iCab 3.0.5 and OS 9.22 Problems

I have finally come back to the Mac fold two and a
half years after my PowerBook 3400 hard drive crashed.

I now have a 400MHz Pismo G3 running OS 9.2.2.
Theoretically three to four times faster than the 3400
with the 604 (I think) processor. I got it broken off
eBay for $46, put some parts into it and it works!

My problem is I use the internet mostly and I have
become accustomed to Firefox on Windows XP on a 450 MHz
Pentium II.

iCab is dog slow, crashes frequently, locks up on
javascript and has a severe memory leak somewhere.

What I do:

I only run javascript where necessary (like yahoo mail
and most banking sites) as it locks up for about two
minutes before giving me the 'javascript is in a loop'
message. The problem is it locks up the entire
computer for those two minutes. I realize this is
partly an OS 9 problem but it us really frustrating,
no other software I use does this.

I have to check memory usage with the 'About This
Computer' window every few minutes as iCab grabs
memory continually. I usually save everything and
restart iCab about every 10 to 15 minutes as it starts
to take over 100MB by then and things get unstable.

I have opened iCab with one or two tabs and gone to
'About This Computer' and just watched as iCab started
with 30MB and gradually increased usage to over 70MB
in just a few minutes while making no changes to the
pages being viewed!

Today I tried going to <http://www.capitalone.com> to
check our credit balance (with only one tab open) and
it just slowed to a crawl. I checked and iCab had
consumed 329 of my 384 Megs of RAM! So I restarted
iCab, did the same thing again and watched memory
usage increase quickly to 250Megs before just closing
the page and moving back to the PC and Firefox. I
realize it is likely a problem with the webpage coding
(has anyone ever seen iCab smile?), but Firefox
handles it just fine.

Any suggestions as to setup or memory (I have virtual
memory turned on) or something I can do to get this to
work?

I plan on installing OS X but I only have 10.0 and a
10.1 upgrade right now (I have been warned about their
instability and incompatibility with a lot of software
so am not looking forward to the changeover). I
probably can't come up with 10.3 for a couple of
months.

Is iCab 3 or 4 on OS X any better? I remember the
switch from 2.98Beta to 3.0Beta on my 3400 was good in
page rendering but impossibly slow to use on 180MHz so
I went back to 2.98 till the famous hard drive crash
of July 2005.

This post, with its own links, might help end your iCab torture.

MamCom and Fizzilla

Thanks for the info! I have WamCom but haven't tried it yet because of messing with the 'latest and greatest' iCab.

I wonder if Fizzilla would work with OS 9 and CarbonLib?

http://www.mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/

But it doesn't look like a complete browser and probably won't be any better than WamCom. I was just wondering if there was something more like Firefox 2 for OS 9.

Thanks Again!

unknown1 said:

I was just wondering if there was something more like Firefox 2 for OS 9.

Click to expand...

WaMCom's version is the closest you'll get. Mozilla stopped its browser development for OS 9 when OS X came out, with version 1.2.1. Then it dumped the browsing suite and moved on to its Firefox predecessor for OS X.

WaMCom patched some security holes in 1.2.1 and called it 1.3.1. It was the last OS 9 Mozilla train to leave the station.

Edit: Found this at mozilla.org, dated June 25, 2003.

WaMCom (Web and Mail Communicator) has created a stable browser based on Mozilla 1.3.1 plus 480 additional trunk bug fixes. This Mozilla-based app suite is intended to give users all the power of Mozilla 1.3.1 with hundreds of additional stability, correctness and security fixes ported from the Mozilla trunk. . . .

[A]ll of the changes that were made to the WaMCom release were changes that had first landed on the Mozilla development trunk. That means that those changes went through the Mozilla code review process. While mozilla.org hasn't put any official blessing on the WaMCom release (or any other release for that matter), I can personally vouch for the developer that did this work. He is a longtime Mozilla developer with a solid reputation and there is nothing malicious about his product.

Click to expand...

Great info on WaMCom!

Can't wait to get back to the Pismo and try it out.

I have posted this to several forums and this one came up with the answers! I think I'll hang around here a while. I spend a lot of time at the AppleFritter hackers forums: http://applefritter.com/tracker

It's amazing how quickly the internet changes and great old apps are lost.

I was able to find ExtensionUninstaller 2.0 here:
http://forum.addonsmirror.net/index.php?showtopic=283

But am unable to find ExtensionUninstaller API and Extension Manager 2.0 so far because the author's website
http://mozmonkey.com/
is down.

I will keep searching for mirrors but I found further instructions from 2003 here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=78407&highlight=&sid=140c6eb425a06c6ffcfb8ad61dc7e007

Someone on another forum suggested Netscape 7.2 but I have no experience with it -yet- and I don't know if it will take extensions which I think are the best part of Firefox/Mozilla.

EDIT:

Found the extensions I was looking for here!:

http://pv-mirror02.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/

Had to rename them to get the .xpi extension but just double clicked them and they installed in order. Now to back up the profile and try some extensions!

Wow. Before reading your edit, I searched all the haunts where I knew those intstaller/uninstaller extensions had been, and came up empty. I had been at all of them last week! Even Jeremy Gillick, the installer/uninstaller author's site is down!

So with much relief I don't have to paste in the bad-news reply. How did you find that page?

Anyway, if you can't find the correct, old Prefbar extension, the author has it here, at the bottom of the page. It's 3.3.4.

Now to back up the profile and try some extensions!

Click to expand...

Maybe you should back up the app, too, so the app and profile always match.

I've run into extension problems using the old app with a new profile, after installing extensions that didn't load properly, or when experimenting with others, and have had to trash everything and start over. Remember, the uninstaller is there along for the ride. It doesn't work.

ArsTechnica is a good site to check whether the left side of the page is cut off. If it is, change the monitor's resolution to make it finer. If the type becomes so small you can't read it, bump up the minimum size in Mozilla's prefs.

Let me know how you're getting along. I have to examine that page you linked to. How did you find it?

There are 6,662 extension folders on that page, none of them with names. How did you find the uninstaller/installers?

I went here:
http://pv-mirror02.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/addons/

(The longest web page I have ever seen - it is still loading in the background as I type this on the PC!)

and I knew from my previous searches on Mozilla.org that the extensions were number 202 and 203!

I found an app to back up Mozilla profiles somewhere but lost it before saving it.

Is there any way to add buttons to the navigation toolbar?

unknown1 said:

I found an app to back up Mozilla profiles somewhere but lost it before saving it.

Click to expand...

Since the profile is a folder, I just copy it. I use an AppleScript to quit Mozilla that copies it automatically, along with trashing the cookies.html file and a bunch of other stuff.

Is there any way to add buttons to the navigation toolbar?

Click to expand...

I don't know. I always hide the navigation toolbar and use right-clicks and mouse gestures to back up and go forward. To type in a URL when the bar is hidden, I use Shift-Command-L (Command-L with Firefox). So I've never investigated.

Check out this list of Mac browsers: http://darrel.knutson.com/mac/www/browsers.html

WaMCom (or something besides iCab) for CSS

I was just wondering if there is something that could be done to add proper CSS support to WamCom, or something. Is it possible a later build could be compiled (or components of it be hacked) to add proper CSS support? I do have codewarrior, but don't really know how to use it, but I have 'Mac Programming for Dummies!' so I can do ANYTHING!

I have been using yahoo as my homepage since 1995 and it doesn't work properly with WaMCom. In iCab, I just set the browser identifier to 'Firefox' and it works fine for the most part.

By the way http://mozmonkey.com is back up. Download them while you can! I spent the better part of last night checking out OS 9 links and a good 80% of them are now dead! Good thing I have about 2 gigs of downloads from 3 years ago archived, maybe I should start my own OS 9 site?

unknown1 said:

I have been using yahoo as my homepage since 1995 and it doesn't work properly with WaMCom. In iCab, I just set the browser identifier to 'Firefox' and it works fine for the most part.

Click to expand...

That's relatively new. I couldn't get Yahoo email to work, either. The site says WaMCom's cookies aren't on, when they are.

The conspiracy theorist in me says Steve Jobs persuaded Yahoo do do this, as he had YouTube change its movie codecs.

I changed OS 9 iCab's identity to IE, and Yahoo suddenly recognized that iCab's cookies were turned on. So it was a simple coding change to lock out OS 9 users.