps Reframe feel closer to the original software than a normal browser theme would. There are 12 themes in total. They cover several versions of Internet Explorer, along with Netscape Communicator, Opera, K-Meleon, Safari, Firefox and Mosaic.

You don’t need a virtual machine. You don’t need to install an unsupported operating system. You also don’t need to expose your computer to the security problems that come with running genuinely outdated browser software.

It changes how modern websites feel

Reframe works best when you stop treating it as a visual joke. Put a current website inside an older browser interface and the differences become obvious very quickly. Classic browsers often filled the top of the screen with labelled buttons, large toolbars and visible status information. Modern sites, meanwhile, bring their own menus, account controls, pop-ups, sidebars and floating buttons. The result can feel crowded.

That’s useful, though. It shows how much interface design has moved from the browser into the website itself. Older browsers placed bookmarks, mail, history, printing and page information directly in front of the user. You could see many of the controls without opening a menu. Current browsers tend to hide those tools behind compact icons, while websites build their own systems for search, navigation, accounts and notifications. Reframe makes that shift easy to see.

It won’t tell you whether old or new interface design is better. That isn’t the point. Instead, it gives designers, developers and writers a practical way to compare different periods of browser design using the same web page. That makes it useful for screenshots, demonstrations and visual comparisons. You get the contrast without spending an afternoon setting up old hardware or tracking down forgotten software installers.

Wayback mode connects the browser to archived websites

Reframe also includes a Wayback mode for loading archived versions of websites. Choose a year and month, and the browser looks for available snapshots through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. When you’re finished, a return-to-today control takes the tab back to the live version of the site. This is where the browser’s theme system starts to make even more sense.

You can open a website captured in 1999 and view it inside a Netscape or Internet Explorer interface from roughly the same period. The page and the browser frame then feel like parts of the same computing environment. Reframe can also create a Today versus Year comparison image. It places a live version of a page next to an archived capture and exports the result as a PNG file.

That’s handy for articles, design reviews and before-and-after features. Of course, archive browsing has limits. Some snapshots have missing images. Others contain broken scripts, incomplete pages or dead navigation. Reframe can’t rebuild files that were never captured. It simply gives you a cleaner and more direct way to work with what’s available.

The Time Warp Modem slows the web down

One of Reframe’s most useful features has nothing to do with browser appearance. The Time Warp Modem can simulate slower internet connections, including 28.8K, 56K and ISDN-style profiles. It reduces available bandwidth and adds latency inside the application. Turn it on and modern websites start behaving very differently.

Large images appear slowly. Web fonts take longer to arrive. Advertising code, analytics tools and client-side scripts become much more noticeable. Pages that feel instant on fibre or fast mobile broadband can suddenly seem heavy and awkward.

The simulation isn’t a perfect recreation of every dial-up connection. Real modem speeds depended on telephone lines, local conditions, server performance and many other factors. It doesn’t need to be perfect to make its point.

For developers and designers, the feature offers a quick way to expose bloated pages and delayed controls. It won’t replace detailed performance testing or the network tools built into developer consoles, but it can make a slow-loading site easier to understand. Numbers in a report can feel abstract. Watching a page struggle to load doesn’t.

It’s a specialist tool, not a daily browser replacement

Reframe includes bookmarks, browsing history, a personal bar and controls that change with each theme. Still, it isn’t trying to replace Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari as your main browser. That’s probably the right decision.

Mainstream browsers compete on extension support, account synchronisation, password tools, security services and connections to wider software ecosystems. Reframe focuses on something much narrower. It gives modern websites a different browser context.

The application is available for Windows, Linux and macOS on Apple silicon. Its code is released under the MIT licence, and its structure allows new themes to be added without rebuilding the entire browser. That opens the door to more interfaces later, though the current selection already covers many of the most recognisable browser designs.

Reframe works because the idea is simple and technically clear. Chromium handles the current web. The theme system controls the interface. Wayback mode handles archived pages. The modem profiles change the connection speed.

Those parts can be adjusted separately, which makes the browser flexible without making it confusing. It’s not just an old-looking window around a web page. It’s a practical comparison tool for browser design, archived websites and web performance. And yes, seeing a current site inside Internet Explorer 5 is strange. That’s exactly why it works.