Classilla

» see floodgap.com/software/classilla as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In Turkey in the early 2000s a Mac cost what an import costs, and the machines I learned on were beige PCs on a dial-up line. Mac OS 9 was something I read about. Classilla is a browser for a computer I never sat in front of, and the operating system is not the interesting part of it anyway.

Apple stopped updating Mac OS 9 in 2001 and stopped selling machines that could boot into it a couple of years later. Internet Explorer for Mac was the browser most of those computers had, and it stopped being updated too. That left a population of perfectly working machines with no way to reach a web that was changing every year. Cameron Kaiser, who runs Floodgap and was already maintaining a Firefox fork for old PowerPC Macs, took the last Mozilla codebase that would still build on Classic Mac OS and kept going.

That codebase was Mozilla 1.3.1, by way of a project called WaMCom, and it was already six years old when Classilla 9.0 shipped on 30 June 2009. Everything after that was one person backporting: rendering fixes and enough TLS to keep HTTPS connecting. He built a way to patch individual broken sites with small scripts, so a single site could be repaired without rebuilding the whole browser.

The thing worth saying about Classilla is that it was one maintainer against an entire industry's release cadence. Every browser it sat beside had a company behind it. Every year the web added something that assumed a modern engine, and every year the gap widened by more than one person could close.

The last ordinary release was 9.3.3, in 2014. Nothing came out for seven years after it. On 29 March 2021 Kaiser published 9.3.4b1 and said it was the final one. He ended TenFourFox the same day.

~ the dossier ~

~ what finally stopped it ~

Kaiser's own explanation was security. There were serious holes in the engine that could not be closed without removing large parts of it, and there was not enough browser left to remove. Mozilla 1.3.1 predated the security architecture later Gecko builds relied on, so there was no clean place to graft a fix onto.

The second reason was arithmetic. TLS on the public web moved to 1.2 and then to 1.3, and cipher suites kept getting deprecated on a schedule nobody was going to slow down for an eleven year old browser. A browser that stops being updated does not slowly get worse. It stops connecting.

By 2021 a Mac OS 9 machine running Classilla could still render an old page off a local disk and could not reliably open a modern one over the network. Kaiser left the site up as an archive and asked people to stop filing bugs.

~ what stayed up ~

floodgap.com still hosts the Classilla page. It says the browser is unsupported and that bug reports will be ignored. The downloads are all still there. The copyright line reads 2009 to 2021.

That is a more honest ending than most software gets. Nothing was sold and nothing was migrated. The last version is still sitting there for anyone with a machine old enough to run it.

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