Browsers for older Macs with Panther...
19/04/10 10:46 Filed in: OS X
Keeping old stuff alive, or why I give Opera another look...
I recently got a G4 400 from a friend, and since I’ve kept a lot of my older software, I decided to turn it back into a small spare computer. I was able to get things going by installing 10.3 and updating it to 10.3.9. Everything went pretty well, until I got to the web browsing part of things. The version of Safari that runs under that platform is, hah, somewhat less than ideal and Internet Explorer 5? Well, I won’t even go there.
I’ve archived a lot of stuff from back then, and I’ve kept most of my stuff categorized by X versions (10.2, 10.3, 10.4, etc.), so I had on my file server versions of Opera, Firefox and Camino that work with Panther. I checked the various browser developpers’ sites, and was surprised to see that the current version of Opera was compatible with 10.3.9. I proceeded to download and install it on the G4.
I ran it on a lot of sites, and except for one crash following a download, it ran fine. I don’t expect it to perform miracles on flash-enabled sites, but for stuff that’s actually standards compliant, it works, and it works well.
Good stuff. And kudos to the Opera team.
More info on the browser here: http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/793/
I’ve archived a lot of stuff from back then, and I’ve kept most of my stuff categorized by X versions (10.2, 10.3, 10.4, etc.), so I had on my file server versions of Opera, Firefox and Camino that work with Panther. I checked the various browser developpers’ sites, and was surprised to see that the current version of Opera was compatible with 10.3.9. I proceeded to download and install it on the G4.
I ran it on a lot of sites, and except for one crash following a download, it ran fine. I don’t expect it to perform miracles on flash-enabled sites, but for stuff that’s actually standards compliant, it works, and it works well.
Good stuff. And kudos to the Opera team.
More info on the browser here: http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/793/