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

First OS9 story in 7 years

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files

[MichaelCrawford]

If you analyzer your logs with a tool such as Analog, you'll find that a significant number of your web sites' visitors are still running Explorer or Netscape versions 3 or 4. At least that's what I find for my sites - and it's been that way for a long time.

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.)