Bringing the modern web to the original iPad mini

Summary

I recently visited my parents and found the first generation iPad mini they bought me when I was ten years old. More than a decade later, it is still a beautiful piece of hardware. Small, light, sturdy, the kind of device Apple used to make before every screen became a laptop replacement. Then I turned it on and remembered why I stopped using it: It was running iOS 9.3.5, which is brutal on the A5 chip. Every tap had weight, animations stuttered, opening an app felt like an eternity. Apple really killed this device with iOS 9. Still, I felt like the hardware was too beautiful to leave in a drawer. I wanted to turn it into a smooth, distraction free reading device. The problem was that reading is not really offline anymore. Even if the actual reading happens in iBooks, the surrounding workflow lives on the web: finding articles, checking references, downloading PDFs, opening links, asking an LLM a question when something does not make sense. Getting there was a nostalgic trip through the legacy jailbreak toolchain. I jailbroke it with Carbon, used Legacy iOS Kit to drop it into kDFU mode, downgraded to iOS 8.4.1, set up OpenSSH, and used CoolBooter to dual boot into iOS 6.1.3. The result was great. iOS 6 on the A5 runs butter smooth. I transferred a few books over the air with iFile and suddenly had exactly what I wanted: a small tablet with a great form factor, a still good screen, and the lovely skeuomorphic iBooks app. Everything was perfect. Right up until the first time the reading workflow left the book. the webkit wall I installed modern root certificates, but that only gets you so far. Safari on iOS 6, or really WebKit, is missing too much: modern TLS support, CSS Grid, Flexbox, and large chunks of modern JavaScript. The modern web is structurally incompatible with a browser engine from 2012. And because this is iOS, every third party browser is stuck with the same system WebKit. The obvious solutions all have problems: VNC / Remote Desktop: Bad latency, bad ...