Firefox - Page 3

powermac · #17 January 5th, 2006, 08:42 AM

The best thing is, that we all can have this discussion. Meaning, the variety of web browsers available for the Mac. The one browser I miss is Netscape stand alone browser for OS8-9. That was a great browser, slimmed down, and ran great. In all these discussions, no one ever mentions Netscape. I don't even have it installed on my computer anymore.

**fryke** · #18 January 5th, 2006, 11:23 AM

Well... If *I* remember correctly, Netscape was never "slim" after version 2.x... It became one bloated beast in fact, which the open source guys noticed, too, once Netscape released the mozilla source code. Nowadays, "Netscape", as a product, is basically dead, since it's merely a repackaged mozilla/Firefox which is never up-to-date with the open source development. Hence people are using Firefox instead.

nixgeek · #19 January 5th, 2006, 01:21 PM

The only thing that bothers me about the mozilla team is that even though they are open source, no one is making the effort to port the latest version to OS 9. Is it that difficult a task to do so? After all, it IS open source and anyone can take the source code and modify it to work with OS 9.

Viro · #20 January 6th, 2006, 04:09 AM

The question is whether there is a demand for apps on OS 9. After all, that OS has been officially dead for how many years now?

Mikuro · #21 January 6th, 2006, 04:21 AM

Netscape was a beast. And I mean that in a bad way. It was huge, and ate up tons of RAM. Netscape 2 was nice. 3 was reasonably lean. 4 was bloated. And after that it was just a sad shadow of what it once was, in terms of speed, features, usability, and just about everything else. It was just Mozilla's uglier, dumber brother.

I miss iCab. I know iCab is still around, but....well, I miss when it was fast and modern. When it first came out, it smacked everything else around soooo hard. And it was small, too. It's still my browser of choice for OS 9 (and 7 and 8, for that matter!), with a third-party build of Mozilla (not up to date, but closer than the official one, at least) as my backup.

nixgeek · #22 January 6th, 2006, 11:57 AM

iCab 3.0 is available now for PPC systems running Classic Mac OS. I tested it out and it's pretty good, especially when rendering sites. However, even though the demand isn't that high, not that many people have a desperate need to upgrade to OS X. Some people are just fine with OS and below. For this reason I don't understand why someone hasn't taken up the task to port FF, or even the Mozilla Suite (which is going to live on as SeaMonkey) at the very least. It doesn't have to have EVERY little fix that comes out, but at least to update it so that security-wise it's up to snuff.