Classilla is a Gecko-based

Internet suite An Internet suite is an Internet-related software suite. Internet suites usually include a web browser, e-mail client (often with a news client and address book), download manager, HTML editor, and an IRC client. The diversity of Internet suite o ...

for PowerPC-based classic Macintosh operating systems, essentially an updated descendant of the defunct

Mozilla Application Suite The Mozilla Application Suite (originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite) is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition ...

by way of the Mac OS port maintained in the aborte
WaMCom
project. The name is a portmanteau of ''Classic'' (the classic Mac OS, as defined by the

Classic Environment This is a list of macOS built-in apps and system components. Applications App Store The Mac App Store is macOS's digital distribution platform for macOS apps, created and maintained by Apple Inc. based on the iOS version, the platform was an ...

), and ''

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

''. Like the Suite it is descended from, Classilla offers

E-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

( POP/

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients ty ...

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

(

NNTP The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (''netnews'') between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the Univers ...

Gopher Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They are ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

and

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

(

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

) access, using a modified version of the Gecko layout engine called ''Clecko''. Classilla also includes its own versions of the DOM Inspector, Mozilla Composer and Venkman components; the former

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...

ChatZilla ChatZilla is an IRC client that is part of SeaMonkey. It was previously an extension for Mozilla-based browsers such as Firefox, introduced in 2000. It is cross-platform open source software which has been noted for its consistent appearance acr ...

component was removed in version 9.1. Classilla was the last updated major browser for classic Mac OS systems, and the only Mozilla-based browser for that environment most recently in maintenance as well, as iCab 3's final update was 3.0.5 in January 2008,

Opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libr ...

's Mac OS 9 support ended with version 6.03 on 20 August 2003,

Internet Explorer for Mac Internet Explorer for Mac (also referred to as Internet Explorer for Macintosh, Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition, Internet Explorer:mac or IE:mac) was a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform to browse web pag ...

on the classic Mac OS ceased development with 5.1.7 in July 2003 and

itself ceased support in 2002 (see History). The final version of Classilla has been released and the suite is no longer supported. The developers considered the project to be alpha quality software. Classilla shared administration with TenFourFox, a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

of Mozilla Firefox for PowerPC-based Macs running

Mac OS X Tiger Mac OS X Tiger (version 10.4) is the 5th major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. Tiger was released to the public on April 29, 2005 for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Some ...

and

Mac OS X Leopard Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc., Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 as the successor of Mac OS X Tig ...

. The primary maintainer was Cameron Kaiser.

History

Official support for Mac OS 9 (and Mac OS 8.6) in the

ended with the release of Mozilla 1.2.1 in 2002, coincident with

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

ending support for their legacy operating system. However, many enthusiasts discovered that Mozilla 1.3.x would still generally build and run on the old Mac OS with modification apart from its dependencies on CarbonLib (Mozilla 1.4.x and newer will not build at all on Mac OS 8 or 9 without heavy modification), leading to builds such a
Unofficial Mozilla for Mac OS 9
an
WaMCom
Of these, WaMCom was the arguably longest maintained, with its final release on 23 July 2003. In May 2009, Cameron Kaiser announced his intentions to start porting later Mozilla updates back to the 1.3.1-based version used in WaMCom, christening his modified version as ''Classilla''. This first version, given the version number 9.0 to match Mac OS 9 (with subsequent numbers matching OS 9 version numbers), was released on 30 June 2009. Kaiser announced the final official release of Classilla and the end of support on March 29, 2021.

Features

Owing to Classilla's unusual provenance (being essentially a heavily

patched Patched (Ptc) is a conserved 12-pass transmembrane protein receptor that plays an obligate negative regulatory role in the Hedgehog signaling pathway in insects and vertebrates. Patched is an essential gene in embryogenesis for proper segme ...

version of Mozilla 1.3.1; vestigial proof remains in its verse from The Book of Mozilla), it has more limited support for

web standards Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of s ...

than do later Gecko-based browsers such as

SeaMonkey SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape ...

and Mozilla Firefox, and its layout compared to iCab 3.0.5 is objectively inferior as the latter browser is

Acid2 Acid2 is a webpage that test web browsers' functionality in displaying aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. The test page was released on 13 April 2005 by the Web Standards Project. The Acid2 test page will be ...

compliant and Classilla is not. Similarly, it only scores 31/100 in Acid 3. On the other hand, its layout capability is more current than WaMCom or Mozilla 1.3.1, and Classilla has a more modern

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

interpreter than iCab and better support for the

Document Object Model The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an XML or HTML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document wi ...

although it is also still deficient compared to mainline Gecko-based browsers. It is perceived by users to be more stable and quicker to render than iCab, important as the classic Mac OS relies on

cooperative multitasking Cooperative multitasking, also known as non-preemptive multitasking, is a style of computer multitasking in which the operating system never initiates a context switch from a running process to another process. Instead, in order to run multiple ...

and has very limited support for

memory protection Memory protection is a way to control memory access rights on a computer, and is a part of most modern instruction set architectures and operating systems. The main purpose of memory protection is to prevent a process from accessing memory that h ...

—any application crash could hang the entire system. However, known problems in the browser and issues with performance on older machines led the developers to implement their own limited version of

NoScript NoScript (or NoScript Security Suite) is a free software extension for Mozilla Firefox, SeaMonkey, other Mozilla-based web browsers and Google Chrome, written and maintained by Giorgio Maone, an Italian software developer and member of the Mozi ...

as a built-in part of the browser so that users had the ability to enable JavaScript only where it was safe or necessary to do so. Classilla also adds support for

user agent spoofing In computing, a user agent is any software, acting on behalf of a user, which "retrieves, renders and facilitates end-user interaction with Web content". A user agent is therefore a special kind of software agent. Some prominent examples of use ...

, which was not part of the original Mozilla suite, and repairs various Mac OS-specific bugs. In addition, Classilla 9.3.0 introduced the Byblos HTML rewriting engine that can rewrite individual pages at the source code level with browser- and user-provided "stele" scripts, with the intent of lightweight adaptation of complicated content to the capabilities or quirks of the browser. Starting with 9.3.0, Classilla presents a mobile user agent by default. Apart from its upgraded support for Web pages, Classilla supports most of the same features that Mozilla of the same generation did, with similar feature sets and bugs in its support for E-mail, Usenet, FTP and Gopher, although the latter received token upgrades. In a likewise fashion, Classilla also inherits many of the security failings of earlier versions of the Application Suite, many of which are still not patched and openly warned of by the developers. The presence of NoScript, along with the unusual nature of the classic Mac OS, is thought to add some level of protection, although it was the avowed goal of the developers to reach security parity with modern Mozilla-based releases and repair outstanding bugs.

References

External links

*
Classilla Google Code
- wiki, source code and downloads {{gopher clients Macintosh web browsers Free web browsers Gecko-based software Gopher clients Free Internet suites Mozilla Application Suite

History

Features

See also

References

External links