Classic Mac OS Builds of Mozilla Transitioning to Port StatusSunday December 15th, 2002MacSlash has an article about Mozilla dropping support for Mac OS 8 and 9. The Classic Mac OS build of Mozilla is being moved to port status (i.e. beginning with 1.3 Alpha, mozilla.org will not produce official builds of Mozilla for versions of Mac OS before X). If you're still using Mac OS 8 or 9 and have CarbonLib installed, you may be able to use MozillaCFM, the Carbonised build of Mozilla for Mac OS X. Information about this is available in the 1.3 Alpha Release Notes but note that we haven't tried this ourselves. Eventually, mozilla.org plans to only make FizzillaMach builds of Mozilla for Mac OS X. Microsoft has already stopped making new releases of Internet Explorer for versions of Mac OS before X. As it is with Windows 95 and Mozilla, the same should apply to MacOS 8 and 9. Although I'm not at all a Mac user, I still feel that Mozilla or some of its derivatives should be produced for older operating systems. Windows95 support and MacOS 8/9 support are not remotely comparable. For a start, Windows95 doesn't need its own special build system which is a real pain to maintain. All you need to do to support Windows95 is to avoid a few APIs. Having said that, I imagine it'll break at some point in the next year and no-one will bother to fix it - which would be a shame. My copy of Windows is 95; I haven't paid the MS tax since then. And it still runs Counterstrike :-) Of course, if you feel that Mozilla should still be produced for MacOS 8/9, mozilla.org would love you to step up to the plate and maintain it... Gerv Why drop Mac OS 8 and 9 support when only 1 in 5 Mac users yet use OS X ? Look at Apple's pr for the 2002 q4 results, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/oct/16earnings.html, issued Oct. 16th 2002. In it, they expected to have 5 million OS X users by the end of 2002. But there are about 23 to 25 million Macs in use---hence 4 out of 5 are not OS X users yet. Indeed, Apple admit that so far 1 in 5 buyers of Macs, sold with OS X as the default OS, actually switch back to OS 9 as their default OS. And Apple has just postponed the end of internal drive Mac OS 9 booting on all new Macs until June 2003, see http://www.thinksecret.com/news/macos9education.html and http://news.com.com/2100-1040-977881.html . As most people only adopt Mac OS X when it comes free with a new Mac, the rate of adoption is largely limited to the number of Macs sold each year of around 5 million new Macs. So it may well be that only just over half of all Mac users will be on OS X in 18 months from now. I'm not sure if Mozilla even works on Win95. I can well imagine that calls to more up to date APIs mean that you would have install IE (irony) 4 or 5 at the very least. The situation is nowhere near as bad as OS 9 though. The old Mac build system is pure evil and very hard to maintain with the unified Win32/Unix system. The Mach build is a joy in comparison ('cvs -co mozilla/client.mk; cd mozilla; make -f client.mk') and with the added bonus that it builds straight from the DevTools you get with OS X. Mac developers no longer need to fork out however many hundreds of dollars it is to buy CodeWarrior or lash together various classic & carbon tools with AppleScript, thus making the platform considerably more accessible than it ever was before. I have started a petition to keep Mozilla on Mac OS Classic. Mac OS Classic users need Mozilla too! Sign it at http://www.petitiononline.com/MozOS9/petition.htm It looks like Apple's new Safari web browser puts paid to all other OS X browsers....so dropping Mac Classic support for Mozilla was clearly a bad choice that now needs to be reversed. So if you follow their logic that OS 9 is a dead OS (which it is) and new versions shouldn't be created for it, then why in the world is OS/2 still supported? I'd be willing to bet a whole hell of a lot of money that the user base for OS 9 (the ones that can't switch to X) is much larger than OS/2. My company is unfortunately one of those user bases that *cannot* switch to OS X. Not until some vital, expensive commercial printing software is upgraded and our entire user base and support staff is trained for OS X. This is most likely over a year away. We're stuck between a rock and a hard place with no new browser versions. Because all of our new ERP software (such as Oracle Portal) is web-based, we are really getting our asses kicked. The problem with the IT industries for a long time now is that about 90% of the industry itself wants to disinclude the minority users or systems (such as Mac OS 9.1-9.22, which I do use). This would be the equivalent of a White bonehead person saying that there are no longer any such thing as Pacific Islanders just because they are a small enough minority that they don't really even matter anyway. I just want to say that Mozilla has also now sold out to these bad ideas that have plagued the industry for about 15 years. You know what really sucks, is that websites now discrimate, and make it impossible for you to even see them if you can't afford or don't want to use the newest of the new every 6 months and throw out all the old shizok every six months also. Just want to say that Mozilla has joined the ranks of bonehead naziism in IT Industries. The recycling plants and trash dumps are filled with computers that could otherwise be useful in this world. CONGRATULATIONS BONEHEADS! T.S. Hunter 12/9/2007 P.S. For Mac OS 9.x, Mozilla 1.31 (Wamcom) runs better and works better with the internet than iCab 3.x (surprise to developers) or MSIE 5.17 (which is mostly only good for hard-connects and where 1.31 fails). I really do wish that someone who cares would develop a fully functional build of Mozilla for Mac OS 9.x at least every 5 years. P.P.S. Steve Jobs needs to be ousted and go back to NeXt, replaced by Steve Wozniak. Bah Humbug!
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