New Gecko Browser for OS 9

[Mike Richardson]

http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/

Could be vaporware but who knows. Page is fairly recent. They might be basing it off the old WamCom and just patching up all the known security holes, which would be kind of boring.

Honestly I don't care about the security holes - who is going to be exploiting a hole that existed in Mozilla in 2003 in a version no one uses anymore except for WamCom users?

Something more exciting would be pulling down layout and speed enhancements from newer Gecko source code into WamCom.

[~tl]

Interesting, from reading their page it looks like they're planning to fork Geko at 1.3.1 (the last version that works on OS 9) and then backport changes from the more recent versions.

http://code.google.com/p/classilla/wiki/AAATheFAQ

According to the roadmap they plan to have a "no matter what" release out on the 1st of July and then a proper, stable release by the end of the year. Should be interesting to follow their progress!

[Gil]

Great find!

[returningmacuser]

If this gets released, it will give me more motivation for me to get my Sawtooth on the web. It will be nice to be able to use the speedy, uncluttered Mac OS 9 on a more regular basis.

[QuadSix50]

This is wonderful news. I'd be eager to give it a try once it's released just to test out and possibly submit bugs if needed.

[MultiFinder]

Ooooo, now this looks seriously cool. This should make life far more pleasant for the few of us that still use Systems 8&9 on a regular basis

[MrMacPlus]

Yup, It'll get put on the 3400c.

[Temetka]

Looks good.

Will be installing it one the IceBook once I solve my OS 9 problems.

[Cory5412]

As of today, a release is actually on the website. They're calling it Classilla 9.0, I don't know what they'll call the stable "by the end of the year" release, in terms of version numbers.

[~tl]

9.0.4 according to the roadmap...

[Gorgonops]

Just for cheap thrills just now I downloaded this and installed it on my SheepShaver 9.0.4 image, and it seems to "work". It displays sites like Wikipedia just fine and I'd swear it feels faster then iCab 3.0.5. Ironically, however, it totally can't display this forum. ;^) (Unless you do the view->style->none trick.)

On the other hand, holy cow is it a memory hog. Sheepshaver's configured with 128MB RAM and Classilla's using 80 of it. When I first tried to run it after downloading it with iCab it hung forever on the startup screen, and when I clicked on the finder I got an "out of memory" error. Clearly I should of shut down iCab first... So, yeah. I'm curious whether this is going to be at all usable on, say, PowerBook 1400's and other such machines with 64MB-ish RAM limits.

[ChristTrekker]

On the other hand, holy cow is it a memory hog. Sheepshaver's configured with 128MB RAM and Classilla's using 80 of it.

Is that much different than Mozilla 1.3.1 though? You can't expect to take Mozilla, add updates, and get something with RAM usage like Netscape 2...

[Gorgonops]

On the other hand, holy cow is it a memory hog. Sheepshaver's configured with 128MB RAM and Classilla's using 80 of it.

Is that much different than Mozilla 1.3.1 though? You can't expect to take Mozilla, add updates, and get something with RAM usage like Netscape 2...

I don't suppose I'm actually surprised by how much RAM it takes. It's just ugly. Given the niche this is trying to fill, well... just how many machines still in day-to-day use are there out there that are both powerful enough to really run this yet incapable of running an OS better equipped to handle such piggish software?

Good luck to them, anyway. I like their logo/branding, at least. ;^)

[Osgeld]

I had a feeling about its ram usage, but its not going to stop me from trying it on 48 megs (well if i can get os9 to install)

[ChristTrekker]

I don't suppose I'm actually surprised by how much RAM it takes. It's just ugly. Given the niche this is trying to fill, well... just how many machines still in day-to-day use are there out there that are both powerful enough to really run this yet incapable of running an OS better equipped to handle such piggish software?

I still think there should be a new text-only browser based on Gecko or Webkit. If I knew enough to marry either one to ncurses, I'd do it.

[avw]

Ironically, however, it totally can't display this forum. ;^)

That´s not a problem of Classilla, it also heappened with Mozilla 1.2.1 (the latest official release) and with WamCom (Mozilla 1.3.1 based). It´s that ugly phpBB and occured with the change to phpBB 3.0 at many forums. I was always wondering why even 68kmla didn´t use a style which is usabele at most recent OS9 Browsers (Opera 6.0.3 also can´t display it correctly), ...

But back to Classilla; it´s a great step foreward! Many sides are rendered better and faster than with WamCom! For people like me who are only using MacOS 9 it´s a great help. About the people who are able to code around here, help them going on with developement.

[beachycove]

Installation on an Intel machine running Sheepshaver is a poor test of the viability of a browser written specifically for the myriad of older machines capable of running MacOS 8.6-9.2.

What machine/ configuration are you using, and what RAM usage does your machine report, AVW?

[avw]

What machine/ configuration are you using, and what RAM usage does your machine report, AVW?

PM 9600 (G4 800), MacOS 9.1, around 50 to 55 MB with 20 tabs opened, that´s between 5 and 10MB more than WamCom. This is my mainmachine which I use for everything, I strictly use OS 9 (and sometimes OS 8.6). Many big pages (youtube, ebay, ...) run much better and faster with Classilla. I´m verry heappy. And the best point is – developement will continue!

[ClassicHasClass]

Hi, I'm the Classilla maintainer. I noticed this thread and decided to come by to answer some of the questions in the thread.

First off, I noticed that the 68kmla forum default theme didn't work ... the day of release so alas that was a little late to fix. The good news is that this particular layout failure may be related one I had been tracking for awhile and unable to find a fix for, and the default theme's case is a bit simpler, so this may be a good thing. I am looking at it for 9.0.4.

With regard to the memory usage, having dug into the code, in my opinion WaMCoM was way too optimistic about how much memory it actually required. Moreover, Mozilla code is notorious for memory leaks (just look at your typical Firefox build, even on OS X, and more so on Windows) and this runtime is no exception even though it is simpler and smaller. For that reason, increasing the minimum actually greatly improves its stability; it does not handle low memory situations well. The 80MB is designed to be a take-it-if-it-can-get it phenomenon and you can cut it down to its minimum, but I would not put it below the stated minimum or you'll regret it. It really is a lot happier in 48MB than the 26ish Kai tried to squeeze it into.

There was also the question about the 1400, and I made sure to test it on mine (a 1400cs/117 upgraded to a 1400c/+G3-333 with 60MB physical RAM and virtual memory to 64MB). It runs. It takes up everything the system has, but it does run! And it's not as bad as I feared it would be even though it is no speed demon. I also test Classilla on a G3 blueberry iBook (300MHz, 576MB RAM), a TiBook G4 (867MHz, 1GB RAM) and of course on the build machine, a 1.25GHz MDD dual G4 (1.5GB RAM in OS 9, 2GB total).

For 9.0.4, JavaScript is the primary target. I have some ideas about how to backport a later SpiderMonkey, although Tamarin is probably going to require an extensive rewrite and I'm just not ready for that right now. But if we can at least clear 1.8 (Firefox 1.5), I think you will find a lot of sites suddenly start working. I want to get 9.0.4 out by Q4 2009 if I can.

Again, I repeat my plea particularly for distillers -- people to find bad sites, turn them into test cases and (hopefully) comb Bugzilla for fixes. The more people we have looking at it, the faster we can backport. I did a lot of digging in Bugzilla for this release, which comes after a month and a half of hard work, but there is still a long way to go.

Thanks, everyone, for your kind words.

[RichardG]

For who's trying to use the forum on Classilla, try changing the theme to subsilver2 in the user control panel. Uses less CSS and even reportedly works on Internet Explorer for Mac.

EDIT: Got it on SheepShaver, wasn't that slow. No web because of 9.0.4's Open Transport which does not cooperate with the aforementioned emulator. When I pressed Cmd-Shift-3, Classilla bombed 26416, which isn't mentioned on this error list...

[Temetka]

I am downloading it now and will test it out inside Classic on my iBook.

Will report back in a few.

EDIT:

Crap, forgot OS 9 is broken on my iBook. Once I fix that, then I can test it out.

[Osgeld]

I tried it on my 8500 /132

stock cpu and 48mb of ram, os 9.0.4

It took its sweet time loading but works fine (i have not ran accross any site that it doesnt like, but i have not been jumping around all that much with it)

[Gorgonops]

Installation on an Intel machine running Sheepshaver is a poor test of the viability of a browser written specifically for the myriad of older machines capable of running MacOS 8.6-9.2.

I'm curious how exactly you justify that statement. On the particular machine I tested on, which happens to be a dual-dual-core first-rev Mac Pro desktop running Linux (yes, long story, short answer is it makes life easier for what the machine does most of the day), SheepShaver with JiT enabled is faster then many of "the myriad of older machines capable of running MacOS 8.6-9.2.".

I know it's an old synthetic benchmark and old synthetic benchmarks are crap, but under Speedometer 4.02 this box scores:

CPU: 30.03
Graf: 16.00
Disk: 4.75
Math: 2528.4
PR: 13.48

The CPU score alone is just shy of eight times faster then the PowerMac 8100/80 score that's the fastest "real mac" in the machine comparison file, and according to this page on Low End Mac, which was the first hit I found looking for Speedometer benchmarks of faster machines my SheepShaver session basically ties a 400Mhz G4 Powerbook. (Other then math, on which it slaughters it.) And this doesn't seem to be an unusually good score for SheepShaver, BTW. My 2.33Mhz MacBook Pro manages to do about 1/3rd again faster then the Linux box.

I could certainly grant SheepShaver more then 128 MB of RAM to make it "more fair", but... think about how many Performa/Powermac 5x00/6x00 models there are out there with 128-160MB RAM limits and maybe it isn't so unfair as it is. Or are those machines not numbered amongst "the myriad of older machines capable of running MacOS 8.6-9.2."?

Anyway, again, just curious why this is a "poor test". Is it a poor test because having no other options would incline me to judge it less harshly? That's not very scientific. All I said was it was memory hog, which is objectively true. And yes, it true of other Gecko browsers. If I were looking at a version of Firefox backported to run on Windows 3.11 would I be any less justified in pointing out the (relatively) huge memory requirements? Most machines running Windows 3.x had 8MB of RAM or less, so I'd think it'd be fair to warn people that they might need to have a somewhat unusually well pimped-out 386 to run said Hair-On-FireFox 3.11 Alpha.

On machines that can run this I'm perfectly willing to say that from what I've seen so far it may be the best Classic OS-compatible browser there is, and that assuming there's enough people out there that still care the project is worth supporting.

[beachycove]

I'm curious how exactly you justify that statement.

Er, the browser we need is one that works on older hardware running MacOS 8.6-9.2?

[Gorgonops]

I'm curious how exactly you justify that statement.

Er, the browser we need is one that works on older hardware running MacOS 8.6-9.2?

And how is testing said browser on an emulator that reasonably accurately mimics said older hardware not a valid way of evaluating it? Haven't exactly made a point there, other then possibly raising a squishy argument that using the emulator somehow isn't in the "proper spirit" of the exercise.

(Emulation/Virtualization is an extraordinary useful tool for software development and QA. Need to see how what you're working on works on a machine with 1/4 the RAM and a different version of the target OS then your development box? Beats wasting power and space on a zoo full of actual hardware.)