Have you heard of tenfourfox? It is a port of Firefox to older PowerPC Macs. They have releases tuned for G3, G4, G4e and G5 Macs for 10.4 & 10.5.

There is Classila for Mac OS 8.6-9.22 - http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/
There is iCab 2.9.9 for the 7.5 and up - http://www.icab.de/dl.php
Somewhere out there is Browser6, designed for those ancient machines - http://68kmla.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8453

I'm impressed by the Classila/TenFourFox's developer's newest endeavor - Copperweb - which looks to run a Perl local proxy service stripping out code from pages that older machines just can't handle. http://www.floodgap.com/software/copperweb/

I feel Copperweb may be a solid goal - in the same way that websites have a Flash/No Flash or Javascript/No Javascript failover, it seems stripping out what makes older browsers choke, or perhaps even translating it to something simpler, is a really smart way to engage the systems. Chances are there are external proxies that can do this, but as the developer said, you probably want to make the old machine self-capable.

Closest thing to a working browswer on SGI/MIPS is SeaMonkey. It was meh on dual R12K 600s with 1gb ram. Everything else was worse, most much worse. Solaris will be gone as soon as Oracle can kill it. As for older windows, even I ain't that masochistic.

I can still do a bit on my PB3400 under 9.1 & 80mb ram using iCab and, rarely, Clazzila (sp?), but that's because the sites I use are either fairly plain or have mobile sites that I hit instead of the main one.

Old computers make fun toys, for the most part, not web browsers.

The problem with browsing on old computers is that modern sites are designed to heavily rely on Javascript and CSS. Just look at Jag's House or Archive.org versus Facebook or Gizmodo. If you use old fashioned HTML 4 markup you shouldn't have any trouble browsing with old computers and browsers. (It's just more difficult to make a good-looking site that's easy to update.)

Mobile versions of sites are about as close as we'll get for big-name places.

so you are looking to create a set of sites that will work on older comps, not a browser? if so would be happy to help in any way i can, i do know some html, but not allot, and if you ever want a hand with hosting anything i am happy to help

I actually like the idea. I also liked PixeroNet which unfortunately seems to be dead. I personally really liked the early years of the internet. Everyone was experimenting, most pages were from private people like you and me, almost no big businesses were involved.

So I love the idea of recreating the experience. Maybe there is a way to cooperate with the Internet Wayback Machine ?

Just use old webpage editing software to make your own pages, and test it for easy viewing on older model Macs and their browsers. There's some software on the Garden, like this: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/claris-home-page-30

i like this project, i have many old comps and the main problem is the web, and as MCP says you just need to use old software to create the pages, we could quite easily create a large number of sites tuned for old computers, and as i say, a am happy to host sites for this project, just give me a shout if your interested

I really did like the way the Internet used to be: just lots of text, which could easily be copied to hard drives, no bloated Flash interfaces, and a blossoming of personal creativity.

One of my favorite "old sites" is http://atarihq.com/tsr/, the famed |tsr's nes archive. With the exception of the Google AdWords (which can be blocked via an adblocker), it's pure, concentrated nostalgia of a bygone era.