Classilla does not save any changes

[PowerFinnrich]

Hello all,

I have a problem since I installed classilla on my Power Macintosh 9600/350 with Mac OS 9.2:

Classilla doesn't save changes.
For example, if I set up the Classilla E-Mail client and close Classilla after that, then open it again and want to check my e-mails - I have to do the whole setup again. The preferences, received/send messages, everything is gone... The same thing is for dialogue boxes,  ("Are you sure you want to go from an unencrypted to an encrypted page?" etc.) which I have to click every time I open the program again.
But for some reason it does save things like bookmarks or visited pages.
Did I do something wrong or does someone know how to fix it?

[ovalking]

I've installed Classilla on several Macs but never encountered this issue.

It sounds like some of the preferences files are not being saved for some strange reason.

Classilla is annoying and confusing with its prefs files and profiles. For some reason they are stored in Documents/Mozilla/Profiles/<your name>/<random name>/

Check them to see the modification dates and if any are locked. I'm expecting your history.dat and bookmarks.html files to be ok, but prefs.js for e.g. might not be.

Try creating another profile.
If this has the same problem try creating one stored on another drive.

If you have another machine / OS, try that, then look for clues in any differences.

[PowerFinnrich]

Hello and thank you for your help!

Today I could solve that issue. And no, I do only have this Classic machine.
The clue was, when I first installed classilla, I was asked by Classilla, if I want to convert the old netscape profile into classilla, and clicked yes.
So it turned out that "prefs.js" was a netscape communicator document and I think that classilla couldn't write in this document for that reason.
I created a new profile and everything works now, even the checkboxes which where really annoying while browsing! Thank you very much!

Now my Classic PPC turns out to be a more and more useful machine, even today!

[Mat]

Interresting finding!

Would be cool, if you reprot this to Cameron, so he can see there are still Classilla users out there and caring about the real usability.

[PowerFinnrich]

Good idea, Done!

[Milko]

Good idea, Done!

Did you get anything back? I emailed him out of curiosity a few months ago just to see if Classilla was 100% abandoned or if there was still hope but never got a reply

[PowerFinnrich]

Unfortunately, I did not receive any reply of him or another maintainer
of Classilla. I don't know but it seems like this really, really great project
has been abandoned... which is very sad.

[Protools5LEGuy]

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/

He has also a browser for Mac OS X updated every year. You should test it in a partition, if something doesn't work
 

[PowerFinnrich]

Tenfourfox is a very nice project, too.
Why should PowerPC's from ten years ago already not be able to access
the internet? This browser brings back even Youtube and Discord
to the PowerPC Macintosh. But unfortunately, my PowerBook G4 has broken.
I used it as my main Computer until two years before, with TenFourFox
installed.

[Bolkonskij]

I had e-mailed Cameron Kaiser as well a couple of month ago. Asked about Classilla updates and letting him know that we would appreciate another update, but haven't gotten any reply either. The man is awfully busy, especially since he fell in love with his Talos II. I don't think he uses OS9 much anymore. Sad, but that's the way things go.

Unless we can get some retired former OS9 dev to pick up Classilla in his newly-found spare time, I think the project is on indefinite hiatus.

[GaryN]

I had e-mailed Cameron Kaiser as well a couple of month ago. Asked about Classilla updates and letting him know that we would appreciate another update, but haven't gotten any reply either. The man is awfully busy, especially since he fell in love with his Talos II. I don't think he uses OS9 much anymore. Sad, but that's the way things go.

Unless we can get some retired former OS9 dev to pick up Classilla in his newly-found spare time, I think the project is on indefinite hiatus.

That's just fucking rude, man. The man has a full-time job you know:  https://www.rivcoph.org/County-Health-Officer
AND he just got married a year or so ago. He holding 10-4 together in what little time with what little energy he has left for zero money.

There aren't going to be any more Classilla updates because there is simply NO WAY to make that ancient browser and old hardware chew through the muck that is today's internet. Even 10-4 running on my TWO 1.8GHz procs slogs through that crap.

Would it even be possible to write a new one from scratch that would run on OS9? Sure. Would it work worth a crap? Probably not on anything but the fastest Power PC's and it would be slow on those.

It's NOT the fault of the computers. It's the fault of the people in this disgusting world that cram ads down your throat, track every time you go to the bathroom and steal every little bit of info they can pry loose from you. Today's internet protocol is 70% pure defensive encryption, 25% advertising and 5% what you actually go there for. Apple, Mozilla, Google and the rest have full-time TEAMS of coders working full-time to keep some kind of a lid on all of it - and THEY get to work on current software, not trying to patch the patches that patched the patches that were patching the old WaMCom-derived soup that is Classilla.

Give it up, man. You want to look at all the kitty cats out there? Use something that will run a newer browser.

[macarone]

>It's the fault of the people in this disgusting that cram ads down your throat, track every time you go to the bathroom and >steal every little bit of info they can pry loose from you. Today's internet protocol is 70% pure defensive encryption, 25% >advertising and 5% what you actually go there for.

Oh so totally true and terribly sad!

Thank you for having the guts to say it. Most appreciated!

Funny though, that the pr0n sites are just about the only ones where you find what you are looking for.

[DieHard]

It's NOT the fault of the computers. It's the fault of the people in this disgusting that cram ads down your throat, track every time you go to the bathroom and steal every little bit of info they can pry loose from you.

As usual, Gary is spot on. 

Another issue is the loosers that analyze traffic and then use there super strippers to rip posts off sites, like ours, that will get google hits when they put the text on there own malicious domains...they do this so that when an unsuspecting soul googles something like "Mac OS 9 Image" or whatever, they click on the malicious link, not our link, and immediately get a huge pop-up "You needs to install the new Flash player" ..."click HERE !" or some other garbage, and trust me, when you "click here" you will not be downloading flash player.

This is why I had to eventually turn off guest browsing, we had more crawlers than users on the forum

[IIO]

i recently landed on such a site via regular google search where the search term was a something completely rare and outdated, like a free software, cant remeber, something like "shootergameforOS7updater0.54alpha.sit.hqx", and even that rare rubbish which probably nobody except me will ever search for again led me to a dynamic script nonsese website (as the ONLY google search result!) which offered to download "shootergameforOS7updater0.54alpha.sit.hqx" but the link did something else.

i understand such search results for "download photohop" or "kill trump" or "buy toiletpaper" - but who the fucks wants to download "shootergameforOS7updater0.54alpha.sit.hqx"? something which even google only knows about from the scam site itself?

[Greystash]

This has gotten a little off topic (but still relevant) and I've said this to a few people in private, but feel it needs to be said in public too.
Although Classilla is amazing and has been a saviour for many years, Cameron has abandoned this for good reason! I work as web developer and see first hand how bloated and awful the internet is getting. The biggest problems are keeping up with modern standards e.g. JavaScript, CSS 3, and SSL which are now used on almost every modern website.

Javascript is everywhere and will never be fully compatible with the engines present in OS9 browsers, and they will never have the resources to be able to process the scripts 'heavy' sites use. Porting a modern JS engine to an OS9 browser would be a mammoth task for little benefit. CSS 3 is the new standard for styling websites, there is no need to stick to CSS 2 specs since pretty much every browser supports CSS 3 now. Classilla had limited CSS 3 support but this has changed greatly since the early 2000's. SSL is used on every website now, it's a standard introduced to help encrypt any user data that's transmitted, and was only just beginning to be adopted widely from the 2000s -2010. There are only a handful of sites that still serve their sites via HTTP, which is bad practice unless you're only serving static content.

With all of these issues combined I can't see how Cameron, or anyone could find the time to keep Classilla up to date unless they were unemployed, and took this on as a full-time project. SSL standards and CSS specs are updated all the time, and many developers are writing JavaScript in ES6, which these browsers would have no chance converting to vanilla JS - there's just too much to keep tabs on! Even Microsoft failed miserably to keep IE up to date with other browsers..

The only real solution is for the OS9/vintage computing communities to start building purely STATIC websites, and serve them over HTTP (no SSL). That way, any 'modern' OS9 browser can access them. I've started working on a website builder for vintage computers for this reason, but even this takes an enormous amount of time and isn't anything compared to updating Classilla. It won't be ready until early/mid next year, and that's an optimistic time frame.

There's a time when you need to accept that it's the end of the line, and that time is now. Part of the beauty of early Mac OS is being so disconnected from everything modern.