Classilla Reaches 9.3.0, Changes Focus

Today, the only modern browser for the classic Mac OS, Classilla, reached version 9.3.0.

What is Classilla?

If you still have Classic Macintosh arcana lying around your house then you probably know already.  Classilla is a merge point between modern code from the Mozilla foundation and the last fully-functional version of Mozilla for the classic Mac OS.  Classilla fills a very real need for users of Mac OS 8.6 through 9.2.2 by giving them the opportunity to access the modern web (mostly-sorta) as well as providing access to modern services as well.

Some things don’t work and will never work.  Adobe abandoned Flash on the platform at version 7 which was around the same time that they started to amp up support for Linux.  HTML 5 will never happen for a number of technical reasons, and the browser market for the platform effectively died in 2003.

All you need to play is 64MB of RAM and at least Mac OS 8.6, though I would highly recommend 256MB of more if you plan on visiting more than one site at a time.

Change Of Focus

The big news here is the change is the default user agent.  Mac OS and Classilla can’t make the full web work forever and as the Internet pushes forward, sacrifices need to be made.  The default user agent is now the Nokia N90, will will call the mobile versions of most major sites and services  that offer them.  Now, I’m sure of one thing.  My phone is probably faster and more powerful that a high-end Power Mac G4, and it’s only a matter of time until the lowest-end phones reach that capability.  That said, it’s only a matter of time until mobile sites outgrow Classilla.  At what point does modern Mozilla code become impossible to integrate back into a Mozilla 5.x based browser?  Only time will tell.  In the mean time, enjoy that classic Mac!  Use it to write a book, make artwork or produce a little music.  It may not be as ‘powerful’ as your Android handset, but it is still infinitely more capable.

Here is the announcement from developer Cameron Kaiser on the LEM mailing list:

Classilla 9.3.0 is released after a long gestation and period of refocusing.

As is widely known and reported, 9.3.0 alters the user agent to preferentially
get and use mobile content, and I will be directing optimizations and fixes
to optimize the browser for such mobile sites since that is a better fit for
our older code and older computers. After a period of experimentation, we're
using a user agent based on the Nokia N90, which is similar to Classilla's
rendering engine. You can still change this from the User-Agent pref panel.

It was originally my intention to also fix the network stack in this release
but I was not able to get it working in any meaningful state (I'm going to
try again later).

However, the other big new change in 9.3.0 is the Byblos rewrite engine.
The Byblos syllabary is one of the great mysteries of ancient scripts, but
the hope is that a stele like the Rosetta Stone might come to light to
decipher it. In a like manner, Byblos lets you write "stelae" in JavaScript
to translate sites from the HTML up -- adding, changing or even removing
sections of content to get the browser to render. This is all dynamic and
happens on the fly, and all you need is knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and
a text editor. Complete docs are on Google Code:

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

Stelae for developer.mozilla.org and yfrog.com are included with the base
release, and I am soliciting for stelae from the user community to include
in future versions.

Finally, there are multiple security and stability improvements ahead of the
full security audit which will finally bring Classilla to security parity
in Classilla 9.3.1.

In 9.3.1 and 9.3.2, more features will be progressively exposed to user
control. In 9.3.0, there is an internal hard whitelist that uses desktop
user agents for certain sites. In 9.3.1, once this is better understood,
advanced users will be able to place about:config entries in, and in 9.3.2,
there will be an entire UI for this when locale strings are unfrozen along
with other UI changes.

Thanks for tolerating the long period between updates.

       http://www.classilla.org/