Got My Mojozilla Workin'

I've been having browser issues for a while. You see, believe it or not, I'm still running an original vintage 1998 teal fishbowl iMac (albeit with 256 megs of RAM added to the 32 megs [*shudder*] that were provided originally). It really can't run anything past Mac OS 9, so I've been unable to take advantage of most of the really cool stuff that's come out for Mac in the last three years or so.

It hadn't been a problem until recently, but the browser thing eventually became a royal pain. I've been running IE 5, which is as far as Microsoft went with that browser for Mac. (I did use Netscape in the past, but when 6 came out...uhh, no. Too slow, too fat, too buggy.) I've been having trouble accessing certain sites since last summer, so I needed alternatives. Firefox sounds great, but it's only available for OS X. I tried finding an older version of "regular" Mozilla at download.com and on Mozilla's own site, but no luck. Noted Mac switcher Jeremiah Cohick turned me onto a German browser called iCab, which actually worked well as a "substitute" browser, though it would never be able to be my default one for various reasons: the formatting is screwy on most blogs, it won't run Hotmail, some sites don't recognize it as a supported browser at all. (I do love the heading on the translated webpage, though: "iCab homepage. Worldwide your guide.")

But as time went by, I was having to use iCab more and more, as IE was suddenly working in fewer and fewer places (this included the main Blogger site, of all things). The last straw came today when I could no longer access my TollTag account through IE. It listed Mozilla among its supported browsers, and it actually sent me to a page where I could go back far enough to find a still-existent version for OS 9 which downloaded and installed and everything. (It took a few tries to get it going; since it's very much related to Netscape, it had all my old Netscape preferences pre-loaded, including a connection to a proxy server that I used to use before I had cable. Once I turned that off, everything worked just fine.)

And the verdict is? So far, a resounding yes. I love it! All the sites that gave me trouble on IE are working just fine, and the whole thing is just fast, fast, fast. It may take me a while to get all my bookmarks imported, since there's no clearly direct way to do that, but I'm all kinds of happy to be able to use one browser again for everything. It was a bit time-consuming to set everything up, but it was the perfect project for a snowy holiday afternoon.