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.
