Who even knows how often they're changing Gmail and Twitter and Facebook? The idea of supporting and using a single OS for 13 years seems completely absurd. We live in an era of constant updates, where your browser changes every six weeks, and your operating system changes every 12 months. Those complaints aren’t always unwarranted. Advertisementįurther Reading Preview: A closer look at OS X Yosemite, just in time for the public betaPeople love to complain about change. In principle, I admire the people committed to making this hardware last as long as it possibly can, but in practice I couldn’t return to my MacBook Air quickly enough. Exceeding the computer's once-impressive-but-now-paltry 1GB of RAM, something you'll do without even thinking if you fire up TenFourFox, prompts virtual memory swapping that grinds things to a halt. Having dozens of browser tabs open at once, playing some music or maybe a video in the background, syncing Dropbox files, even watching animated GIFs consumes precious CPU cycles that an 800MHz G4 doesn't have to spare. Stuff you take for granted on a modern, multi-core computer with an SSD and lots of RAM is totally different on a system this old. It’s just not a very pleasant experience compared to a modern Mac. It’s usable, and I could actually do pretty much everything I needed to do to get my job done on it.
Mac OS 9 is pretty spartan by modern standards, but it's quick to respond to user input, at least as long as it's not hung up on something. One thing I’ll say about both OS X 10.4 and 10.5 on this hardware is that it’s laggy no matter what you’re doing. In any case, TenFourFox does a respectable job of rendering pages properly, and I’m sure it runs much better on newer 1GHz-and-up aluminum PowerBooks and iMacs than it does on this old titanium G4. I replaced it with the official Firefox icon to make myself feel better.
It can’t use plugins, though the plugins still available for PowerPC Mac OS X are long out of date anyway. The official development blog, while very informative, makes it sound like Firefox is always a feature or two away from being completely un-port-able. The browser is RAM-hungry to a fault (it used around 206MB to load the Ars homepage, compared to 96MB for Safari). Scrolling on the 800MHz PowerBook was constantly choppy and unresponsive, where Safari is at least capable of something approximating smoothness. As great as it is that there are still brave souls keeping the lights on for PowerPC users, TenFourFox is not my favorite browser.