Classilla, a New Port of Mozilla To Mac OS 9 170
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."
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, seriously, who cares?
Somebody will. Most of the projects I work on at home come under the category of "because I want to". I am currently building a digital clock which has been in the planning process for twenty years.
The software I work on in my day job is much older than MacOS 9. A lot of my work involves shoehorning modern stuff into it so this type of project is of interest to me.
Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
We do at my office (publishing)
Well, we're down to only having 3 computers that solely run OS9, and more that still run apps in classic though.
We use Quark Xpress 4.5 and a particular set of XTensions. Quark's upgrade path, to put it bluntly, sucks. Quark5 and 6 were IMHO utterly useless and Quark 7 is basically "as good as" Quark 4.5 in my book. We do use quark7 but the problem is that Quark7+the extensions we need run far SLOWER on the quadcore macs than on 800mhz g4s/g5s etc. Sad. Has nothing to do with the merits of OS9 versus OSX, it's just because the newer versions of the apps we need and use on a daily basis, well, suck.
The writing is on the wall though, we're one or two hardware failures away from being Os9/classic free.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
schools ... you would be surprised at the number of elementary school class rooms that still have OS 9 apps and machines that run them ...
Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's always hardware emulation to run OS9
First OS9 story in 7 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. This is the first OS9 story [slashdot.org] on Slashdot since this one [slashdot.org] from February 2002. Incidentally, that one is the *only* other one.
Well, either that, or the Firehose is broken.
The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files (Score:5, Interesting)
There are lots of reasons for this. Some people cannot afford the new hardware required for Mac OS X. Some of those who could buy the hardware have a big investment in software that uses Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) dongles that wouldn't work on OS X even if the newer Macs were equipped with ADB - they haven't been for years.
Some software has been discontinued, with the vendors out of business, and so will never be ported to OS X-native. If the software is useful enough to the end user, then they'll keep running Mac OS 9.
Finally, some people simply don't know how to upgrade. Until very recently a relative of mine was running Internet Explorer 5.0 on Mac OS X 10.2 - no doubt riddled with well-known security holes, but she simply didn't know better. I bought her Mac OS X Tiger for Christmas (Leopard won't run on her G3), then visited soon after and installed it for her, then downloaded and installed all the updates.
All of these are reasons that I plan for Ogg Frog [oggfrog.com] to support the Classic Mac OS.
(And there are many Macs out there that are too old to run Mac OS 9; they'll be running 8.6 or some such.)
Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, there is sheepshaver and I did give it a try awhile ago, though perhaps I should try again. Worth looking into. Thanks for the tip.
Quark7 is a universal binary, as are the XTensions. They're written in LISP actually--kinda neat. From talking to the developer, the issue lies with architectural changes within quark that makes the XT run slower (can't vouch for this). The XTension takes marked up text and creates processed pages complete with columns, images, and footnotes, etc, optimizing line spacing, character spacing, space around heads, etc to make visually appealing pages. The part that is so much slower now is after the XTension (which communicates with a remote server) performs all the calculations, when quark goes page by page and redraws each one.
The only improvement in Quark since 4.5 that we actually make use of is having multiple undos :) There's still no "search backwards" feature!!
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
I care.
My daughter is getting old enough now to use a computer, and I've dug out an old iMac G3 DV that was given to us by a friend, and loaded several older pre-school games my mom had lying around from when my brothers were little.
Now, not only can it be a great little preschool computer for her, but it can also be used online in a pinch.
Or perhaps letting her have access to several of the show based sites that have content for the kids
(Sid the Science Kid, Sesame Street, and several other PBS, Disney and Nick JR. shows)
I could now let her go to those, without having to worry about what she could get into on my computer.
(she decided to rename a good chunk of my songs last time she sat on my computer)
Bottom line:
Is it state of the art, the next big thing? of course not.
but it did just make some older equipment just that much more useful.
Re:First OS9 story in 7 years (Score:2, Interesting)
Might well be that it is the only other one! I was pleased to have good reason (at least, I thought it was good) to use that icon ;)
timothy
Re:The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of 2.9 million hits from IE browsers on our most active site since the beginning of the month, roughly 5200 are from versions of IE older than 6. That's about 0.1% of our IE users, and 0.05% of our total users.
Also, I've caught obvious UA spoofing in our logs -- one script reported a different, random UA with every request -- many of which were browsers you'll never actually see in the wild -- like "Lotus Notes web client"
What's more, even the biggest sites don't offer an A-grade experience for older browsers. Hell; I remember not being able to access microsoft.com using IE 3 in 1998! If microsoft dropped IE 3 support a decade ago, surely most of the web can as well. Even Yahoo offers a limited experience [yahoo.com] to users using old browsers, and facebook throws "get a better browser" messages up if you visit with IE6.
In the end, it's just not economically feasible, in many cases, for developers to spend time supporting 0.05% of browsers, especially when those browsers are so old that they support only a fraction of modern standards. I salute your efforts to make your properties accessible to _absolutely_ everyone, and I'd love to do the same, but we just can't justify the development cost, for the sites we run. We'd be spending thousands of dollars to support a number of users we can count on one hand, to the detriment of our tens of thousands of users on modern platforms. Frankly, if any of our frequent contributors are on older platforms, it's almost more cost effective for us to buy those few stragglers modern netbooks.
This is true of all software. Sure, we could write everything to run on DOS and Mac OS 7, but it'd be expensive to develop and test on so many platforms; there'd be minimal, if any gain in adoption; and we wouldn't be able to take advantage of more recent technology. In the end, taking the "support absolutely everything" philosophy just isn't a sound business decision.
Re:Who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
The latest version of OS9 was 9.2. It was pretty terrible. Supposedly an update to make it more compatible with running in a box alongside OSX.
BUT, if you stuck with 9.1, it was the most solid of all of the early Mac OS's. I dont think OSX approached its stability until the later versions of 10.3. And I ran lots of extensions and oddball programs on it.
And yes, you can drag out all the technical reasons why OSX architecture is so much better but the reality is, where the rubber met the road, OS9.1 worked just fine.
I preferred 9.1 over all of the early versions of OSX and interestingly enough it was the lack of an updated browser that became the main problem. I did take a couple of machine backwards from 9.2 to 9.1.
I am currently resurrecting an older G4 Mac to run OS9 so I can muck around with some of the games. It will share a monitor with my W98 system but you end up needing Mac specific keyboards/mice so the KVM will be a bit underutilized on that position.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're a teacher in Mexico using an old Mac, this is of no interest to you. You don't have Internet access anyway. Nice try though.
Nice try indeed. Harking back approximately two decades, Mexico became the first country in the American continent to begin installing fiber-optic telephone wiring for widespread use, even before the United States. FYI, this happened in Baja California.
Nowadays, the majority of Mexicans hooked up to the Internet do so through the telephone monopoly Telmex, Telnor in the Northwestern states (both owned by one of the ten richest men in the world, Carlos Slim). A minority hook up through TV cable services, fewer still via satellite (Starband), usually in remote rural areas where Telmex or Telnor have not arrived yet.
Nationwide, junior high schools in rural areas have adopted a teaching system via satellite known as telesecundaria, which can easily be adapted for Internet access and may have already done so.
Now, if you go to any urban area in Mexico and peruse the secondhand stores with electronics, chances are that you'll bump into an early generation iMac in working condition, and be able to purchase it dirt cheap, as the casual Mexican computer user has only used Windows in his/her entire life, so these things may sit on the shelves for awhile. As anecdotal evidence, a friend with a graphic design business once found and bought three iMac Graphite models in one swoop, a five hundred dollar deal, at one of these stores.
Therefore, if you're a savvy teacher in Mexico, or just plain a Mac user with a penny to pinch and a little luck, Classilla could potentially be a godsend.
Re:Who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
I won't be able to use IT's web pages - but that's okay, they don't do it that way (proprietary system interfacing with databases and uploading Excel files via FTP - I know, I know, but that's what they do despite my offers of a better way).
Re:why don't you like mac os x compared to classic (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever used a Mac OS X machine as your main machine for an extended period of time?
Yeah, I dual-booted between 10.2 and Classic, and then ran 10.3 and 10.4 with no Classic (or Classic emulator) at all. I've had more experience with OS X than I'd like to. I love the insinuation that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, though, that's nice.
How do you feel Mac OS X's let you down, ui-wise?
The main thing that bothers me, and that only Apple can get away with: version 10 of a product shouldn't have *fewer* features than version 9. Finder in OS X had some features that Finder in OS 9 didn't have, but the real crime is that OS 9 Finder had *tons* of features that OS X didn't-- and some that *still* haven't been added to OS X. (And many of those features were critical to my workflow.)
For example, my workflow in OS 9 was based around labels and folder tabs. OS X *finally* added labels back in, although it took them until 10.4 (IIRC) to do it, but they've still never added folder tabs back into the OS. (The folder tab feature let you take an open Finder window and drag it to the edge of the screen. It would turn into an always-available 'tab' that you could pop-open to interact with.)
I think they also finally added back-in the ability to auto-mount network drives on login, that was a retarded feature to get rid of.
And it didn't help that every new feature they added to OS X had a horrible, horrible UI. Spotlight search might be powerful, if you could figure out the hideous maze of menus and fields. Oh, and I dare anybody to give me a consistent set of rules for when Apple uses Aqua appearance as opposed to Metal appearance. They just roll a fucking dice, to confuse users.
Speaking of Aqua vs. Metal, I also love how there are two entirely different types of Finder windows, one of each-- double-click a folder and try to predict which type of Finder window opens! It's completely non-deterministic, as far as I can tell. (There's probably some rule that governs it, but damned if I could figure it out in 3 years of OS X usage.)
But in my mind, the greatest crime against Classic users was the removal of spatial browsing. The concept of one-folder = one-window is now completely gone in the industry. Sad, because it worked better than anything I'd ever tried before or since.
(Oh, and don't get me started on the Classic emulator/environment. I've never seen a more shitty piece of software passed off as "production quality." It did nothing but eat up your battery life and CPU, while completely failing to run 20-25% of Classic software. What a turd.)
I've never heard of any classic user who left OS X because of the GUI
That's because most Mac users are so brainwashed that they'd use OS X even if it was just a static photograph of one of Steve Jobs' turds.
I, on the other hand, actually *chose* to use Mac after evaluating the other systems available. And when Apple pissed all over their most faithful users by removing all the features that made their OS so great, I left-- like I said above, if I have to use a crummy UI, I might as well use Windows so I can use more software.