Apple takes a lot of stick from users of older Mac hardware for
dropping support for their machines from later versions of the Mac OS -
and for older Mac OS versions from the latest software.
As a user of two old 2000 Pismo PowerBooks, for
which Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger
was the end of the road, I'm very much aware of rapidly eroding
standards compatibility for this hardware/OS/software combo. It's not
welcome, but my rational side acknowledges that it's unreasonable to
complain about Apple (and most software developers) no longer being
willing or able to allocate engineering resources to support
11-year-old hardware and a nearly 6-year-old operating system. At least
if we want to enjoy the full advantage of development progress at the
other end.
However, I want to salute Apple for just releasing one more update
of its Safari browser for OS X 10.4 users. Version 10.4 is not
supported by the current Safari (version 5), but along with the latest
Safari 5 security update release, Apple also issued a Safari 4.1.3 update for us
holdout Tiger users, and it seems to be a very decent browser -
possibly the best left among the diminishing handful of up-to-date
browsers that still support OS X 10.4.
My usual favorite browser, Opera, discontinued Tiger support after
version 10.6.3, and the last several builds of Opera that nominally did
support 10.4 had some annoying bugs - most notably an issue
(acknowledged by Opera) with text entry on Web pages causing long
stalls. I've continued to use Opera because of its speed and general
stability, but after trying out this new version of Safari - which
seems to be just as fast as Opera if not even faster - I thought I
might switch to it as my default browser on the old Pismos.
That plan lasted about an hour, until I noticed that there was a lot
of hard drive activity going on in the background even when I wasn't
doing anything. I tried closing tabs. Still no joy.
However, quitting Safari 4.1.3 ended the background busy-work
Starting up Safari caused it to resume. Bummer, that doesn't happen
with Opera, OmniWeb, or SeaMonkey, all of which I use
regularly on the Pismo.
So Safari 4.1.3 is close, but no cigar. Aside from that issue and
the need to use an installer and restart the machine after installation
instead of just dragging the application into the Applications Folder
Safari 4.1.3 for Tiger is a nice browser.
Speaking of installers, I also had to download and install the
OS X Security Update
2009-005, which I hadn't gotten around to doing yet. That took
longer than installing Safari itself, but I suppose it's to the
good.
Anyway, I'm back to Opera 10.63 as my anchor browser, and I'm also
using OmniWeb 5.10.3 a lot these days on the Pismos. It and SeaMonkey
are probably the best-working OS X 10.4 compatible browsers left,
the latter taking the nod over its Camino and Firefox stable-mates by virtue of its
simpler, speedier user interface.
However, if it's raw speed you want, Safari and Opera are the
fastest, at least on my 550 MHz G4 upgraded rig.
I'm not sure whether the hard drive activity thing with Safari 4.1.3
is unique to my setup or a general issue. OmniWeb is also based on
Apple's open source WebKit browser engine,* and
it doesn't have the busy hard drive problem, for whatever that's worth.
