Ars Technica's notes from the OS 9 underground

Richard Moss has published his excellent and very comprehensive state of the Mac OS 9 userbase in Ars Technica. I think it's a detailed and very evenhanded summary of why there are more people than you'd think using a (now long obsolete) operating system that's still maintains more utility than you'd believe.

Naturally much of my E-mail interview with him could not be used in the article (I expected that) and I think he's done a fabulous job balancing those various parts of the OS 9 retrocomputing community. Still, there are some things I'd like to see entered into posterity publicly from that interview and with his permission I'm posting that exchange here.

Before doing so, though, just a note to Classilla users. I do have some work done on a 9.3.4 which fixes some JavaScript bugs, has additional stelae for some other site-specific workarounds and (controversially, because this will impact performance) automatically fixes screen update problems with many sites using CSS overflow. (They still don't layout properly, but they will at least scroll mostly correctly.) I will try to push that out as a means of keeping the fossil fed. TenFourFox remains my highest priority because it's the browser I personally dogfood 90% of the time, but I haven't forgotten my roots.

The interview follows. Please pardon the hand-conversion to HTML; I wrote this in plain text originally, as you would expect no less from me. This was originally written in January 2016, and, for the record, on a 1GHz iMac G4.

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Q. What's your motivation for working on Classilla (and TenFourFox, but I'm mostly interested in Classilla for this piece)?

A. One of the worst things that dooms otherwise functional hardware to apparent obsolescence is when "they can't get on the Internet." That's complete baloney, of course, since they're just as capable of opening a TCP socket and sending and receiving data now as they were then (things like IPv6 on OS 9 notwithstanding, of course). Resources like Gopherspace (a topic for another day) and older websites still work fine on old Macs, even ones based on the Motorola 680x0 series.

So, realistically, the problem isn't "the Internet" per se; some people just want to use modern websites on old hardware. I really intensely dislike the idea that the ability to run Facebook is the sole determining factor of whether a computer is obsolete to some people, but that's the world we live in now. That said, it's almost uniformly a software issue. I don't see there being any real issues as far as hardware capability, because lots of people dig out their old P3 and P4 systems and run browsers on them for light tasks, and older G4 and G3 systems (and even arguably some 603 and 604s) are more than comparable.

Since there are lots of x86 systems, there are lots of people who want to do this, and some clueful people who can still get it to work (especially since operating system and toolchain support is still easy to come by). This doesn't really exist for architectures out of the mainstream like PowerPC, let alone for a now almost byzantine operating system like Mac OS 9, but I have enough technical knowledge and I'm certifiably insane and by dumb luck I got it to work. I like these computers and I like the classic Mac OS, and I want them to keep working and be "useful." Ergo, Classilla.

TenFourFox is a little more complicated, but the same reason generally applies. It's a bit more pointed there because my Quad G5 really is still my daily driver, so I have a lot invested in keeping it functional. I'll discuss this more in detail at the end.

Q. How many people use Classilla?

A. Hard to say exactly since unlike TenFourFox there is no automatic checkin mechanism. Going from manual checkins and a couple back-of-the-napkin computations from download counts, I estimate probably a few thousand. There's no way to know how many of those people use it exclusively, though, which I suspect is a much smaller minority.

Compare this with TenFourFox, which has much more reliable numbers; the figure, which actually has been slowly growing since there are no other good choices for 10.4 and less and less for 10.5, has been a steady 25,000+ users with about 8,000 checkins occurring on a daily basis. That 30% or so are almost certainly daily drivers.

Q. Has it been much of a challenge to build a modern web browser for OS 9? The problems stem from more than just a lack of memory and processing speed, right? What are there deeper issues that you've had to contend with?

A. Classilla hails as a direct descendant of the old Mozilla Suite (along with SeaMonkey/Iceweasel, it's the only direct descendant still updated in any meaningful sense), so the limitations mostly come from its provenance. I don't think anyone who worked on the Mac OS 9 compatible Mozilla will dispute the build system is an impressive example of barely controlled disaster. It's actually an MacPerl script that sends AppleEvents to CodeWarrior and MPW Toolserver to get things done (primarily the former, but one particularly problematic section of the build requires the latter), and as an example of its fragility, if I switch the KVM while it's trying to build stubs, it hangs up and I usually have to restart the build. There's a lot of hacking to make it behave and I rarely run the builder completely from the beginning unless I'm testing something. The build system is so intimidating few people have been able to replicate it on their computers, which has deterred all but the most motivated (or masochistic) contributors. That was a problem for Mozilla too back in the day, I might add, and they were only too glad to dump OS 9 and move to OS X with Mozilla 1.3.

Second, there's no Makefiles, only CodeWarrior project files (previously it actually generated them on the fly from XML templates, but I put a stop to that since it was just as iffy and no longer necessary). Porting code en masse usually requires much more manual work for that reason, like adding new files to targets by hand and so on, such as when I try to import newer versions of libpng or pieces of code from NSS. This is a big reason why I've never even tried to take entire chunks of code like layout/ and content/ even from later versions of the Suite; trying to get all the source files set up for compilation in CodeWarrior would be a huge mess, and wouldn't buy me much more than what it supports now. With the piecemeal hacks in core, it's already nearly to Mozilla 1.7-level as it is (Suite ended with 1.7.13).

Third is operating system support. Mozilla helpfully swallows up much of the ugly guts in the Netscape Portable Runtime, and NSPR is extremely portable, a testament to its good design. But that doesn't mean there weren't bugs and Mac OS 9 is really bad at anything that requires multithreading or multiprocessing, so some of these bugs (like a notorious race condition in socket handling where the socket state can change while the CPU is busy with something else and miss it) are really hard to fix properly. Especially for Open Transport networking, where complex things are sometimes easy but simple things are always hard, some folks (including Mozilla) adopted abstraction layers like GUSI and then put NSPR on top of the abstraction layer, meaning bugs could be at any level or even through subtleties of their interplay.

Last of all is the toolchain. CodeWarrior is pretty damn good as a C++ compiler and my hat is off to Metrowerks for the job they did. It had a very forward-thinking feature set for the time, including just about all of C++03 and even some things that later made it into C++11. It's definitely better than MPW C++ was and light-years ahead of the execrable classic Mac gcc port, although admittedly rms' heart was never in it. Plus, it has an outstanding IDE even by modern standards and the exceptional integrated debugger has saved my pasty white butt more times than I care to admit. (Debugging in Macsbug is much like walking in a minefield on a foggy morning with bare feet: you can't see much, it's too easy to lose your footing and you'll blow up everything to smithereens if you do.) So that's all good news and has made a lot of code much more forward-portable than I could ever have hoped for, but nothing's ever going to be upgraded and no bugs will ever be fixed. We can't even fix them ourselves, since it's closed source. And because it isn't C++11 compliant, we can forget about pulling in substantially more recent versions of the JavaScript interpreter or realistically anything else much past Gecko 2.

Some of the efficiencies possible with later code aren't needed by Classilla to render the page, but they certainly do make it slower. OS 9 is very quick on later hardware and I do my development work on an Power Mac G4 MDD with a Sonnet dual 1.8GHz 7447A upgrade card, so it screams. But that's still not enough to get layout to complete on some sites in a timely fashion even if Classilla eventually is able to do it, and we've got no JIT at all in Classilla.

Mind you, I find these challenges stimulating. I like the feeling of getting something to do tasks it wasn't originally designed to do, sort of like a utilitarian form of the demoscene. Constraints like these require a lot of work and may make certain things impossible, so it requires a certain amount of willingness to be innovative and sometimes do things that might be otherwise unacceptable in the name of keeping the port alive. Making the browser into a series of patches upon patches is surely asking for trouble, but there's something liberating about that level of desperation, anything from amazingly bad hacks to simply accepting a certain level of wrong behaviour in one module because it fixes something else in another to ruthlessly saying some things just won't be supported, so there.

Q. Do you get much feedback from people about the browser? What sorts of things do they say? Do you hear from the hold-outs who try to do all of their computing on OS 9 machines?

A. I do get some. Forcing Classilla to preferring mobile sites actually dramatically improved its functionality, at least for some period of time until sites starting assuming everyone was on some sufficiently recent version of iOS or Android. That wasn't a unanimously popular decision, but it worked pretty well, at least for the time. I even ate my own dogfood and took nothing but an OS 9 laptop with me on the road periodically (one time I took it to Leo Laporte's show back in the old studio, much to his amazement). It was enough for E-mail, some basic Google Maps and a bit of social media.

Nowadays I think people are reasonable about their expectations. The site doesn't have to look right or support more than basic functionality, but they'd like it to do at least that. I get occasional reports from one user who for reasons of his particular disability cannot use OS X, and so Classilla is pretty much his only means of accessing the Web. Other people don't use it habitually, but have some Mac somewhere that does some specific purpose that only works in OS 9, and they'd like a browser there for accessing files or internal sites while they work. Overall, I'd say the response is generally positive that there's something that gives them some improvement, and that's heartening. Open source ingrates are the worst.

The chief problem is that there's only one of me, and I'm scrambling to get TenFourFox 45 working thanks to the never-ending Mozilla rapid release treadmill, so Classilla only gets bits and pieces of my time these days. That depresses me, since I enjoy the challenge of working on it.

Q. What's your personal take on the OS 9 web browsing experience?

A. It's ... doable, if you're willing to be tolerant of the appearance of pages and use a combination of solutions. There are some other browsers that can service this purpose in a limited sense. For example, the previous version of iCab on classic Mac is Acid2 compliant, so a lot of sites look better, but its InScript JavaScript interpreter is glacial and its DOM support is overall worse than Classilla's. Internet Explorer 5.1 (and the 5.5 beta, if you can find it) is very fast on those sites it works on, assuming you can find any. At least when it crashes, it does that fast too! Sometimes you can even get Netscape 4.8 to be happy with them or at least the visual issues look better when you don't even try to render CSS. Most times they won't look right, but you can see what's going on, like using Lynx.

Unfortunately, none of those browsers have up-to-date certificate stores or ciphers and some sites can only be accessed in Classilla for that reason, so any layout or speed advantages they have are negated. Classilla has some other tricks to help on those sites it cannot natively render well itself. You can try turning off the CSS entirely; you could try juggling the user agent. If you have some knowledge of JavaScript, you can tell Classilla's Byblos rewrite module to drop or rewrite problematic portions of the page with little snippets called stelae, basically a super-low-level Greasemonkey that works at the HTML and CSS level (a number of default ones are now shipped as standard portions of the browser).

Things that don't work at all generally require DOM features Classilla does not (yet) expose, or aspects of JavaScript it doesn't understand (I backported Firefox 3's JavaScript to it, but that just gives you the syntax, not necessarily everything else). This aspect is much harder to deal with, though some inventive users have done it with limited success on certain sites.

You can cheat, of course. I have Virtual PC 6 on my OS 9 systems, and it is possible (with some fiddling in lilo) to get it to boot some LiveCDs successfully -- older versions of Knoppix, for example, can usually be coaxed to start up and run Firefox and that actually works. Windows XP, for what that's worth, works fine too (I would be surprised if Vista or anything subsequent does, however). The downside to this is the overhead is a killer on laptops and consumes lots of CPU time, and Linux has zero host integration, but if you're able to stand it, you can get away with it. I reserved this for only problematic sites that I had to access, however, because it would bring my 867MHz TiBook to its knees. The MDD puts up with this a lot better but it's still not snappy.

If all this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But at least that makes it possible to get the majority of Web sites functional to some level in OS 9 (and in Classilla), at least one way or another, depending on how you define "functional." To that end I've started focusing now on getting specific sites to work to some personally acceptable level rather than abstract wide-ranging changes in the codebase. If I can't make the core render it correctly, I'll make some exceptions for it with a stele and ship that with the browser. And this helps, but it's necessarily centric to what I myself do with my Mac OS 9 machines, so it might not help you.

Overall, you should expect to do a lot of work yourself to make OS 9 acceptable with the modern Web and you should accept the results are at best imperfect. I think that's what ultimately drove Andrew Cunningham up the wall.

I'm going to answer these questions together:

Q1. How viable do you think OS 9 is as a primary operating system for someone today? How viable is it for you?
[...]
Q2. What do you like about using older versions of Mac OS (in this case, I'm talking in broad terms - so feel free to discuss OS X Tiger and PPC hardware as well)? Why not just follow the relentless march of technology? (It's worth mentioning here that I actually much prefer the look and feel of classic MacOS and pre-10.6 OS X, but for a lot of my own everyday computing I need to use newer, faster machines and operating systems.)

A. I'm used to a command line and doing everything in text. My Mac OS 9 laptop has Classilla and MacSSH on it. I connect to my home server for E-mail and most other tasks like Texapp for command-line posting to App.net, and if I need a graphical browser, I've got one. That covers about 2/3rds of my typical use case for a computer. In that sense, Mac OS 9 is, at least, no worse than anything else for me. I could use some sort of Linux, but then I wouldn't be able to easily run much of my old software (see below). If I had to spend my time in OS 9 even now, with a copy of Word and Photoshop and a few other things, I think I could get nearly all of my work done, personally. There is emulation for the rest. :)

I will say I think OS 9 is a pleasure to use relative to OS X. Part of this is its rather appalling internals, which in this case is necessity made virtue; I've heard it said OS 9 is just a loose jumble of libraries stacked under a file browser and that's really not too far off. The kernel, if you can call it that, is nearly non-existent -- there's a nanokernel, but it's better considered as a primitive hypervisor. There is at best token support for memory protection and some multiprocessing, but none of it is easy and most of it comes with severe compromises. But because there isn't much to its guts, there's very little between you and the hardware. I admit to having an i7 MBA running El Crapitan, and OS 9 still feels faster. Things happen nearly instantaneously, something I've never said about any version of OS X, and certain classes of users still swear by its exceptionally low latency for applications such as audio production. Furthermore, while a few annoyances of the OS X Finder have gradually improved, it's still not a patch on the spatial nature of the original one, and I actually do like Platinum (de gustibus non disputandum, of course). The whole user experience feels cleaner to me even if the guts are a dog's breakfast.

It's for that reason that, at least on my Power Macs, I've said Tiger forever. Classic is the best reason to own a Power Mac. It's very compatible and highly integrated, to the point where I can have Framemaker open and TenFourFox open and cut and paste between them. There's no Rhapsody full-screen blue box or SheepShaver window that separates me from making Classic apps first-class citizens, and I've never had a Classic app take down Tiger. Games don't run so well, but that's another reason to keep the MDD around, though I play most of my OS 9 games on a Power Mac 7300 on the other desk. I've used Macs partially since the late 1980s and exclusively since the mid-late 1990s (the first I owned personally was a used IIsi), and I have a substantial investment in classic Mac software, so I want to be able to have my cake and eat it too. Some of my preference for 10.4 is also aesthetic: Tiger still has the older Mac gamma, which my eyes are accustomed to after years of Mac usage, and it isn't the dreary matte grey that 10.5 and up became infested with. These and other reasons are why I've never even considered running something like Linux/PPC on my old Macs.

Eventually it's going to be the architecture that dooms this G5. This Quad is still sufficient for most tasks, but the design is over ten years old, and it shows. Argue the PowerPC vs x86 argument all you like, but even us PPC holdouts will concede the desktop battle was lost years ago. We've still got a working gcc and we've done lots of hacking on the linker, but Mozilla now wants to start building Rust into Gecko (and Servo is, of course, all Rust), and there's no toolchain for that on OS X/ppc, so TenFourFox's life is limited. For that matter, so is general Power Mac software development: other than freaks like me who still put -arch ppc -arch i386 in our Makefiles, Universal now means i386/x86_64, and that's not going to last much longer either. The little-endian web (thanks to asm.js) even threatens that last bastion of platform agnosticism. These days the Power Mac community lives on Pluto, looking at a very tiny dot of light millions of miles away where the rest of the planets are.

So, after TenFourFox 45, TenFourFox will become another Classilla: a fork off Gecko for a long-abandoned platform, with later things backported to it to improve its functionality. Unlike Classilla it won't have the burden of six years of being unmaintained and the toolchain and build system will be in substantially better shape, but I'll still be able to take the lessons I've learned maintaining Classilla and apply it to TenFourFox, and that means Classilla will still live on in spirit even when we get to that day when the modern web bypasses it completely.

I miss the heterogeneity of computing when there were lots of CPUs and lots of architectures and ultimately lots of choices. I think that was a real source of innovation back then and much of what we take for granted in modern systems would not have been possible were it not for that competition. Working in OS 9 reminds me that we'll never get that diversity back, and I think that's to our detriment, but as long as I can keep that light on it'll never be completely obsolete.

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