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."

Comments

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Zarel]

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Although iCab is no longer maintained for Mac OS 9, its last release for Mac OS 9 was in 2008, far more recently than Gecko 1.3 (2002), and the Mac OS 9 version is still a full-featured modern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.