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.

IIIGS

[tepples]

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

No, but Apple ported Safari to the IIIGS.

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: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?

[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?

[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.