Other Web browsers for early Intel Macs

[wicknix]

Finding web browsers that are still usable on today’s web can be a chore for older versions of OS X.

The following is a list of known, up-to-date (or relatively up-to-date) and maintained web browsers, e-mail clients, and FTP clients, for Intel Macs with at least Snow Leopard support, then Lion and up.

IMPORTANT NOTE! Consider browsers “no longer maintained” or “maintenance ended” at your own risk.
These lack latest security patches and possibly the latest security certificates.
You break, you cry. You get rooted, you throw out your computers, renounce digital technology, and learn to make homemade root beer.

---

BROWSERS

Arctic Fox
supports 10.6+ (supported and maintained as of February 2024)

SnowLion
supports 10.6+ (supported and maintained as of February 2024)

Nightly55
supports 10.6+ (supported and maintained as of February 2024)

Chromium Legacy
supports 10.7 through 10.14 (supported and maintained as of February 2024)

Pale Moon
supports 10.7 through 14.1 (supported and maintained as of February 2024)

Basilisk
supports 10.7 through 14.1 (supported and maintained as of February 2024)

SeaLion
supports 10.7 through 14.1 (supported and maintained as of February 2024)

BrassMonkey
supports 10.7 through 14.1 (supported and maintained as of February 2024)

InterWeb
supports 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9+ (maintenance ended 2022)

SpiderWeb
supports 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9+ (maintenance ended 2022)

Firefox Legacy (aka, “Nightly”)
supports 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 (maintenance ended 2020)

Firefox 78esr
supports 10.9 through 10.15+ (maintenance ended 2021)

Opera 89
supports 10.11+ [based on chromium 103] (no longer maintained)

iCab 5.9.2
5.9.2 supports 10.9 through 10.15; 5.8.6 supports 10.7 through 10.14 (no longer maintained)

SeaMonkey 2.49.5
supports 10.7, 10.8 and 10.9+ (no longer maintained)

TenFourFox Intel FPR32
supports 10.4.3 Intel through 10.14 (i.e., includes all SL-capable Macs) (maintenance ended 2021)

TenSixFox
supports 10.6 and up (maintenance ended 2019)

Waterfox Classic
supports 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9+ (no longer maintained)

---

E-MAIL CLIENTS

GyazMail 1.5.21 (32-bit)
supports 10.4.3 through 10.14

GyazMail 1.6.3 (64-bit)
supports 10.6+ 10.9 to 10.15 (developer amended from 10.6+ to 10.12+, but 10.9, in an all-64-bit environment, might work here)

Thunderbird 45
supports 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8+

Thunderbird 52 (back-ported)
supports 10.7, 10.8 and 10.9+

Thunderbird 78 ESR
supports 10.9 through 10.15+

---

FTP CLIENTS

Cyberduck 7.8.5
supports 10.9+

Fetch 5.7.7
supports 10.6+

FileZilla 3.2.7.1
supports 10.5, 10.6+

Transmit 4.4.8
supports 10.5, 10.6+

---

NOTE: This is a Wiki post, so feel free to add any others to it. Just don't add anything which hasn't been updated in years.

 

[Imixmuan]

While not technically a browser, tenfivetube is a godsend on my early Intel macs. My late 2007 Macbook can playback 720p at about 60% CPU. Browsers can just about handle 480p, but my processors get pegged at 100%.

TenFiveTube - Yet another YouTube option (updated 12/20/20)

We now have a few more options for Leopard, and Snow Leopard for YouTube. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT: Leopard users will need QuickTime 7.7 for optimal performance. Download...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[RogerWilco6502]

I'll need to compare some of these. I'm running FF Legacy right now, but I wouldn't mind seeing what else is out there.

 

[Hughmac]

Added TenFourFox Intel, although personally I use InterWeb as it still has FireFox sync enabled

Cheers

Hugh

 

[retta283]

A lot of good stuff here, thanks for the collection.

 

[wicknix]

I've updated the wiki with another browser. I just got seamonkey 2.49.5 semi back ported to 10.6. It's mostly functional. Only the built in email and newsgroup reader are b0rked. The browser, composer and address book work as they should. I'll keep plugging away at it. I'd like to get it 100% functional.

​

 

[Imixmuan]

Installed Snow Monkey seems speedy, stable so far. Was able to install the libre ublock from the spiderweb addons but not h264ify or greasemonkey, can't seem to add addons from within the browser itself. What code base is this coming from, is it a pure port? And....I know you hear it a lot but thanks for all you do. Thanks to you we literally went from no browsers for Snow Leopard to a complete embarasment of browsers for Snow Leopard.....

 

[wicknix]

Thanks. Yes, pure straight port of seamonkey 2.49. Well the UI anyway. The backend is the same as 10.6's interweb and spiderweb builds which i couldnt have done without ff legacys patched code to borrow from. The thunderbird add-ons site is lacking a lot of the good old extensions sadly.

Cheers

P.S. Without starting a political war, would you mind changing your screen shot please? That biden image hurts my eyes. Thanks.

P.P.S. I updated it a bit more. New download at same link. SeaTabx2 and Chatzilla installed w/out issue from the thunderbird addons site

 

[wicknix]

Updated the wiki as i back ported Thunderbird 52 to Lion, so i included an e-mail section as well.

​

 

[Wowfunhappy]

@wicknix It might be interesting to hear which browser you'd most recommend for Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion respectively. New users could probably use a clear "try this first" recommendation.

 

[wicknix]

That's a tough one. Arctic fox gets regular updates and bug fixes, but it doesn't have as new of a rendering/java script engine. However, it's fast and supports a ton of extensions. Interweb based on 52esr/old uxp, has the next best extension support, but is open to webrtc leaks. SpiderWeb also based on 52esr/old uxp, is more locked down, but has less extension support. Snowmonkey is based on 52esr and is limited to the thunderbird add-ons site. So based on a users needs each browser has different positives and negatives. For web compat and extensions i'd lean towards interweb for 10.6.

For lion it's a toss up. I really like chromium legacy (even with the semi broken UI) as it just works for every site I've thrown at it. FF legacy is also pretty good. Pale Moon gets updated almost monthly and is pretty solid as well. Then again interweb and spiderweb are built against semi current UXP code (same back end as pale moon) and have a ton of security updates and require far less ram than FF legacy and chromium.

All I can say is try them all and see what fits your needs and machine specs. I personally use chromium legacy and spiderweb on my Lion install for day to day tasks. On snow leopard i use arctic fox and spiderweb.

Cheers

 

[Wowfunhappy]

...there's another browser Snow Leopard users should probably know about, although I'm not going to add it to the list just now. Partly because it's buggy as heck, and partly because I'm not clear as to whether it can actually be installed as of this writing. But, it uses an up-to-date rendering engine that should be compatible with just about every website out there.

MacPorts maintains a version of webkit-gtk (aka, Apple's Safari engine). Kencu seems to update the engine about once every year, and because it's Kencu, he makes it work back to Snow Leopard. (From from what I can tell, Kencu is one of the largest driving forces behind MacPorts's unparalleled legacy support.)

If you have MacPorts installed, you can theoretically install the browser via:

sudo port install webkit2-gtk +quartz +minibrowser

Then, run the minibrowser binary that's on your filesystem.

When I first ran the command some months back, it installed on Snow Leopard. When I tried it again some time later, it failed. Since I don't actually use Snow Leopard outside of virtual machines, I wasn't motivated to investigate further. If you don't mind using x11, you could potentially try removing the +quartz option.

When it does install, you'll find that it has a very barebones UI, and that you frequently have to use the reload button many times before pages decide to appear. But, because the engine is up-to-date, when pages do load they basically always render correctly!

The whole thing makes me a bit sad, to be honest. It feels like MacPorts got 99.5% of the way there, but couldn't quite finish it...

P.S. MacPorts also packages two less barebones browsers based on their webkit-gtk port, epiphany and midori. I do not recommend using them, as they were actually much more crash-prone than the minibrowser.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Welp, I kind of sort of kind of figured out how to make Chromium Legacy not crash in Mavericks.

https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy/issues/2#issuecomment-766527613

After injecting this code, I was actually able to browse the web and such, but only after disabling remote fonts, which really sucks!

I'm hoping it was enough to give blueboxd something to investigate further, though. Since I can't actually get Chromium to compile, I think this is as far as I can go on my own.

 

[Amethyst1]

Perhaps we should just link to this excellent thread in the version-specific OS X threads rather than listing browsers and mail clients separately in each which is kinda redundant. I've done this in the Snow Leopard thread but will wait for others to vote yea or nay before doing it in the other threads.

 

[wicknix]

Most people know this already, but here's another way to have up to date browsers on our dated OS X's.
VirtualBox is free, and so is Linux. The lighter weight, the better. I chose Q4OS with Trinity desktop.
Works great for those occasional stubborn websites (or security for banking, ebay, etc without rebooting).

Cheers

 

[Amethyst1]

The lighter weight, the better.

Even better would be having no GUI in the VM at all, running an X11 server on OS X and forwarding the browser. Or use VNC to do the same.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

running an X11 server on OS X and forwarding the browser.

I've tried this via Docker. It technically works but the UI is very laggy—much moreso than just using e.g. VNC. I brought this up on HN and was told the problem is related to how browsers interact with X11 (ie, they're too chatty). Suffice to say, I don't recommend this route.

---

Total aside, Chromium Legacy's UI has been basically fixed as of the latest build. Blueboxd implemented some new code I came up with yesterday.

 

[Amethyst1]

've tried this via Docker. It technically works but the UI is very laggy—much moreso than just using e.g. VNC.

Good point. I think X forwarding requires much more data to be passed between the hosts than VNC.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

So, if anyone really wants to run Chromium Legacy in Mavericks, here is how you can do it.

1. Download and extract Chromium Legacy.
2. Download and extract the attached .dylib file.
3. Open Terminal and cd into /Path/To/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS.
4. Run: DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES=/path/to/ChromiumMavericksWorkarounds.dylib ./Chromium

There is a catch! It would seem that the reason Chromium Legacy usually crashes on Mavericks is due to some sort of "use after free" bug. The attached library fixes this in a very crude way, by preventing CoreFoundation from releasing any memory. Which is to say, it creates a memory leak.

To my surprise, however, memory usage doesn't appear to be noticeably worse than is typical for Google Chrome. I even stress-tested it by opening both Slack and Figma at the same time (two memory-hungry web apps), and they remained totally usable in my development VM, which has only 4 GB of memory. I'm not sure how this is possible, but you may want to keep an eye on Activity Monitor, and definitely restart Chromium if you notice memory usage going through the roof.

---

Edit: Library removed from here, a significantly more sophisticated version is now integrated into this PrefPane.

 

[Hughmac]

I've just found that Google Chrome 49.0.2623.112 (64-bit) works fine on my 2010 MBA in 10.6.8, downloaded from Google themselves.

Is this the same as Chromium Legacy or should it be added to the list?

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Amethyst1]

Is this the same as Chromium Legacy or should it be added to the list?

Chromium Legacy is version 90 so looks to be quite a bit newer.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

I've just found that Google Chrome 49.0.2623.112 (64-bit) works fine on my 2010 MBA in 10.6.8, downloaded from Google themselves.

Sadly, it's many years old at this point. It won't work with a lot of websites, and more importantly than that, it's insecure!

IMO, it's one thing to use an old operating system where you can (presumably) trust the individual apps you run to not be malicious. But it's almost impossible to trust every website you visit, much less every external resource those websites serve (via ad networks, for example). Don't do it, except maybe for very specific websites.

 

[Hughmac]

Thanks, removing it now

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Raging Dufus]

Looks like Pale Moon/UXP is done with Macs:

End of Macintosh support - Pale Moon forum

​

Will be interesting to see if someone forks this off and continues development.

 

[wicknix]

That's because they treat anybody who volunteers their time to the project like crap. Well, and their users too. The mac dev who came after me must have had enough, just like me and the others before me. Unlike Tobin who doesn't work and has nothing better to do, we all have jobs and a life outside of uxp and can't spend 24 hours a day on it like he does. Then they harp on you for working on other projects at the same time. Not worth the hassle.