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

Who cares?

[Tetsujin]

I mean, seriously, who cares?

Re:Who cares?

[mdwh2]

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).

Re:Who cares?

[MichaelSmith]

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:Who cares?

[sugarbomb]

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:Who cares?

[bcrowell]

I mean, seriously, who cares?

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.

Re:Who cares?

[the_humeister]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Seriously. I mean, when are they going to port Mozilla to the Commodore 64? Oh, there'll be cheers that day...

Re:Who cares?

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[randomchicagomac]

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.

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.

Re:Who cares?

[adolf]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[the_humeister]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=30400

Re:Who cares?

[Pandrake]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[bcrowell]

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.

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Orion Blastar]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[larry bagina]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[jmenezes]

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: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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Who cares?

[iron-kurton]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do, since I have an original 233MHz Bondi Blue iMac with 64MB RAM.

Re:Who cares?

[BitZtream]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[BitZtream]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Insightfill]

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 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.

Re:Who cares?

[pauljlucas]

I [don't have] 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).

Why didn't you give her her own user account?

Re:Who cares?

[Old97]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[gandhi_2]

At least until I get assigned to those schools.

Then, 3rd world countries usually get them. So they would care about Classilla.

Re:Who cares?

[deepdarkhole]

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.

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:Who cares?

[AtariKee]

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.

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record, it isn't a stock Gecko 1.3 -- see the patch list: http://www.classilla.org/releases/

Re:Who cares?

[retiredtwice]

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?

[niktemadur]

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?

[moosesocks]

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).

Re:Who cares?

[falcon5768]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[AmigaMMC]

>next there'll be an Amiga port

Finally! ;-)

Re:Who cares?

[adolf]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Tetsujin]

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.

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:Who cares?

[BZ]

> 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.

Re:Who cares?

[muszek]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[NJRoadfan]

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?

Re:Who cares?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[nyctopterus]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[nyctopterus]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[nyctopterus]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[lancejjj]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Cro Magnon]

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.

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Just Some Guy]

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?

Re:Who cares?

[Pandrake]

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).

Re:Who cares?

[Tetsujin]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[King_TJ]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:Who cares?

[retiredtwice]

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.)

Re:Who cares?

[adolf]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Telephone Monopoly? Telmex? What happened to Taco Bell?

Re:Who cares?

[jrothwell97]

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.)

Re:Who cares?

[jmenezes]

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

Re:Who cares?

[jmenezes]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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?

[Diabolus Advocatus]

And judging by how long it's taking for anyone to even comment, I assume the answer to my above question is no...

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).

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Moridineas]

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:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[the_humeister]

There's always hardware emulation to run OS9

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[tlhIngan]

There's always hardware emulation to run OS9

Yeah, wasn't there a nice port of SheepShaver or something specially for Intel Macs?

Not sure how fast it is, though - but maybe Quark running in Rosetta might be the problem. I seem to remember Office for Mac being a real dog until the last major release.

And there are still plenty of PowerPC Macs around - old PowerBooks and Mac Minis still populate eBay regularly.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Moridineas]

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:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Anubis IV]

Ironically enough, I was running Classic mode on my PowerBook G4 just a few hours ago. There are a handful of old games that don't run natively on OS X that I still like to play from time to time (in fact, my two favorite games ever are in this category). But I don't use it on a day-to-day basis by any means. As for booting into OS 9, the last time I would've done that would have been a year or two ago, I should think. Probably around the time I upgraded from an even older PowerBook G4 to this one, and I was running a few applications and utilities on the old one to test them out before sending them over.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

I'd just use iCab. It probably has just as good compatibility as Gecko 1.3.1 and it's been stable for a long time.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[pilgrim23]

the fact is, for single dedicated apps OS 9 was a robust operating system. heck 8.1 even 7.5.5 were dang good! I still have one 68K box I run 7.5 on but mainly that is to provide a network path for an older Apple IIgs I use for certain dedicated tasks (Yes Apple IIs still live)

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[mdwh2]

I'm not sure that "robust" is a word I'd use for an OS lacking memory protection.

As for only running a single app, the rest of the computing world moved away from that model in the 80s.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Philip K Dickhead]

Where's my Sinclair and Osbourne support?

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[SizzlinSaguaro]

My boss and two other engineers where I work all use os9 daily. They use a ancient CAD program called Ashlar Vellum (reminds me of a glorified verison of MS Paint) to make engineering drawings all day long. Up until a year ago they even used netscape 4 for www and email and seem to be content in their own little world. They now have PC's sitting next to them for internet use, but they still use their os9 mac's for "real" work...

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who fucking cares.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[mrgiles]

Quark, to put it bluntly, sucks.

There. Fixed that for ya.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Phroggy]

Not for the software my mom wants to use with her music students, there isn't. Sure, you can cobble something together that is technically capable of running the application, but unless the timing of both the sound and video is perfect, it's completely useless.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Moridineas]

I can't totally agree... I think Quark 4.5 was a really great product. Every release since then has gotten bigger and more bloated and slower and added very few (if any) new features, while keeping bugs--the basic quark XTags (their own little markup language) parser in Quark7 crashes if it hits several kinds of malformed tag for instance--Quark 4.5 handled these errors without crashing. That's the kind of sucktitude I'm talking about. In Quark8 they decided to pull a Office2k7 and redesign the UI...just what we needed.

We'd certainly consider switching to Indesign which gets better reviews, but our workflow works really damn well right now. It would take a lot of time and money to overhaul it and get back to where we currently are.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Spit]

I miss Cubase VST32 and Protools 5 on OS9. ;_;

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

That OS version only shipped with one Mac model, though (the mirrored doors G4).

Well, I think the MDD G4 was only the first Mac to ship it.
And I think it was the last change made to OS 9 before OS 9 booting support got discontinued in January 2003. And unfortunately it wasn't documented very well, though one thing about it that was documented was that Mac OS 9 partition sizes was still limited to 200 GB.

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.)

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[jonadab]

> for single dedicated apps OS 9 was a robust operating system

For single dedicated apps, PC-DOS 3.3 was a robust operating system. But, except maybe for the occasional kiosk, who uses single dedicated apps these days?

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Chris L. Mason]

Actually, it was the second Quicksilver model that added support for +128 ATA drives, not the MDD model.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[ivucica]

It's either giving that to my sister or letting her use my laptop.

Just kidding. iMac G3 seems to run OSX 10.2.8 very well, so we've got that. But to run OS9 software, you need OS9, and that's it.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[nyctopterus]

InDesign is heading down the same path of suckitude. The first version was SO nice and snappy on my 500mhz G4. It's getting worse and worse--more than throwing away the hardware speed increases.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[joposer]

Wasn't that the Digital Audio?

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[dgatwood]

According to lowendmac, that support is unofficial and only works in Mac OS X (and, I suspect, probably only in 10.2). That said, LEM and I could both be wrong. It certainly is possible.

If you want unsupported, I ran LBA48 on a beige G3 once. It takes all of five minutes to comment out one line in the ATA family kext and recompile.... Actual hardware bugs notwithstanding, LBA48 addresses are just data as far as the controller is concerned. Thus, LBA48 support doesn't require any controller support(*) as long as the driver doesn't make incorrect assumptions about LBA48 implying other features like faster DMA modes or large transfer sizes.

(*) Booting from a larger partition requires firmware support, which is why most OSes limit LBA48 to supported hardware.

Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, SheepShaver is an option to run OS 9 on Intel Macs.
It is often seen packaged with OS 9.0.4 and called COI (Classic On Intel)

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3701450/Classic-On-Intel_(OS9_for_Intel_Macs)_One_click_install

Neat, but...

[bonch]

Neat, but it would have been even cooler to see WebKit ported to MacOS 9. I'm not keen on the idea of Mozilla's performance on the classic MacOS.

May God Have Mercy on Our Souls

[penguinstorm]

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.

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...

weird

[Tumbleweed]

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?

Re:weird

[NJRoadfan]

Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?

Not going to happen without some sort of C++ compiler and decent graphics. Even then one would likely need a Transwarp GS/Zip GS card for a page to render faster then a weekend. After all, it takes the machine a couple of minutes just to decompress a small JPEG image!

Re:weird

[Tumbleweed]

> Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?

Not going to happen without some sort of C++ compiler and decent graphics. Even then one would likely need a Transwarp GS/Zip GS card for a page to render faster then a weekend. After all, it takes the machine a couple of minutes just to decompress a small JPEG image!

Well, good thing I found a TransWarp GS a couple of weeks ago! :)

I'd imagine the amount of RAM would be a pretty huge hurdle, too. I've got a ROM 03 machine with a 4Meg memory upgrade for it, but 5Megs doesn't sound like enough to run any kind of modern rendering engine. Well, maybe the one in Opera... :)

Re:weird

[ChristTrekker]

Anyone want to port Gecko (or WebKit, I'm not picky) to use a ncurses UI? That ought to speed it up, and be pretty useful too.

Wasilla

[Anonymous Coward]

A New port for quitters.

macbook 180

[Anonymous Coward]

will it run on my macbook 180?

good news for faggots

[Anonymous Coward]

they got a new web browser.

Old Mozilla not Firefox

[PineHall]

It is old code. From the FAQ:
the decision was made to split Gecko off at 1.3.1

Re:Old Mozilla not Firefox

[sootman]

AFAIK, the last version of Firefox for OS 9 was 1.2.1.

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.

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[timothy]

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:First OS9 story in 7 years

[Kamokazi]

Are you implying it's possible that a Slashdot 2.0 feature is broken? Nonsense!

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[Blakey Rat]

Mac OS Classic was always under-reported on this site in the "olden days" (i.e. when it was relevant to everybody else.) I have no idea why, since it was the most successful non-Microsoft operating system for, what, 15 years?

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it was even worse than Windows having evolved little technically since the early 80s.
That said the original MacOS GUI is still unbeaten as far as GUIs go.

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of which, has anyone found a good solution for running Classic Mac OS apps on an Intel Mac?

The SheepShaver and Basilisk II emulators were pretty impressive a few years ago, but are a less stable and a less elegant solution than Apple's built-in Classic support in OS X which was dropped in the switch to Intel (for obvious hardware reasons).

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[Little_Professor]

Either that, or you don't know how to do searches: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=os9

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[Anonymous Coward]

(Same AC)

It certainly was a good reason, and it was a delight to see that icon, too.

I suppose reading Slashdot is a bit like bird-watching at times - you're happy when you see something rare and unusual. ;)

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[zsau]

In the olden days, this place was much more of a free software place, ISTR. Now it's just general computery stuff. Also, Mac OS X is in some ways the continuation of Mac OS, but in other ways it's very much not; the userbase nowadays is a lot more diverse. Mac OSwas used relatively little by the target audience of this place, that changed when Apple appeared to "get it" by putting Unix underneath a sparkly gui (but the command line's never been the reason Iuse GNU/Linux on my computers, except for about eight months when I had a computer that was too slow to run contemporary guis as my main box).

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[mdwh2]

Also, Mac OS X is in some ways the continuation of Mac OS, but in other ways it's very much not

Indeed, although I'd go so far as to say that in all ways, it's not, except for sharing the brandname, and that it was marketed as the successor.

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[Idiomatick]

Are you implying this isn't a repost? I didn't even know that was possible.

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[Idiomatick]

Are you implying that this isn't a repost? I wasn't even aware that was possible.

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[zsau]

Its GUI has much in common. Aside form the obvious things like the (silly) global menubar, conflating the systray and the menubar, the (silly) close-button-in-the-left-corner, or putting disk drives on the desktop, the way you interract with the system seems very similar to me. It's very different from other well-known operating systems of 2001. And for most classic Mac users, the GUI was all that mattered: who gives a rats where the kernel comes from, as long as it doesn't hang up?

(None of the things I've explicitly mentioned are/were unique to Mac OS (X), but their existence in OS X is definitely because of classic Mac OS, and are in contradiction to OS X's NeXTSTEP lineage or Windows.)

Re:First OS9 story in 7 years

[Blakey Rat]

If most Classic users are like me, they couldn't stand the shitty OS X UI. Once it became apparent that Apple has absolutely no interest in retaking their previous position of UI leadership, I moved to Windows. If I have to use a crummy UI, I might as well use the one with the most software. And, unlike Apple, Microsoft is actually interested in evolving the UI.

IIIGS

[tepples]

Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?

No, but Apple ported Safari to the IIIGS.

Re:IIIGS

[imamac]

Mod funny/insightful. I had to think about that one for a sec...iPhone 3GS.

Re:IIIGS

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:IIIGS

[Tumbleweed]

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

Nah, he's just running on an Apple IIGS! For values of 'running'.

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.)

Re:The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of those log entries are probably bot traffic not real users.

Re:The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files

[merreborn]

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 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:The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files

[jonadab]

> 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

I don't find that for our website at work (public library). I see a lot of browsers, but I don't see those.

> Some people cannot afford the new hardware

People who can't afford three-year-old used hardware typically also don't have internet access at home.

Re:The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What? You believe user agent strings? It's pretty easy to conclude that over 1% of all accesses use a falsified user agent.

I believe them only for authenticated users, minimizing robots and zombies. And my corporation's web authentication process involves the exchange of money. And I -still- see falsified users agents every second of the day.

Re:The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files

[merreborn]

People who can't afford three-year-old used hardware typically also don't have internet access at home.

Honestly, I think there are a few people out there who simply overestimate the cost of upgrading.

They don't realize that you can pick up a solid netbook, or refurb desktop for $300.

Re:The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files

[arantius]

> ... significant number of your web sites' visitors are still running Explorer or Netscape versions 3 or 4 ...

Bull plop.

On my site, with 7211530 "hits" as reported by AWStats:

6,096 (0.0845%) Used *any* version of IE before 6.0.
    812 (0.0113%) Used any 3.x or 4.x version of IE.
5,721 (0.0793%) Used *any* version of Netscape.
2,588 (0.0359%) Used Netscape 3.x or 4.x.

You have to add together all of IE 6.0 and Netscape to even break one tenth of one percent.

In fact, only:

138,957 (1.9269%) Used any version of *Firefox* before 3.0.

From TFA: Runs on 8.6

[Anonymous Coward]

"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!

Re:From TFA: Runs on 8.6

[CronoCloud]

OpenSuse? Why not YDL? Yeah, I know the YDL community is pretty much mostly those running it on PS3's these days, but that's pretty much the case with all the PPC Linux distros

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 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: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 (if you hover over a link), and it has some rendering and scrolling bugs (such as on Blogspot). But on the whole, it's much more stable than the older browsers. And Slashdot 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 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.

It's also old, but Netscape 7.01 for OS 9?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not going back to OS 8/9 thank you...

[mergy]

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.

Re:Not going back to OS 8/9 thank you...

[Anonymous Coward]

But Steve Jobs said that Apple Macintoshes are like the Mercedes of the computing world! Do you mean that he was lying when he said that, and that it is really like working on an old vintage Packard Bell, with it's poorly trimmed solder joints hanging off riser cards, and with sharp sheet metal edges inside just waiting to lacerate your wrists for daring to venture beyond the candy colored exterior!?

For SHAME!

Re:Not going back to OS 8/9 thank you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, thank you. Amongst the worst operating systems ever. My roommate was a CS major and told me that his OS prof told the class that if someone turned in MacOS for their final project, he would fail them, because they clearly didn't understand how a modern operating system should work. This was in 1993.

Look and Feel

[butlerm]

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...

Re:Look and Feel

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kinda old, huh?

Re:Look and Feel

[Concerned Onlooker]

Boring does not equal functional. I'd say that the improvements made in OS X were all worthwhile. Easier to use and easier on the eye. It's like having air conditioning in your car. It's not absolutely necessary but at the end of the day you feel so much less tired.

Re:Look and Feel

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Shiny and hyper animated? I take it you haven't used Leopard or know where the preferences are? Currently, OS X is more neutral and minimalistic that OS 9, IMHO. And the animation is more informative than flashy (perhaps we can exclude the dock). The only really shiny parts left are the buttons and the dock (once again). But even so, it's been toned down a lot since the candy and pin-stripe days of 10.0.

Re:Look and Feel

[noidentity]

Yeah, I'm still an OS 9 holdout, but I'm going to have to switch soon because of the lack of tools on it. I'm excited about this browser, which will help me hang on a little longer.

Re:Look and Feel

[Psyborgue]

Try OSX for a few weeks. "animated" features like exposé might seem useless at first but after a while you'll find you can't live without the feature. With a screen-corner gesture you can display all windows, all windows a given type and/or even drag them between virtual desktops by adding another screen-corner gesture. After a while you never "lose" any windows and moving them around becomes a very intuitive and physical experience, like moving pieces of paper. Anything you don't like you can generally turn off anyway. Critics of OSX often point and say "that's a gimmick" without actually bothering to use the feature. And don't bother claiming it eats CPU cycles. The fancy stuff is done on the GPU.

What's old is new again - or maybe not

[westlake]

the currently-released build seems to work well on my old PowerBook 1400 -- despite being a little memory-hungry.

Some things never change.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, NetBSD'll run on a toaster. That's not quite all that remarkable.

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.

Great - when is the Atari 1040ste port?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Oh, but never mind - the processor is slower than the connection - the computer itself would be the bottleneck...

:-/

RS

Old Edu software and games

[ThrowAwaySociety]

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.

I could have really used this...

[daemonc]

about 4 years ago.

Classilla ?

[frenchbedroom]

Why did I immediatly translate this name as Clbuttilla ?

Hallelujah!

[4D6963]

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.

Re:I do???!

[TaoPhoenix]

Heavens no, that would be accepting a marriage proposal.
California can't handle that yet.

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 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.

Roadmap missing Tracemonkey

[multipartmixed]

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.

Re:Roadmap missing Tracemonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like the next version does have some plans for JavaScript: http://code.google.com/p/classilla/wiki/Roadmap

How about a new port of Mozilla for Mac OS X?

[objekt]

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.

Re:How about a new port of Mozilla for Mac OS X?

[onebuttonmouse]

Forgive me if I am being naive, but is SeaMonkey not a direct replacement for the old Mozilla suite?

If they're porting to old platforms

[Cro Magnon]

I'm looking forward to the port to DOS 5.0.

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

Re:Who cares? (you insensitive clod)

[johnrpenner]

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.

why don't you like mac os x compared to classic?

[zsau]

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).

Some Questions & Comments About Firefox 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:why don't you like mac os x compared to classic

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Re:Who cares? (you insensitive clod)

[adolf]

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??

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.

Mac OS X abandoned the best aspects of Classic

[jvonk]

I've never heard of any classic user who left OS X because of the GUI

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:

1. I was raised on Mac OS, starting in 1989 with System 6 on a Mac IIcx and used Macintosh exclusively all the way through 2001 on my Wallstreet Powerbook G3.
2. Before college, I worked for 18 months at an Apple Authorized Service Provider as the sole Apple Certified Technician in a 90 mile radius.
3. I developed applications for the Mac following Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (I asked for a copy of the official "Inside Macintosh" HIG for my 15th birthday).

Back to my assertion that OS X a crappy copy of Windows rather than a viable successor to Mac OS 9...

The Dock:

• It's like the Windows Taskbar, only bad. Everything is an icon or a tiny copy of the app's current screen. I know the name of the window/app I want to access, but I don't necessarily recall what its window/icon *looks* like at the moment.
• "Oh, but they have Expose now!" What a hack... Windows has taskbar grouping by application. Choose the application, pick the window from the list by title, and go. Mac OS has "show all the open windows in the system... and try to find which of the 30 shuffled-up-postage-stamp-sized-images-ofthe-window-contents is the one you are looking for"
• Taskbar grouping again... have you ever tried to minimize 30 documents to the Dock simultaneously? Oh, and what if you want to minimize all the windows for one application (and, no, I *don't* mean Hide Application)? These are simple tasks on Windows.
• I don't want the Dock in my way. Ever had a large window open and then had the Dock auto show over the edge so that you cannot resize it without moving your mouse away and waiting for the Dock to retreat so you can dart in to try it again? At least Windows lets you resize windows from any edge, unlike the "helpful" Finder. This wasn't an issue in OS 9: no Dock, no problem.

The Filesystem:

• Remember when Apple's marketing material used to mock Windows for having to use three-letter filename extensions? "Oh, yeah... that."
• One of my favorite aspects of the Mac OS was the multifork filesystem and the file metadata (type/creator codes). You could create files of a common format, say, TEXT, that other apps would register that they grokked. However, the files also had a creator code. That meant that if you double clicked on a TEXT-type file that was created by one app, it would open the app that created it (note how that differs from concept of default applications). However, if you had another app open that grokked the TEXT type, then its open file dialog box would show the same file. OS X "upgraded" that feature away.
• OS X also "upgraded" applications into special kinds of directories/bundles instead of a standalone file decorated with a resource fork. Not a problem, eh? Well, what if I really dont want my application to end in .app? No such restriction in OS 9.

In General:

• Have you ever tried to have a bunch of browser windows open and then another app interleaved in those windows? The Mac OS metaphor of the "application as the root" driving everything is a severe hindrance to this intuitive task compared to the Windows metaphor of having the window itself be at the top of the hierarchy. Case in point: you have a bunch of browser windows open and you have a text document that is partially obscured by two browser windows. So, you click on one of the obscuring browser windows and minimize it expecting that the

Re:Mac OS X abandoned the best aspects of Classic

[zsau]

It seems it was the whole system rather than just the gui which has put you off Mac OS X, but thanks for your comments anyway. (You also seem to think I like Mac OS X. Nothing could be further from the truth, and many of your complaints I share, both about the gui and more generally.)

Re:why don't you like mac os x compared to classic

[zsau]

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.

Re:why don't you like mac os x compared to classic

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Here You Go:

[forgot_my_nick]

Here you go:
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/

Re:Here You Go:

[objekt]

Thanks!