![]() There's a gang there that keeps poking at the system and literally decompile, reverse engineer and recompile old system files for all sorts of purposes, with an ongoing, separate mailing list. There are also all those guys with DAW hardware for OS 9, and they also like hanging around there (they use those tools for their actual jobs). I don't know about Thinkclassic, but I'm willing to seriously bet MacOS9Lives isn't going anywhere anytime soon: the community is simply incredibly commited to Mac OS 9 (for all the right reasons), with the Mac mini G4 becoming OS-9-compatible since only last year. With that said, I do agree with you that at least the RAM cap issue should be dealt with probably before a browser was made from the ground-up. ![]() Afterall, it's all thanks to them we have Mac OS 9 natively running on multiple hardware, such as the Mac mini G4 and the 1.67GHz laptops (all of which OS 9 is insanely good on). Those are good, and some people there actually do poke at these tasks and sometimes come up with something. On MacOS9Lives, indeed there are discussions of both "9.2.3", for key technical improvements like more RAM detection, as well as "9.3" discussions for improvements that take more liberties and are not as essential. It uses scripts and hacks and only actually builds into an executable app under very finicky, hard-to-replicate conditions that Kaiser suggests scared away "all but the most motivated (or masochistic) contributors" to both Classilla and the original OS 9 branch of the Mozilla project. "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," he says. With Classilla, Kaiser is very, very slowly battling against these. Things like toolchain support and drivers and OS-level implementations of things like multithreading and multiprocessing are where the OS 9 environment is lacking. He notes that comparable Pentium 3 and 4 systems cope fine with light browsing of the modern Web, so the problem facing OS 9 as a platform for going online is instead its software. In terms of raw computing power, however, Kaiser says that G4 and G3 Macs have the necessary power to properly load most sites on the Web.
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