Classilla, a New Port of Mozilla To Mac OS 9

oberondarksoul writes "Every now and then, you hear about a new port of Mozilla to one of the lesser-used platforms. Recently, a new version of Mozilla has been released for Mac OS 9 — an operating system no longer sold or supported, and with no new hardware available to buy. Dubbed Classilla, it aims to provide 'a modern web browser running again on classic Macs,' and the currently-released build seems to work well on my old PowerBook 1400 — despite being a little memory-hungry."

Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Diabolus Advocatus]

Seriously though, does anyone even use it? If I still had a Mac that old, I'd rather run 8.6 to be honest. 9 added nothing much more than bugs while running slower...

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[dgatwood]

If you have the mirrored doors edition of 9, it added LBA48 support. Now that the smallest drives on the market are about 160 gigs, being able to use the portion of your ATA drive above the first 128 binary gigs is a pretty significant benefit. That OS version only shipped with one Mac model, though (the mirrored doors G4).

It is not as up to date as Firefox 3.5

[Orion Blastar]

and not supported by the Mozilla Foundation, but it is a Mozilla 1.3.1 based web browser.

Too bad it does not support the 68K MacOS 7.5.X environment, there are a lot of people running Mac 68K emulators and that is the version of Mac System that Apple allows to be downloaded legally for free.Usually the Basilisk II [online.fr] Mac 68K emulator, which seems to be popular.

At least they try for PowerMac Mac OS 8.6 compatibility, which is good for those PowerMac users who cannot upgrade to Mac OS9.

Re:Who cares?

[Orion Blastar]

There is a team working on Amizilla [sourceforge.net] which is the AmigaOS version of Mozilla web browser. But it was last updated in 2006.

The other project is AMozillaX [amiga-news.de] which was announced but no code or web browser was released and it seems to have vanished off the Internet.

Re:Who cares?

[SammyIAm]

You're definitely right there, sugarbomb. I used to work at a school district a while back, and although the computer labs were mostly OS X, the older computers from the labs were often pushed out to classrooms for teachers to use. I can't tell you how awful it was to be reduced to using IE (I don't even remember what the last version of OS 9 was) to download drivers or updates if Netscape has been deleted from the system. Though using Netscape 4 to get things of some of today's image/css/flash heavy websites wasn't a cakewalk either. In many cases, the computer is only used to check webmail and browse the Internet, and a modern-browser would go a long way to extending the life of these machines.

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[account_deleted]

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To the "Just Install Linux" Crowd...

[airbatica]

If you've never tried to install Linux on an Old World Mac (any PowerPC,PCI based mac older than a Blue and White G3 or iMac G3) then you're in for a treat. Think slamming your balls in a car door fun. Almost all the modern Linux distributions have dropped support for BootX (the MacOS Linux loader) and Oldworld machines. Why not boot from Openfirmware you ask? Because it flat dosen't f*****g work. The details of why escape me, and I don't care enough to look it up. Throw hardware upgrades into the mix (like a modern IDE controller, and a decent graphics card) and really pull your hair out. Needless to say, I dumped the Powermac 6400 off at the recycling center years ago, picked up a cheap, stripped and working Blue and White G3 and never looked back.

Re:To the "Just Install Linux" Crowd...

[cm5oom]

Netbsd supports booting from openfrimware on old world macs just fine. I believe it's the only OS that does.

Re:Who cares?

[MacTO]

Name me one school that still uses old Macs

Does a fairly affluent school that is two blocks north of a prominent Canadian university count? Some teachers love making computers available to the children that they teach. Unfortunately, when board policies only allocate two per classroom and place the rest in computer labs, teachers often have to scrounge for what's cheap or free.

While on the note of obsolete technology in the classroom, I recently donated a Pentium 90 to another school in an affluent neighbourhood. In their case, the teacher actually wanted that extraordinarily old computer because many of the good educational games were designed to run on 486's or early Pentiums.

Mac OS 9 did not have memory protection or preemptive multitasking. It crashed a lot.

Just a note here: cooperative multitaking may cause a system to become unresponsive, but it won't cause a system to crash. In both the case of cooperative multitasking and the lack of memory protection, the stability issues were caused by applications rather than the operating system (in virtually every case). As such, it was quite possible to choose applications that did not affect the responsiveness or stability of the system as a whole. Granted, that was virtually impossible to do for web browsers in the case of the classic Mac OS.

Re:May God Have Mercy on Our Souls

[GrahamCox]

This seems likely to lend new fervor to the "Mac SE 30 was the best Mac ever" argument, one that I've been tired of every since...well...colour.

The SE/30 had colour - you just needed an extra video card and external monitor to see it. That's how I used mine...

Not with that computer

[CyberSnyder]

Those sites use Flash extensively and it runs like a dog on my daughter's hand-me-down iBook G4. I don't think you'll be happy with the results on a G3. Flash isn't written well or at least with the same optimizations as the Windows version.

Re:It is not as up to date as Firefox 3.5

[AtariKee]

8.6 compatibility is very good... so far. I'm testing the browser on my Cube, a Bondi iMac (running 8.6) and a Performa 6400 (ditto). It's definitely faster than Mozilla, Netscape, and WamCom, and fairly stable. Only certain sites make it crash, such as Alltop [alltop.com] (if you hover over a link), and it has some rendering and scrolling bugs (such as on Blogspot [blogspot.com]). But on the whole, it's much more stable than the older browsers. And Slashdot [slashdot.org] no longer crashes either :)

I jumped on as a tester fairly early in the project; discussion started on the OS 9 list sponsored by Low End Mac [lowendmac.com] about a modernized browser for the classic OS; as I still use my OS 9- running Cube daily, and got tired of WamCom crashing on me.

Re:Who cares?

[Zarel]

Have you heard of iCab [www.icab.de]? It's the only Acid2-compliant browser that runs on Mac OS 9, and is much more standards compliant than Gecko 1.3 (the version used in Classilla).

Although iCab is no longer maintained for Mac OS 9, its last release for Mac OS 9 was in 2008, far more recently than Gecko 1.3 (2002), and the Mac OS 9 version is still a full-featured modern browser with tabbed browsing, built-in AdBlock, excellent standards compliance (iCab was the first browser with an Acid2-compliant public build) - the only thing it's really missing is CSS3 opacity, and all that good stuff.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Who cares?

[Tetsujin]

Pretty sure you can install Mac OS X in that thing. Not saying you have to, or if those games are compatible with it, but if you wanted to...

In my experience, "old" versions of Mac OS X (like from five years ago) are very nearly as much of a pain in the ass to deal with, in terms of getting reasonably modern software on the thing, as Mac OS 8 was when I tried it several years back. OS 10.3, for instance, is now old enough that most new software doesn't support it. OS 10.4 is very nearly at that point as well.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[jonadab]

I've not used Quark myself, but I have a friend who claims two rocks and a piece of string would be a reasonable substitute for it. Yes, he's a Mac user, and yes, he works in the publication industry (for a publisher that specializes in the ancient near east -- so among other job duties he gets to typeset ancient languages, e.g., Akkadian). I think the biggest complaint he has about Quark is that it appears to have been designed to make you go through all the steps you'd have to go through if you were working directly on paper, which apparently creates a lot of extra unnecessary work compared to a modern, computer-oriented way of doing things. Like I said, I've not used it myself, so I don't know the details. (Also, I haven't seen a Mac for several years. A former boss was a mac fan, but she retired several years ago. The three people who have held the position since are all Windows users, so the Macs have all been phased out. Not my choice: I'd have preferred to keep at least a couple of them around, for the diversity.)

OT:1680x1050 etc. from PowerMac 8500

[noidentity]

Since this thread might have some people still using PowerMac 8500 and related machines, I've recently hacked the 7300/7500/7600/8500/8600 Graphics Driver [nyu.edu] to support resolutions in the 1600x1200 range on a stock PowerMac 8500 (probably works on the other models as well). I now have a 20" 1680x1050 LCD connected and working perfectly, locking on to the analog signal with perfect pixels. I figured out where the timing parameters are stored in the driver, allowing other new resolutions as well (like 1440x900), and fine-tuning of the pixel rate. Even with a CRT, this allows higher resolutions. Contact me [mailto] if you'd like try the driver or have a different resolution.

Re:IIIGS

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't a complicated joke. You're just slow/dumb.

Re:Who cares? (you insensitive clod)

[johnrpenner]

i've upgraded many many old G3 iMacs to run OSX - and they run OSX just fine (so long as you update the firmware first). you need at least 128-256Mb RAM - but you should be able to get at least OSX 10.3 on ANY old G3 iMac.

once you got OSX installed on your old imac, its a piece of cake to install Firefox -- now the caveat is -- if you only have only OSX 10.3, then you can only run up to Firefox v2 -- to get Firefox v3 or later, you will have to have Tiger (OSX 10.4) installed.

now, unless you got one of the really old pre-firewire iMacs -- you can run OSX 10.4 on them -- but you may have to use target disk mode (CMD-T at startup) and install Tiger (OSX 10.4) from a second machine that has a DVD drive (because Tiger 10.4, unlike Panther 10.3 is the first version of the Mac OS that comes ONLY on DVD!!) -- but because of Target Disk mode -- this is not half as hard as hacking an xorg.conf file... so why you complain??

therefore -- because all old G3 iMacs will run OSX (with a firmware upgrade) -- it means that all old iMacs will also run firefox -- at least to version 2, and if you manage to get tiger installed -- up to firefox 3.

2cents
jp