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| Developer(s) | Cameron Kaiser |
|---|---|
| Initial release | June 30, 2009; 15 years ago (2009-06-30) |
| Final release | 9.3.4b1 / March 29, 2021 (2021-03-29)[1] |
| Operating system | Classic Mac OS (Mac OS 8.6 andMac OS 9) Mac OS X (10.1.5 Puma –10.4.11 Tiger) |
| Platform | PowerPC |
| Type | Web browser |
| License | Mozilla Public License,GNU General Public License, others (seeabout: within the browser) |
| Website | classilla |
Classilla was aGecko-basedInternet suite forPowerPC-basedclassic Macintosh operating systems, essentially an updated descendant of the defunctMozilla Application Suite by way of the Mac OS port maintained in the abortedWaMCom project.[2] The name is a portmanteau ofClassic (the classic Mac OS, as defined by theClassic Environment), andMozilla.[2]
Like the Suite it is descended from, Classilla offersE-mail (POP/SMTP),Usenet (NNTP),Gopher,FTP andWorld Wide Web (HTTP) access, using a modified version of theGeckolayout engine calledClecko. Classilla also includes its own versions of theDOM Inspector,Mozilla Composer andVenkman components; the formerIRCChatZilla 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, asiCab 3's final update was 3.0.5 in January 2008,[3]Opera's Mac OS 9 support ended with version 6.03 on 20 August 2003,[4][5]Internet Explorer for Mac on the classic Mac OS ceased development with 5.1.7 in July 2003[6] andMozilla itself ceased support in 2002 (see History).
The final version of Classilla was released in March 2021 and the suite is no longer officially supported.[1] The developers considered the project to bealpha quality software.[7] Classilla shared administration withTenFourFox, afork ofMozilla Firefox for PowerPC-based Macs runningMac OS X Tiger andMac OS X Leopard. The primary maintainer was Cameron Kaiser.
Official support forMac OS 9 (andMac OS 8.6) in theMozilla Application Suite ended with the release of Mozilla 1.2.1 in 2002,[8] coincident withApple 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 onCarbonLib (Mozilla 1.4.x and newer will not build at all on Mac OS 8 or 9 without heavy modification), leading to builds such asUnofficial Mozilla for Mac OS 9,WaZilla 1.3f, andWaMCom. Of these, WaMCom was the arguably longest maintained, with its final release on 23 July 2003.[9]
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,[10] christening his modified version asClassilla. This first version, given the version number 9.0 to match Mac OS 9 (with subsequent numbers matching OS 9 version numbers),[11] was released on 30 June 2009.[12]
On March 29, 2021, Kaiser released the final versions of both Classilla and TenFourFox and announced the cancellation of official support for both projects, citing increasing technical issues.[13][1]
Owing to Classilla's unusual provenance (being essentially a heavilypatched version of Mozilla 1.3.1; vestigial proof remains in its verse fromThe Book of Mozilla), it has more limited support forweb standards than do later Gecko-based browsers such asSeaMonkey andMozilla Firefox, and its layout compared toiCab 3.0.5 is objectively inferior[14] as the latter browser isAcid2 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 modernJavaScript interpreter than iCab and better support for theDocument Object Model 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,[15][16][17][18] important as the classic Mac OS relies oncooperative multitasking and has very limited support formemory protection—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 ofNoScript 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 foruser agent spoofing, 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 mobileuser agent by default.[19]
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.[11] 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[11] and repair outstanding bugs.
