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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."
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...
Indeed. Maybe next there'll be an Amiga port.
(Well actually, I've always loved the Amiga - but the point is I'm not expecting to see a story on Slashdot about it these days, and if there was, you can bet there'd be all the "whocares/letitdie/deadhorse" comments. Why should an old OS like MacOS be any different, especially when Apple themselves moved on years ago?)
I see that the mods-who-can't-stand-any-criticism of Apple have already got to you (although I'm not sure why even they would defend MacOS - come on, even Apple themselves ditched it and had to replace it with something that was up to the job).
What hath man wrought?
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.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
I think a port of the gecko rendering engine would be great, but I'm dubious about the performance of a XUL-based browser on such an old platform.
Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
will it run on my macbook 180?
they got a new web browser.
It is old code. From the FAQ:
the decision was made to split Gecko off at 1.3.1
schools ... you would be surprised at the number of elementary school class rooms that still have OS 9 apps and machines that run them ...
Not everybody can afford to throw away old computers and buy new hardware. If you're a teacher at an elementary school in Mexico, and all you have in your classroom is an old mac, then this could be very important to you. It turns that mac from something that can't surf the web (or can't do so securely) to something that can.
No, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I run linux.
Find free books.
Or just put one of the Linux or BSD distributions on there. They're certainly more usable and more stable than Mac OS 9 ever was.
Seriously. I mean, when are they going to port Mozilla to the Commodore 64? Oh, there'll be cheers that day...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Wow. This is the first OS9 story on Slashdot since this one from February 2002. Incidentally, that one is the *only* other one.
Well, either that, or the Firehose is broken.
No kidding. Then you could get some modern software on these machines as opposed to waiting around for someone to compile something on top of an old version of Gecko.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?
No, but Apple ported Safari to the IIIGS.
I will not feed the troll, I will not feed the troll, I . . .
Are you out of your mind? The point other commenters are making is that a non-trivial number of folks, with an emphasis on schools and other educational institutions, have old hardware that runs Mac OS 9. It might be that, in some abstract, general sense, Linux or BSD is more usable and stable than OS 9 (although I disagree), but the question is what's more usable on the hardware available to these folks. As somebody who spent too much time in college (computer science program, university known for computer science) trying to get linux to run on apple hardware of this era, I can assure you that getting other OSes to work is nigh-impossible, and that few, if any, of the institutions that are *still* using this hardware could realistically take that option. So this is great for those users.
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 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.)
Request your free CD of my piano music.
"Classilla requires any Power Macintosh with at least 64MB of RAM (virtual or physical), 50MB of free hard disk space and OS 8.6 or higher. A G3 with 128MB of physical RAM and OS 9.1 is the recommended minimum. (It will run on OS 8.5, but due to various bugs in that release we strongly advise updating to 8.6.)"
This actually makes me happy. I'd like to make use of my Rev. A Bondi iMac, but openSUSE 10.3 is being a scrum-bum.
I have two joysticks and a build of MacMAME. This will seal the deal!
I would've cared.
I picked up a free G3 iMac awhile back, just because I've never had an Apple computer, nor does anyone that I know near here.
All I wanted to do with it was turn it into a handy Internet browsing machine. But I couldn't find a decent browser for it. I thought about upgrading to OS X, especially since I found some more RAM for it, but the process (involving a strange shamanistic incantation of multiple serialized firmware and OS updates) was scary.
Right. So, I put Ubuntu on it. Works fine, of course, but it's really not very much of an Apple anymore. A newer Firefox would've helped that.
Kid-proof tablet..
Are you out of your mind? The point other commenters are making is that a non-trivial number of folks, with an emphasis on schools and other educational institutions, have old hardware that runs Mac OS 9.
Name me one school that still uses old Macs, especially ones in Mexico where the price disparity between a Mac and non-Mac computer is amplified.
It might be that, in some abstract, general sense, Linux or BSD is more usable and stable than OS 9 (although I disagree), but the question is what's more usable on the hardware available to these folks.
Can't really argue against someone who doesn't believe in facts. For example, Mac OS 9 did not have memory protection or preemptive multitasking. It crashed a lot. I know from experience.
As somebody who spent too much time in college (computer science program, university known for computer science) trying to get linux to run on apple hardware of this era, I can assure you that getting other OSes to work is nigh-impossible,
Then you obviously suck at installing free unixes on these machines. Any Mac with Openfirmware can have a free unix installed. It is trivial to install with new world Mac machines. There are some quirks with old world Macs. And that's about the range of hardware that Mac OS 9 will run on anyway.
and that few, if any, of the institutions that are *still* using this hardware could realistically take that option. So this is great for those users.
Again, name me one school that still uses old Mac hardware to any significant degree.
http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=30400
I've got three MacOS 8.6 that are the main production line for our company. Nice to know I still can use a web browser on those machines for solutions made to be used by all other computers (WinME, WinXP, MacOS X, etc..) since IE 5 crapped out a long time ago and nothing else would run half as well as it on the old Macs.
I would definitely agree that MacOS 9 was a bad OS. It was by far the worst computer operating system I ever used -- much worse than earlier versions like MacOS 6 or 7, much worse than MacOS X, and much worse than Linux or FreeBSD.
The problem is that installing, say, Linux on an old mac is not something that a lot of people (e.g., my made-up Mexican elementary school teacher) are comfortable doing. It's true that installing Ubuntu on a vanilla x86 desktop machine is getting pretty darn easy -- but I don't think that applies so much to an old mac. I'm also not really sure what WM would be practical to use on an old mac. I certainly don't think you'd want to try Gnome or KDE. Maybe xfce? I'm not sure if there's any non-empty intersection between the set of WMs that will have acceptable performance on an old mac and the set of WMs that are easy enough for my fictional Mexican school teacher to figure out if he/she's used to MacOS 9.
Find free books.
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 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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
There is a team working on Amizilla which is the AmigaOS version of Mozilla web browser. But it was last updated in 2006.
The other project is AMozillaX which was announced but no code or web browser was released and it seems to have vanished off the Internet.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Name me one school that still uses old Macs, especially ones in Mexico where the price disparity between a Mac and non-Mac computer is amplified. A couple weeks ago I saw a couple power macs running OS 9 (or maybe even 8) on a local news fluff piece. I think they were being used for the school a/v program.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
It may not be the latest and most fantastic of browsers, but Netscape 7.01 is still available from evolt.org, works on OS 9 (and earlier), and does a better job of rendering most pages than IE 6 does.
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.
I spent enough time with; -OpenDoc -Desktop Printing -Chooser -Extension Manager -Cleaning out corrupted preferences -Playing with RAM allocation for Adobe apps for clients -PPP dial-up accounts with hacks No thanks. I don't think my fingers have ever healed from putting memory into the PPC 7100s or 8100s and getting continually sliced-up. Ugh! Bad memories indeed.
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...
I have to side with the GP here. I love linux just as much as any other slashdotter, but the knee-jerk reaction to ANY problem around here is "JUST INSTALL LINUX."
There are a gazillion reasons that it's not as simple as that in all of these cases, first and foremost is COST. Who is going to pay for these installs, who is going to do the research to find someone able and willing to do these installs, who is going to pay for that? What about legacy software you CAN'T run on Linux, what about dongles, what about the network, etc etc etc. What about the cost of training the unionized teachers to use something completely new and unfamiliar as opposed to the same old "window thingy" they used to access their email?Does anyone around here even realize how much of a bureaucratic process it is to something "simple" as installing a new operating system in publicly-funded schools??
Undoubtedly, I'll get modded down as troll of flamebait for pointing out that a solution to a technical problem is not "just install linux" because there are other non-technical factors to consider in each scenario.
By the way, I think it's very cool that there is still active development going on for a legacy system, and that it has an active community, and I am in no way, shape or form trying to take away from that with this post.
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
One reason might be that the people who can still run Mac OS 9 like the look and feel better than Mac OS X. I certainly do - the new "shiny" / hyper-animated look and feel is one of the primary reasons why I have little current interest in getting a Mac. I feel the same way about Vista, but at least there I can turn it off.
User interfaces should not be "exciting" - they should be functional, and minimize eye strain and unnecessary distractions, especially for the people that have to use them eight or more hours a day.
Of course few things are quite as bad as trying to read an online article when an animated ad is flashing away in the next column...
I do, since I have an original 233MHz Bondi Blue iMac with 64MB RAM.
the currently-released build seems to work well on my old PowerBook 1400 -- despite being a little memory-hungry.
Some things never change.
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Yea, cause that machine will run Firefox the memory/cpu hog nice enough to actually be able to stand browsing.
Of course it won't, browsing even simple pages will be mind numbingly shitty because you're trying to shoehorn modern software into a machine far too old to run it.
The proper thing to do is use a browser from that machines age, no one is going to exploit your shitty old mac anyway, more so, you're not likely to find any of those exploits in existence now days, you're more likely to find a Linux exploit than a page exploiting a browser on that thing.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I tried pressing a tangerine iMac G3 (450MHz, I think) into service and found that those PBS sites - frankly: any Flash stuff - would bring it to its knees. I had tried a fresh install of 10.3 (debated 10.4) and even tried a Ubuntu installation, but Gnash wasn't quite up to their Flash version detection tricks.
But: even under Mac OSes, the Flash sites would kill the poor thing. CPU would be completely pinned and the screen still couldn't update fast enough to make some of the games playable.
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.
Why didn't you give her her own user account?
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
If indeed he was mod'ded down then perhaps it was because he didn't contribute anything rather than it was that he criticized something Apple. Any idiot can respond to anything with "who cares?" or "WTF?" or similar, but that's just a lazy dismissal. It's even more lazy and less helpful than a good troll or flamebait. How are you supposed to even respond to that -- "I do!" - ? It's a totally useless comment.
A more insightful response might have been along the lines of, "I had no idea there was still a market for new browsers/applications for what I assumed was a dead or near dead operating system. Could someone enlighten me on the value proposition of MacOS 9 in today's world?"
Now I'd give such a response 2 mod ups for interesting or something.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Then, 3rd world countries usually get them. So they would care about Classilla.
THL phish sticks
I've got a souped up Performa 6360, upgraded with a 400 MHz G3, 136 whopping MB of RAM, 80 GB HD, 32 MB Radeon 7000 PCI video card, external SCSI CD burner, 19" LCD monitor, and MacOS 9.2.2. So I care since Netscape 7 for Classic sucks, Opera is kinda usuable but really drags ass, and I don't care for iCab much at all. I'm looking forward to this. MacOS Classic sure ain't OS X but 9.2.2 is not that bad to use for a less used system.
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.
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.
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.
It was usually 68k apps running on PPC machines that would cause the more catastrophic crashes, as they were more likely to corrupt the system heap. The classic OS's main stability issues were with extensions, which were mostly fixable with Cassidy-Greene's Conflict Catcher. Reordering the extension loading usually fixes any issues.
I've found that with any PPC-native program, if it becomes unstable and causes the machine to stop responding, force-quitting would usually bring it back from the dead without causing the entire machine to go down. I still tend to reboot after such an event, to clean up memory. But the crashes are few and far- between with PPC- native apps.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Have you heard of iCab? 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.
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
Or just put one of the Linux or BSD distributions on there. They're certainly more usable and more stable than Mac OS 9 ever was.
There's a lot of really good old educational software and simple games that run under the Classic OS. I'm thinking mostly of old Broderbund titles (half of it was crap, but half of it was, well, classic) but there is a huge old library of abandonware in schools. Much of it was never ported to OS X, to say nothing of Linux. Some of it was never even ported to Windows. (For that matter, lots of old Apple II programs never had Windows or Mac equivalents, so lots of schools kept their Apple IIes and IIgs's long after they'd become staggeringly obsolete, because teachers still used them for some odd thing or another.)
Alongside those old programs, you could still run old versions of Photoshop and Office 2000. There are situations when those old apps are more usable than even current versions of, say, Gimp and OpenOffice are, and many more when it doesn't matter one whit.
Out of all the things OS 8/9 is missing, lack of a good modern web browser is probably the biggest. This fills a niche.
For the record, it isn't a stock Gecko 1.3 -- see the patch list: http://www.classilla.org/releases/
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.
I get it now. If you disagree with the majority on
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.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I did some temp work in a (fairly well-off) district in Northern NJ 2 years ago.
Some of the teachers there wanted machines at their desks to check e-mails and perform other basic tasks with, and were given the OS9 iMacs that were formerly used in labs and classrooms. They fulfilled their (very simple) purpose quite well, and I believe are still in use.
I also still administer an old Xenix system that drives a series of B&W serial terminals and line printers via a DigiBoard. 'Administer' is a rather loose term, as it hasn't needed attention in about 3 years -- easily the most resilient and cost-effective system I've come across.
About 4 years ago I helped dismantle a lab of Apple ][es at a small college, where they were still being used to teach typing, and perform a few basic word processing tasks. The machines had been in use for over 20 years at the time of their retirement.
Every now and then, I'll run across a machine running DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95. I haven't seen a Win98 machine since it fell from widespread use. Win2000 is also surprisingly scarce, considering how long NT4 lingered around. Haven't seen a Windows Me! machine since a few months before it was discontinued (and for good reason).
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
My district till has well over 400 OS 9 iMacs. There are some education software packages with no PC equivalent, no OS X equivalent, and NO replacement. Most of my job in maintaining the districts macs is 60% legacy support, 40% new system support and server management.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
about 4 years ago.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Finally! ;-)
No. I never heard of iCab.
But I don't have install media for this computer, either, and the usual sources don't really have a clean or easy way for me to turn this back into a Mac.
So it is, unfortunately for me, just another Ubuntu machine. Not that such a thing is bad in any particular way, but it's not a Macintosh. :-/ Maybe if the hard drive barfs at some point, I'll revisit it.
I implore the mods to up your score for your reference of iCab, though -- MODS! Pay attention. Someone has offered something which is actually CONTEXTUALLY MEANINGFUL, and helps folks solve the problem described in the article by alternative means. Please mod him up for doing so.
Kid-proof tablet..
I would've cared.
I picked up a free G3 iMac awhile back, just because I've never had an Apple computer, nor does anyone that I know near here.
All I wanted to do with it was turn it into a handy Internet browsing machine. But I couldn't find a decent browser for it.
Dude! I did the exact same thing... I wanted to get a feel for how the classic Mac OS worked (both from a user standpoint and a developer standpoint)... But it really didn't seem like a terribly friendly environment for someone who didn't want to put a bunch of money into the machine. I had an old Mozilla on there for a while, but eventually it was just wasting space and collecting dust, so I sold it at a flea market for $20.
It's actually a bit of a drag that I didn't make it work out. It's frustrating sometimes, thinking about what it takes to really learn about an OS that you're interested in, but not interested in enough to really embrace. I wanted to learn from these different environments - but it seems like that requires too much of an investment.
Bow-ties are cool.
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.
Bow-ties are cool.
> Now, not only can it be a great little preschool computer for her, but it can also be used
> online in a pinch.
I wouldn't use Gecko 1.3.x (which is what this is) online unless you're ok with the machine being exploited. Oh, and unless you're ok with a somewhat crappy user experience. Just for comparison, Firefox 1 shipped on top of Gecko 1.7....
On the other hand, the chance of exploits actually targeting Mac OS Classic is pretty low, I guess.
Why did I immediatly translate this name as Clbuttilla ?
Awesome! I know no one cares, but when you use Mac OS 8/9 (which is otherwise a great OS), the biggest problem you meet is an utter lack of a decent browser that can display a normal modern website normally.
You just got troll'd!
I have a friend who's primary computer (over 10 years old) still runs OS9 . Not only that - he's hooked via a 128 (or was it 256) kbps line that costs him more than a 30Mbps cable that's available in his area. He works in graphics and every time I hear "it works for me", I'm crying a little.
Heavens no, that would be accepting a marriage proposal.
California can't handle that yet.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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 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 if you'd like try the driver or have a different resolution.
Personally I don't see why they are sticking with the old Mozilla Suite if its going to require a ton of patching and rewriting anyway. Might as well back port Firefox if one has to go through all that work. After all, wasn't the move away from a monolithic internet application suite a way to increase speed and reduce memory footprint?
I'm surprised their roadmap doesn't mention upgrading the javascript engine ahead of the other browser components.
Tracemonkey had, and I'm sure will have again, a JIT to emit native PPC code. That will be a MAJOR performance increase across the whole browser (recall, Mozilla is held together with bailing wire and JavaScript). The embedder-facing JS API has only had one incompatible change that I know of in the last bajillion years, and I'd be willing to bet the "JS_FRIEND"ly stuff wouldn't be too bad either.
Tracing only appeared with 1.9.1, but I see no reason why it couldn't be backported. It would be like getting free CPU cycles, which most of the machines in the target audience probably desparately need.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
8.6? If they didn't come with Mac OS 9, that sounds like they are 604 or maybe early G3s. They mostly shipped with 64MB or less RAM. While it may be able to run Mozilla - just about - the typical JavaScript-heavy web page will cause serious swapping and use most of the CPU.
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Note that the existence of a Mozilla port does not mean the existence of a flash plugin. You'll still have to find a native flash plugin, and I think the latest one is something around Flash 5 or 6. It won't run most modern flash things. A JavaScript-heavy site, on the other hand, will cripple an old Mac in terms of CPU load and RAM usage.
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IE 5.2 for Mac. As I remember it, it was a decent browser for the time. It used a different layout engine than IE for Windows (Tasman instead of Trident), and had really robust PNG support -- including full transparency in 24 bit PNGs. It also had a small memory footprint. It was superior to Netscape 4 in every way (apart from being from Microsoft).
I still fire it up every now and again to see how it copes with the modern web. It's not brilliant, but it's definitely usable.
But the crashes are few and far- between with PPC- native apps.
Okay, I'm not sure if Adobe apps were PPC native, but I assume they were. OS 9 crashed on me several times a day using Illustrator and Photoshop (usually with nothing else running). Complete freeze, requiring hard reboot. This was the case with several installs on several computers, so it wasn't just one rig.
OS 9 was about 100x (no exaggeration) less stable that the first OS X on the same computer. It was just fucking awful on the stability front.
I completely disagree. My experience of 9.1 was complete freezes several times day (on different computers, so it wasn't just the one machine). OS X 10.0 crashed just *once* in the first month I used it as my main OS -- on the same computer OS 9.1 had taken to crashing several times a day.
Firefox doesn't work the same as Mozilla did. Some people miss Netscape and Mozilla. I can't even find a place to download the last version of Mozilla for Mac OS X.
-- Boycott Shell
I'm looking forward to the port to DOS 5.0.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I recently found an iMac DV SE (400Mhz G3) which someone had thrown out. With some minor fixes I was able to boot it. They were using it as a webserver on OS X 10.2, which is presumably why it had a full gig of RAM in it. I put in a newer (40GB) hard drive and tried installing OS X 10.4. Guess what? It worked! The graphics are noticably slow, but it goes to show that a machine that old can run a still-supported version of OS X, at least if it has with lots of RAM.
Sadly, schools run all this 10+ year old hardware because no one bothers to give them better old hardware.
My school just got thirty used 2005-vintage iMacs from a local business that upgraded their machines to the latest and greatest. Businesses swap out old hardware frequently, and we have a local volunteer that prepares the old machines for new uses.
They clean up the old hardware, test it, and install stock software (OS X, FireFox, Office, etc).
It's a hell of a lot better to spend money on teaching instead of equipment.
I never used Mac Classic, but I had similar experiences with DOS. DOS itself was quite stable, but it didn't do squat against buggy applications.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Then you obviously suck at installing free unixes on these machines.
OS 9 is much faster on that hardware than you'd ever be able to make Linux run. Cooperatively multitasking and unprotected memory suck for stability but are great for the performance of desktop apps. Don't believe me? Look back further to Mac OS and AmigaOS on late-'80s machines with sub-10MHz CPUs and half a meg of RAM. You could do fullscreen animation and sound editing on those systems. Could you truly get Linux to run that nicely on them?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Ya, early G3s: but it's good for in-house web pages that I control for sharing access to data and low-level processes (one of the Macs runs FileMaker's Web Publishing, which does enough for my needs w/o javascript or flash or anything client-side) for serving up info on graphic art with thumbnails since their machines can't deal with EPS and TIF or even very large JPGs without freaking out.
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).
I do, since I have an original 233MHz Bondi Blue iMac with 64MB RAM.
Ever thought of getting rid of it? I mean, the computer's like 11 years old at this point... People regularly throw away computers no less than five times more powerful than that thing... And these days it costs money to dispose of a computer unless you can get somebody to take it from you... I had one and I decided it was just taking up too much space - and not getting used, since I had other, more powerful machines I used instead (including a five year old Mac laptop - which itself is at the ass end of the software availability spectrum now - but which nevertheless can effectively do tasks that would bring a classic iMac to its knees...)
For that matter - I've made a habit of collecting old computers for fun ever since I was in college. 8088's in 1996, 386es and 486es in the next couple years, and so on... and you know what? They were basically not worth the time, effort, or storage space to have 'em. They were junk then, just like the original iMac is junk now. This is why I think porting new software to a dead-end OS on ancient hardware is a waste of time.
Bow-ties are cool.
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
schools are poor dude - the $1000 that it takes to buy a new CPU for a student or a teacher comes out of the budget for the teacher's salary - i was in a school this spring (2009) - they're still getting by with ancient 486 PCs running windows 98 and the 'new' machine was running windows 2000. yes - this was in southern ontario - which is a lot better off than schools in mexico (or many other parts of the world) -
so - yes - this makes a lot of old machines more useful for those that can afford to update the least.
How do you feel Mac OS X's let you down, ui-wise? Have you ever used a Mac OS X machine as your main machine for an extended period of time? Real question (and I won't judge your first answer based on the second). I've never heard of any classic user who left OS X because of the GUI (altho I've heard of many who've left for other reasons, like software availability or price).
Look out!
I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.
At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.
Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.
In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.
Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.
The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.
And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!
I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)
Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.
With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.
For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-per-tab isn't scheduled for either.
Developer interaction with Firefox users is stilted too. Sometimes Bugzilla rep
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.
Comment of the year
Yep... but honestly, the biggest hurdle I couldn't get past with the old G3 iMac I tried to set up for my kid was lack of modern Flash support. Practically all those kids' web sites are written using Flash, and the last version they released for classic MacOS is so dated, it constantly crashes/freezes, or sites tell you "Sorry, but you need a newer version." and won't even try to display the content.
If someone was able to port an up-to-date version of the Flash plug-in for the old MacOS, that'd go a LONG way towards revitalizing older Macs as web browsing machines for the kids.
I complain because I want a decent browser (Firefox v2 doesn't count), and I don't have an extra Mac to do the target disk mode trick with (because if I did, I wouldn't have picked up the iMac to begin with). I complain because the machine doesn't have Firewire, anyway. I complain because the instructions for updating the firmware were obtuse and seemed to have a long dependencies in software that I was having a difficult time tracking down. I complain because researching this stuff is more difficult than it ought to be due to the hands-off culture that Apple fosters.
I complain because Ubuntu didn't require any of these things (nor hacking of xorg.conf). It just worked.
Kid-proof tablet..
I left the Mac platform because of the OS X GUI (among other reasons). From my perspective, Apple seemed to have abandoned everything I liked about the Mac and replaced it with a GUI that was a poor copy of Windows. Consonantly, I decided to transition—if it feels like a crappy copy of Windows, then why not just use Windows?
To establish my Mac snob bona fides:
Back to my assertion that OS X a crappy copy of Windows rather than a viable successor to Mac OS 9...
The Dock:
The Filesystem:
In General:
I love the insinuation that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, though, that's nice.
I'm sorry, now I'm offended. I really tried to make it clear I just wanted to know the whole picture: your opinion and the basis for it. It's hard to ask for a complete perspective of someone's opinion on the internet, because it ends up sounding like you're insinuating something, but that was really not my goal and I tried to make that clear. How would you have asked it, so you wouldn't've misunderstood my motivation for asking? I tried to be explicit, but that evidently failed.
Otherwise, your post has been helpful/informative; thanks for that.
I guess the Metal-style apps often seem (to me) to represent a break from the classic Mac past, but it's my recollection they've been growing since the first release of Mac OS X: the Metal Finder wasn't there at day one (was it?) and this gradual increase (gradual compared to a sharp wall at 10.0) is part of why I think Mac OS X is a continuation of classic Mac. If they hadn't've changed OS, I think they would still have made many of these changes--although I doubt they would've got rid of so many fetaures.
BTW: Gnome has a spatial file manager, or at least a spatial mode. Unlike Mac OS X's Finder, the decision to use spatial vs non-spatial mode is a system-wide configuration all file manager windows respect, so it's obvious what you're going to get. I would consider Gnome to be a (very minor, but still noticeable) member of "the industry", so it's still around.
Look out!
BTW: Gnome has a spatial file manager, or at least a spatial mode. Unlike Mac OS X's Finder, the decision to use spatial vs non-spatial mode is a system-wide configuration all file manager windows respect, so it's obvious what you're going to get. I would consider Gnome to be a (very minor, but still noticeable) member of "the industry", so it's still around.
If I ever own a piece of hardware that Linux actually supports, I'll definitely give it a try. I'm not holding my breath, though, since Linux has failed to fully support my G4 iBook, HP Tablet, G4 desktop, Dell tower.
Comment of the year
I have an Imac G3 233 Mhz and iCab literally freezes the thing when surfing the internet. This thing has 1gb of ram and it has been demoted to being a juke box and playing my old blizzard games (Diable 2, starcraft.)
I am always amazed at how different people can basically share the same experience and come out of it diametrically opposed.
I stand by my statements and at one time had about 5 macs of various types at two locations that I kept track of. 9.1 was rock solid almost no matter what you threw at it. 9.2 was an entirely different story.
And I am sure you had the bad experiences you commented on.
I wonder what was different. (but I am not curious enough to try to figure it out and besides, Im not sure I remember how to use OS9) LOL I have enough trouble just keeping XP working right. But at least I hardly ever worry about 10.5 (although I never upgrade at the first offer, I wait until an upgrade has been out awhile, have not quite gutsed up to 10.5.7 yet.)
I get it now. If you disagree with the majority on
It is frustrating, isn't?
I already know a couple of modern operating systems by heart: Various Linux, and modern Windows. I've got a few dusty bits of FreeBSD wisdom stuck in the back of my head for future reference, as well.
I didn't want to marry Apple's OS, and their convoluted upgrade "paths". I just wanted a functional, Internet-accessing Apple computer with which to learn on. This, plainly, didn't happen.
That said: I'm currently installing OS X 10.something on a Dell D620 laptop that I came across. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.
Kid-proof tablet..
Telephone Monopoly? Telmex? What happened to Taco Bell?
If it's for a kid, though, assuming that you put it into Simple Finder mode and installed suitable educational games on there, an iMac DV running Tiger would be perfect. (I'm speaking here as a student running 10.4 on a slot-loading iMac DV as my secondary machine. It's a bit sluggish, but it does the job very well.)
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Mainly, because she's not supposed to use the computer, but decided to sit down at it anyways to watch Blue's Clues (I have several episodes on there to load onto our phones in case we're going on a long trip.)
In the process, of course, she gave really informative names to everything, along the lines of BHJKKKLJYTFSpomsKJLHHGKJBKBHJKHBJKHHJKHJK
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
Yes, you can definitely have Tiger running on the iMac, which I actually do as well.
The iMac is setup as a dual-boot system with 9.2.1 and 10.4.x.
I originally only loaded 9.x on the machine for nostaligia reasons, but followed that by installing 10.4 to use the machine for some light web browsing.
Upon getting my hands on those CDs, however, It quickly became obvious that those games would refuse to run, even when loaded in classic mode.
Since then, I've just kept it in OS9.
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
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?
Not really. We don't need examples of school in third-world countries.
Here you go:
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/
Cultist of the Average Middle-Aged Ones