

The next best thing you can do, after installing all the memory you can, is to use a fast hard drive or SSD. That’s as true for the original version as it is for macOS Sierra. Regardless of how many processors your Mac has or what speed it runs at, more memory will always help OS X run better. 1 GB is nice, 2 GB is great, and more than that, even better, although you need a G5-based Mac if you want to access more than 2 GB of memory. Tiger can run with less than 512 MB, but that’s a realistic minimum for decent performance. The best thing you can do for Tiger is run it on a dual-processor Power Mac G4 or G5 – or the truly awesomely powerful 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 Quad – with plenty of memory. Version 2.4.5 is the last to support OS X Tiger.
FIREFOX FOR MAC OS X TIGER FREE
LibreOffice 4.0.2 (the last PowerPC version) is powerful but slow.įor word processing, TextEdit is free and decent, but the freeware Bean word processor is even nicer. Microsoft Office is powerful, but its also bloated and composed of several separate apps, unlike AppleWorks which is fully integrated. (The database is probably its weakest component.) With AppleWorks, a single app handles word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, vector art, and more. Working with Microsoft Office and Apple’s iWork apps has convinced me of that. AppleWorks used to come free with every iMac, and it’s the best integrated office suite ever. Office Apps and SuitesĪs long as you’re using OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or earlier, you can’t go wrong with AppleWorks 6.

Some sites don’t like any browser not made by Microsoft. Then again, there are parts of the company website for my current employer that I can’t access on my MacBook running OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Probably the biggest problem with older browsers is that some websites, especially banking and the like, may not support your old Mac. It’s a Mac-specific port of an earlier version of Mozilla, very lightweight, and pretty responsive, but without the flexibility and power of TenFourFox. I’d go with Camino as my alternate Tiger browser. Google’s Chrome browser was never ported to PowerPC, Firefox officially dropped Tiger support before Firefox 4 was released, and Safari is hopelessly old and outdated at version 4.1.3 from 2010. And Simon Royal has shared some tips on tweaking TenFourFox to be even more responsive.
FIREFOX FOR MAC OS X TIGER FULL
You even get full screen mode, something most Mac apps didn’t get until OS X 10.7 Lion or later. (Rather than port every version to PowerPC, TenFourFox only works on the ESR, Extended Support Release, a sequence that includes 38 and 45 but nothing in between.)Īs we’ve said time and again, if you have a PowerPC Mac running Tiger, TenFourFox is the best browser going. Sure, Firefox for supported platforms is at version 47 now, but TenFourFox 45.3 is in its second. (I’ve never used Tiger on an Intel Mac, but unless it has less than 1 GB of system memory, you’re better off with Snow Leopard on Intel Macs.) BrowsersĪny Mac running OS X Tiger can run TenFourFox 38, a port of Firefox optimized in separate versions for G3 and G5 CPUs, along with two G4 versions depending on which chip variant you have.

It was perfectly adequate for my needs, and it’s still good enough for a lot of people to continue using it, especially on PowerPC Macs. If not for that, I would have stuck with Tiger. There was only one reason I ever switched from Tiger to Leopard – NetNewsWire had switched to using Google’s RSS feed manager (since discontinued), and that version of the app required Leopard. But once I retired Home Page, I no longer needed to use Tiger on a regular basis – I moved to OS X 10.5 Leopard on my Power Macs and 10.6 Snow Leopard on my 2007 Mac mini. I used Home Page when I began Low End Mac in April 1997, and it was early 2013 that I finally found and moved to a better solution.Ĭlassic Mode is at its best on a dual-processor Power Mac, because it can dedicate one CPU full time to Classic Mode while the other handles all the OS X details. 0 in Classic Mode, which requires Tiger or earlier versions of OS X, to WordPress, which is a browser-based content management system (CMS). I used Tiger daily until about three years ago, when Low End Mac moved from using Claris Home. (If it were, I’d transplant one of my higher capacity 7200 RPM hard drives.) Likewise, it has a very pokey hard drive with just 40 GB capacity, but it’s not like this is going to be a production computer. I wouldn’t normally run Tiger with just 512 MB of memory, but that’s what came with the computer, and I’m not going to throw money at it.
