Not long ago I remember coming across some discussions about upgrading SChannel (the actual TLS component in Windows) in older versions using OpenSSL or other TLS libraries, but can't find at the moment. The advantage of doing so is all other apps going through WinInet automatically get the upgrade.

One solution that works network-wide is to use a MITM proxy; I run one mainly for adblocking and filtering, but another feature it has is automatically upgrading TLS requests to the latest version it supports - currently TLS 1.3. Unfortunately, thanks to Big Tech's monopoly, I get blocked by many sites because the requests it makes doesn't look enough like an officially sanctioned browser, which is another thing I need to get around to fixing eventually.

I've discovered the same thing a year ago when me a colleague and I wanted to add Win2k support to an old tool (hobby project obviously, not work related :D). Ended up in a visual basic 6 forum where someone created an html table with all the exports of the core DLLs for almost the entire NT line. Was really useful and I ended up adding limited NT4.0 support to the tool just for fun.

https://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?894262-RESOLVED-List...

For reference, cscript/wscript (which can call other languages too) are calling "jscript", which just is microsoft's implementation of ecmascript/javascript with nonstandard extensions.

  ES  JSc IE(/other)
  -   1   3.0 (part of Win95 OSR2 by default)
  -   2   (IIS 3.0)
  1   3   4.0 (part of Win95 OSR2.5 and Win98 by default)
  "   4   (VS6)
  (2) 5   5.0 (part of Win98SE by default. ES2 is mostly just wording changes compared to ES1)
  "   5.1 5.01 (part of Win2k by default)
  3   5.5 5.5 (part of WinME by default. ES3 is what standardized exceptions, among other things - I'm not sure what MS extensions were like before this)
  "   5.6 6.0 (part of WinXP by default)
  "   5.7 7.0 (part of WinXP SP3 by default)
  "   5.8 8.0 (part of Win7 by default)
  "   11  (Windows 11)

    package main
    
    import (
       "net/http"
       "os"
    )
    
    func main() {
       resp, err := http.Get("https://example.com")
       if err != nil {
          panic(err)
       }
       defer resp.Body.Close()
       resp.Write(os.Stdout)
    }