Getting an old (2002) 700 MHz iMac G4 with just 512 MB of memory up and running reminded me of what a nice – and still useful – operating system Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is, especially on that old Apple PowerPC hardware.
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I wouldn't normally run Tiger with just 512 MB of memory, but that's what came with the computer, and I'm not going to throw money at it. Likewise, it has a very pokey hard drive with just 40 GB capacity, but it's not like this is going to be a production computer. (If it were, I'd transplant one of my higher capacity 7200 RPM hard drives.)
I used Tiger daily until about three years ago, when Low End Mac moved from using Claris Home Page 3.0 in Classic Mode, which requires Tiger or earlier versions of OS X, to WordPress, which is a browser-based content management system (CMS). I used Home Page when I began Low End Mac in April 1997, and it was early 2013 that I finally found and moved to a better solution.
Classic Mode is at its best on a dual-processor Power Mac, because it can dedicate one CPU full time to Classic Mode while the other handles all the OS X details. But once I retired Home Page, I no longer needed to use Tiger on a regular basis – I moved to OS X 10.5 Leopard on my Power Macs and 10.6 Snow Leopard on my 2007 Mac mini.
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There was only one reason I ever switched from Tiger to Leopard – NetNewsWire had switched to using Google's RSS feed manager (since discontinued), and that version of the app required Leopard. If not for that, I would have stuck with Tiger. It was perfectly adequate for my needs, and it's still good enough for a lot of people to continue using it, especially on PowerPC Macs. (I've never used Tiger on an Intel Mac, but unless it has less than 1 GB of system memory, you're better off with Snow Leopard on Intel Macs.)
Browsers
Any Mac running OS X Tiger can run TenFourFox 38, a port of Firefox optimized in separate versions for G3 and G5 CPUs, along with two G4 versions depending on which chip variant you have. Sure, Firefox for supported platforms is at version 47 now, but TenFourFox 45.3 is in its second. (Rather than port every version to PowerPC, TenFourFox only works on the ESR, Extended Support Release, a sequence that includes 38 and 45 but nothing in between.)
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As we've said time and again, if you have a PowerPC Mac running Tiger, TenFourFox is the best browser going. You even get full screen mode, something most Mac apps didn't get until OS X 10.7 Lion or later. And Simon Royal has shared some tips on tweaking TenFourFox to be even more responsive.
Google's Chrome browser was never ported to PowerPC, Firefox officially dropped Tiger support before Firefox 4 was released, and Safari is hopelessly old and outdated at version 4.1.3 from 2010. I'd go with Camino as my alternate Tiger browser. It's a Mac-specific port of an earlier version of Mozilla, very lightweight, and pretty responsive, but without the flexibility and power of TenFourFox.
Probably the biggest problem with older browsers is that some websites, especially banking and the like, may not support your old Mac. Then again, there are parts of the company website for my current employer that I can't access on my MacBook running OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Some sites don't like Macs. Some sites don't like any browser not made by Microsoft.
Office Apps and Suites
As long as you're using OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or earlier, you can't go wrong with AppleWorks 6. AppleWorks used to come free with every iMac, and it's the best integrated office suite ever. Working with Microsoft Office and Apple's iWork apps has convinced me of that. With AppleWorks, a single app handles word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, vector art, and more. (The database is probably its weakest component.)
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As we've said time and again, if you have a PowerPC Mac running Tiger, TenFourFox is the best browser going. You even get full screen mode, something most Mac apps didn't get until OS X 10.7 Lion or later. And Simon Royal has shared some tips on tweaking TenFourFox to be even more responsive.
Google's Chrome browser was never ported to PowerPC, Firefox officially dropped Tiger support before Firefox 4 was released, and Safari is hopelessly old and outdated at version 4.1.3 from 2010. I'd go with Camino as my alternate Tiger browser. It's a Mac-specific port of an earlier version of Mozilla, very lightweight, and pretty responsive, but without the flexibility and power of TenFourFox.
Probably the biggest problem with older browsers is that some websites, especially banking and the like, may not support your old Mac. Then again, there are parts of the company website for my current employer that I can't access on my MacBook running OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Some sites don't like Macs. Some sites don't like any browser not made by Microsoft.
Office Apps and Suites
As long as you're using OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or earlier, you can't go wrong with AppleWorks 6. AppleWorks used to come free with every iMac, and it's the best integrated office suite ever. Working with Microsoft Office and Apple's iWork apps has convinced me of that. With AppleWorks, a single app handles word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, vector art, and more. (The database is probably its weakest component.)
Microsoft Office is powerful, but its also bloated and composed of several separate apps, unlike AppleWorks which is fully integrated. LibreOffice 4.0.2 (the last PowerPC version) is powerful but slow.
For word processing, TextEdit is free and decent, but the freeware Bean word processor is even nicer. Version 2.4.5 is the last to support OS X Tiger.
Unleash the Tiger
The best thing you can do for Tiger is run it on a dual-processor Power Mac G4 or G5 – or the truly awesomely powerful 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 Quad – with plenty of memory. Tiger can run with less than 512 MB, but that's a realistic minimum for decent performance. 1 GB is nice, 2 GB is great, and more than that, even better, although you need a G5-based Mac if you want to access more than 2 GB of memory.
Regardless of how many processors your Mac has or what speed it runs at, more memory will always help OS X run better. That's as true for the original version as it is for macOS Sierra.
The next best thing you can do, after installing all the memory you can, is to use a fast hard drive or SSD. I've been installing 7200 RPM drives in my Macs for about 15 years now, and it really makes a difference. An SSD would be even faster, but make sure you get one that works well with PowerPC Macs – and the Classic Mac OS, if you ever plan on booting directly into Mac OS 9. Note that Tiger does not support drives over 2 TB.
Or Just Playing with Tiger
If you're just going to use the old Mac for AppleWorks, browsing the Web lightly, and some vintage Mac games (I love Sim City 2000), an old G3 or G4 Mac with Tiger works well. It's less demanding of hardware resources than Leopard, and it would make for a very nice homework machine. After all, you probably can't out-type a 16 MHz Mac II, let alone a 300 MHz G3.
I would look to slot-loading iMacs, G4 iMacs, a Lombard or Pismo PowerBook, any G4 PowerBook, or any Power Mac from the Blue and White model forward as good Tiger candidates.
Conclusion
Sure, there are theoretical insecurities in Tiger and Leopard and Snow Leopard that are never going to be fixed, and there is only one close-to-up-to-date browser for Tiger, but even the latest operating systems – including macOS Sierra, Windows 10, Chrome OS, and every flavor of Linux – has some undiscovered security issues. It's the nature of a modern operating system. I wouldn't worry too much about it.
When I set up an old G4 or G5 Mac, I partition the hard drive with one-quarter to one-third of the space for OS X 10.4 Tiger, the other partition with OS X 10.5 Leopard, which has some slightly more modern browsers, some alternative browsers (Stainless and Roccat, for instance) not available on Tiger, and can be used to run a Time Machine backup drive for your network (2 GB maximum drive size!).
But overall, I could be happily working with Tiger today. It will squeeze the most out of that old PowerPC G3, G4, and G5 hardware, and it will let you blast into the past with Classic Mode (see Low End Mac's Compleat Guide to Mac OS 9). In fact, Classic Mode gives you a browser option not available to those running OS X Leopard and later: Classilla runs very nicely under Mac OS 9.x and is set up to access websites as though it were a mobile browser, which should really speed things up.
If you've got old Macs, give Tiger a try.
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The gradual marginalization of PowerPC Macs is bound to accelerate sharply with the release of Intel-only Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and one can anticipate that it may not be too long before PowerPC Mac owners begin to be confronted with the frustrating up-to-date browser issue that is one of the biggest problems for Classic Mac OS holdouts these days.
It's already happening to some degree. For example, Stainless, a very nice little WebKit-based indie browser somewhat inspired by the Google Chrome browser project – and which I've become quite partial to on my Unibody MacBook – only works on Intel Macs.
How long will Apple continue updating Safari 4 for PowerPC Macs? My guess would be that version 4 of Safari will probably be the last version supporting Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard may get one more revision. [Update: Safari 5.0.6 was the last for Leopard.]
If precedent is any guide, the best bet for browser sustainability on Apple's orphaned OS versions will be the Mozilla Gecko-based browsers. WaMCom and lately Classilla developments of Mozilla for Classic users are a case in point.
How I Work
My browser MO is generally to run one example each of the Safari/WebKit, Mozilla/Gecko, and Opera/Presto browsers simultaneously, which pretty much keeps the bases covered.
On my MacBook, it's the Opera 10 Turbo RC, of which the final version is slated for release tomorrow; Firefox 3.5.2, and Stainless – the latter both because I like Stainless, especially its cool tiny icon bookmark feature, and because I haven't yet got around to upgrading the OS to Safari 4's required Version 10.5.7 or later (I'm at 10.5.6) and may now just wait until I install Snow Leopard.
I've installed Leopard 10.5.8 on my 17″ PowerBook and am using Safari 4.0.3 on it, along with Firefox 3.5.2 and Opera 10 Turbo.
On the Pismo, running OS X 10.4.11, it's a bit of a different story. Ironically, I'm running Safari 4.0.3 on the older machine, and also Opera 10 Turbo, but Firefox has not been a happy camper on the Pismo -with its poky Rage 128 Mobility GPU and 8 MB of VRAM – for some time now, so for the past couple of years my preferred Gecko browser on that ‘Book has been Netscape Navigator 9, which is based on a now-obsolescent version of Firefox 2. It looks and works great, but alas development and support were discontinued over a year ago.
I like to run fairly up-to-date browsers, as you tend to run into compatibility issues with older ones (for example, some pages on Apple's website don't render well in Navigator 9 these days) and the old browser doesn't support session restore, which I find it a pain to live without.
SeaMonkey
One alternative that I've been checking out lately is SeaMonkey, the last of the Internet suite browsers, with built-in email and newsgroup clients, an IRC chat application, and a WYSIWYG HTML page composer – essentially an updated, refined, security-patched iteration of the old Mozilla Application Suite and Netscape Communicator. The currently available SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta is thoroughly modern under the hood, using the browser core and web feature support from Firefox 3.5.1, including all security fixes, audio/video, downloadable fonts, and JIT-compiled JavaScript.
It's also received some overdue and much welcome interface tweaks, with an updated, brighter, more contemporary, and IMHO more attractive look, although there are still some antiquated touches such as a tab close button on the far right of the tab bar rather than having one more conveniently placed on each tab.
Its download manager is completely reworked, including (hooray!) support for cross-session resumable downloads, plus there are new-tab and new-window command line options and fully customizable toolbars. With SeaMonkey 2, everything I need is there: tabbed browsing and a real progress bar and (hooray again) session restores are now supported.
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The non-browser elements of SeaMonkey don't really interest to me, so I've tended to overlook the program in recent years, but it does offer a thoroughly modern browser core with all the web feature support from Firefox 3.5.1 in a package that works reasonably well on the old Pismo under Tiger, although I do find that after a week or so of uptime it tends to slow down and start dipping into virtual memory to a more painful degree than does Navigator 9.
Camino
That sent me checking out the latest version of Camino (1.6.9), the Mac-only Cocoa interface browser that also uses Mozilla.org's Gecko engine. Camino is a browser that I've tried hard to like, but I kept getting dragged back to Navigator 9 on the Pismo because the latter just works so well, and to Firefox on the newer machines (especially the Shiretoko Intel-optimized build on the MacBook), because I'm addicted to a few Firefox plugins, such as WeatherBug and some of the alternate interface skins, including one that makes it look like Navigator 9.
However, Camino is a better performer than Firefox on the memory-challenged Pismo, but a major shortcoming is that it's cranky about answering clicks on its interface windows to bring it forward, especially when coming from Classic Mode applications. This issue does not afflict either Navigator 9 or SeaMonkey 2.
Last week I downloaded Camino 1.6.9, and while it's early days yet, I provisionally can report that these the issues seem to have been improved to a considerable degree in this release, so if that holds up through several days of uptime, Camino's happy qualities of being significantly quicker loading pages, and support for session restores may finally have won me over. It certainly is an attractive looking browser and is the only Gecko based browser that supports OS X Services. (You can download versions of Camino 1.6.9 optimized for G4 and G5.)
Other recent Camino refinements:
- Toolbar Search Improvements
Camino 1.6 now includes an editor that allows deleting, renaming, and reordering search engines. Camino also supports OpenSearch search engine plug-ins. New search engines can be added to the toolbar's search field by automatic discovery or by web pages that provide links to OpenSearch plug-ins. - Streamlined Find Interface
Camino 1.6 removes the Find panel and replaces it with a simple, unobtrusive Find toolbar that appears near the bottom of the browser window. With back and forward buttons at your fingertips and incremental find, the Find toolbar makes finding words on a page easier than ever. - Tabbed Browsing Improvements
Camino 1.6 includes a scrolling tab bar. When more tabs are open than can be displayed in the tab bar, arrows appear at the right and left edges to allow scrolling the bar. As part of this change, the tab overflow menu has been replaced by a menu displaying all open tabs in the current window. - Software Update
Updating to the latest version of Camino is even easier than ever with Camino's new auto-update feature. Integrating with the 'Sparkle' framework, Camino now automatically checks for new releases and optionally installs them. - AppleScript Support
Camino now includes enhanced AppleScript support. AppleScripts can now refer to individual tabs and windows, add, open, and delete bookmarks, and even have custom toolbar icons. - Keychain Support
In addition to saving logins and passwords in the Mac OS X Keychain, Camino 1.6 can now store information for multiple accounts in the Keychain. Camino also maintains computability with Safari Keychain entries, allowing easier switching between web browsers. - Feed Detection
Camino supports the detection of RSS/Atom feeds in web pages. When a feed is found, an icon appears in the location bar. Clicking that icon and selecting a feed will send the feed to your default Mac OS X feed reader. New in Camino 1.6 is the ability to pass feeds to certain web-based feed readers including Google Reader, Bloglines, and My Yahoo. - Spell-checking
Camino includes the built-in Mac OS X spell-checker on every text field. Unlike Firefox, this spell-checker is the same one used throughout Mac OS X. You don't have to worry about making spelling mistakes when writing for your blog, leaving comments, or posting on forums. New in Camino 1.6: For users of Mac OS X 10.5, you can change the active spelling language. - Session Saving
Camino includes support for 'session saving', or optionally remembering what pages you were visiting when you quit and automatically loading them the next time you start – perfect for all those times you have to install Mac OS X updates. This is a must-have feature for me.
Camino includes an elegant built-in popup blocker as well as built-in adblocking and gives you the option to show the popup, whitelist the site, or never get prompted again. Additionally, Camino includes the ability to keep Flash animation from loading until you're ready (Flashblock) as well as the ability to disable Java.
Camino 1.6.9, released August 26, is described by the developers as a security and stability update for Camino 1.6.x.
Camino 1.6.9 contains the following improvements over version 1.6.8:
- Upgraded to version 1.8.1.23 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, which includes several critical security and stability fixes.
- Upgraded the 'Block flash animations' code t
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System Requirements
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- Camino 1.6 is a universal binary and runs natively on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs.
Editor's note: Camino 2.0 has reached Beta 3, and I've found it to be remarkably stable after months of using the various betas. At Low End Mac headquarters, it's our default browser, with Firefox 3.6 alpha 2 (the G4-optimized Minefield build) as our main alternative. dk [Update: Camino reached version 2.1.2 before the project was discontinued. Because it is a universal binary, it still runs on OS X 10.9 Mavericks and the 10.10 Yosemite Beta.]
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