New and better browser for an old computer?

December 24, 2006 12:55 PM

What browser would you recommend for an iMac running system 9.2?

It's an old PowerPC G3 400Mhz. It's running Explorer 5 Macintosh edition at the moment and it's running into problems. Specifically, a dialog box that continually pops up that says, "unable to establish a secure connection, etc. Site certificate not yet valid." I'm thinking there's a compatibility problem, i.e. old browser, new internet.

posted by anticlock to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

iCab for MacOS is still under active development. There are some somewhat old unofficial Mozilla builds floating around out there, too.

Either one of those is likely to be more reliable and enjoyable than IE5.
posted by majick at 1:05 PM on December 24, 2006

iCab sorta works. But really, the answer is a new Mac.
posted by spitbull at 1:43 PM on December 24, 2006

thirding iCab - it's pretty much your only choice if you're sticking with OS 9. (this is an OS that's 7 years old at this point, after all.) if you want to sink some money into it, OS X 10.3 and 512MB RAM would also run on that machine (though a bit slowly).
posted by mrg at 1:58 PM on December 24, 2006

If you're willing to ditch OS9 on it, and don't need much other than internet, linux would solve performance issues. You'd need to be technical to some degree to get it up and running, but there are some very lightweight linux browsers and windowing environments that run wonderfully on low end PCs, not sure if there is anything similar for the mac though.
posted by cschneid at 2:00 PM on December 24, 2006

I've seen OS X run just fine on old iMacs, with the extra RAM. Obviously, you have to clean a lot of cruft out of the system as well; don't let too many programs run at once, etc.
posted by rossination at 2:14 PM on December 24, 2006

I have an old 400Mhz G3 powerbook (512MB of RAM, I think), and it runs OS X 10.4 happily. I don't notice any responsiveness disparities when switching between it, my 12" powerbook from 2 years ago, and the new Intel iMac on my desk. It suffers when trying to view YouTube movies or excessive Flash, but otherwise it's been a great workhorse for basic internet stuff. If you're not locked into OS 9, I recommend a software upgrade.
posted by migurski at 2:24 PM on December 24, 2006

Previously, I found iCab to be the best for my OS9 workstation.
posted by mzurer at 2:26 PM on December 24, 2006

I agree that an OS X upgrade would be the best option. I ran it on an old iMac with the same specs and it worked pretty well. You do have to throw as much RAM as possible at it, though. My mom's iMac is even slower -- 350 Mhz -- and she also is running OS X, and using Safari as a web browser.
posted by litlnemo at 3:09 PM on December 24, 2006

Don't forget Netscape 7. A bit dated, but servicable. iCab had some poor CSS support years ago when I tried it, but I've heard its active development has brought it forward nicely.

I also wanted to chime in with the voices saying OS X is a possibility -- I ran OS X on a G3 333 Mhz with 384 MB RAM comfortably for most day-to-day tasks 2 1/2 years ago. You do lose some snappiness going from 9 to X, but lots of RAM really helps.
posted by weston at 6:36 PM on December 24, 2006

I'd ditch OS 9. It's pretty much an abandonded platform. I'd keep it only if the machine you're running on is a Powerbook, for the power management/sleep stuff.

Go to OS X if doable, even if it's a laptop; otherwise XFCE is marvelous for older machines. Xubuntu is the distro I've used for it. This way, you can stay current with browsers and so forth. And get modern software like RSS readers.
posted by yesno at 8:38 PM on December 24, 2006

I don't see any reason why IE 5 would not work with all current secure sites, i.e. nothing about SSL / HTTPS has changed that much in the last 5 years. So you should most certainly be able to get rid of that box by just adjusting the settings, perhaps you need to disable certificate revocation list (CRL) checking, for example. Now, that doesn't mean IE5 doesn't still have massive CSS/HTML rendering issues, or that the machine may be slow; but if you just want to continue using what you have I see no reason why that particular dialog shouldn't be fixable.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:49 PM on December 24, 2006

XPostFacto allows you to install OS X on beige G3 machines: I've got a G3 that works fine with it - Your only sticking point might be memory.
posted by Orb2069 at 10:03 PM on December 24, 2006

If it's a 400 Mhz iMac, XPostFacto probably isn't necessary. I'm assuming it's probably one of the slot-loading iMacs and AFAIK those can all run OS X without any extra trickery. Just lots of RAM, or it will suck.
posted by litlnemo at 2:34 AM on December 25, 2006

Fiftieth those who say update your OS if you have sufficient memory -- I ran a 400 MHz G3 PowerBook with 768 megs of RAM on 10.4 until recent-ish, and it really did most stuff without a hitch.
posted by Wolof at 3:32 AM on December 25, 2006

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Opera yet.
posted by box at 9:26 AM on December 25, 2006

Neither Opera nor Internet Explorer works properly for GMail.
posted by mzurer at 12:39 PM on December 25, 2006

We have several Mac OS 9.2 iMacs at my library that will someday be replaced, so it's not in my interest to buy more RAM to upgrade them to OSX. In the meantime, I've been using a Mozilla build of 1.4.3, which I can make no guarantees for, but has worked on our computers. You can get it here.
posted by Lynsey at 8:50 PM on December 25, 2006