Can you use OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2023? Nearly 15 years later...

OS 10 snow leopard to this day Remains the most loved version of Mac OS and I made a video about this but I may have come across a bit harsh I figured the best way to see if I was wrong it was to buy a physical copy of snow leopard and install it on my Mac Pro 2008 in 2023. usually my videos have a very tight script but I don't know the outcome going into this my one goal is to get onto the modern web and then go from there so in order to get my Mac Pro ready for snow leopard I needed to downgrade it and ditch my GPU to the one it shipped with a Radeon 2600 XT as snow leopard was released in 2009 and my GPU was released in 2013. one concession I have to make to modernity is I'll be using a 256 gigabyte SSD as this computer no longer has any hard drives in it or as us cool kids say spinny discs but to be fair this SSD is pure garbage because I only paid twenty dollars for it and it doesn't have any dram one of the biggest appeals a snow leopard is it was all of 29 this was a no-brainer upgrade for any Mac that supported it I paid less than 29 for it on eBay so I feel like I got a pretty good deal because that's less than new but of course you can find it for free on archive.org but I did not say that in this video my Mac Pro 2008 is a weird configuration because I've had it since 2008 I've even gone as far as to upgrade the DVD RW to a much faster one my DVD RW is a little flaky at this point in time so I had to pop out the drive in order to insert the disk one of the first problems I experienced was trying to use my HDMI capture device my Mac Pro 2008 detected this as a 4K display but I'm using DVID out to HDMI which has a max resolution of 1920x1200 DVI is a horrible standard that encompasses multiple formats and several different cable types amazingly the HDMI capture was able to get a Garfield picture fortunately while editing I realized I could unsmush this picture this is likely because DVID and HDMI both use a tmds bit stream this is really geeky stuff and doesn't really pertain to this video but just for a quick aside DisplayPort uses a packet-based data transmission system called Main link although to make things confusing DisplayPort can also carry tmds AKA HDMI what I'm trying to say is I wasn't able to get a good capture of snow leopard's intro video If you haven't seen this before there's a link in the description to the video I have to commit at the time it was pretty hype I'm skipping ahead Beyond installing the OS which is kind of boring anyhow to the fully installed State as I was finally able to set my resolution as 1080P and I was able to capture my screen so remember how I said my Mac Pro 2008 is heavily modified the first thing I discovered is my airport card wasn't working and that is because I upgraded it to 802.11 AC this apparently is not supported in snow leopard this meant I needed to run a physical ethernet cable to my Mac Pro not the worst but not ideal once I had a network connection I was able to run software update Apple surprisingly keeps its servers up to date and active and thus I was able to upgrade to 10.6.8 after I finished updating one of the first messages I saw was Adobe Flash without a date what a different time 2009 was ironically this was only a half year before Steve Jobs wrote his famous open letter thoughts on flash if there ever was a singular event that illustrates Steve Jobs's influence it was this macromedia flash was a solution from a different era where web browsers were significantly less capable if you're not as old as me there's a time when almost all streaming video on the web including YouTube was served through Adobe Flash it's hard to overstate how big of a deal this open letter was Steve Jobs would nearly single-handedly kill Adobe Flash by announcing publicly that Apple would not allow Adobe flashlight to exist on the iPhone citing the very real problems like poor security poor performance lack of touch support and the closed ecosystem even if viewed through the lens of history as a selfish move to protect Apple's ambition with the App Store Steve Jobs refusal to embrace flash helped the web remain open and push web browsers to vastly increase their capabilities it's very easy today to say that Steve Jobs was right because many of the most popular desktop applications at their core are just web apps using a framework like electron just to name a few popular applications that use this are like slack Discord vs code and there's plenty more however there was a much darker future where Adobe Flash was the backbone for the desktop world making cross-platform applications possible using Adobe Air ironically the web today is facing a new closed ecosystem threat with Google's web environment Integrity API proposal at some level the API is to combat bodying and the fear of a dead internet but it can be boiled down to forcing DRM into the web Beyond media to ensure ad views this is still in the early stages but if Google is successful I don't know if we can count on Apple standing in the way again my initial Impressions is 10.6.8 really does feel Snappy although I am running this on a Mac Pro 2008 with an SSD with 8 gigs of RAM it isn't a ton but still double with what most Macs of that Arrow were shipping with while the speed is very impressive it is a fresh install of an OS on an SSD this is not surprising the first concern I had was trying to get this computer on the internet snow leopard comes bundled with Safari 4 and it can be updated to Safari 5. both of these are woefully out of date my first stop on finding it better browser was going to lowendmac.com their article on Snow Leopard was a bit out of date but they did recommend Firefox ESR 38 which was from 2015. I was able to download this and install it surprisingly this got the web to be semi-usable but going back to Apple's homepage it was still a mess after some quick digging I found that Firefox 40 3 ESR was the last supported version of Firefox on Snow Leopard this didn't radically change my browsing experience because Apple's homepage was every bit as broken the next browser I tried was supposedly still being developed and its name was Rock cat 8. after going to apple.com it was clear this wasn't going to be able to render modern websites so I decided to move on I decided at this point it was time to stop messing around and break out the secret weapon Mac Rumors forums the first recommendation was spiderweb a fork of Firefox it was last updated in 2022 which is fairly recent spiderweb is a bit janky I noticed in the Remi file it mentioned polyfills and a polyfill is a small snippet of JavaScript code or a library that allows modern web features and apis to be injected into older browsers and it's rarely perfect spiderweb comes bundled with the xpi file which is firefox's plugin format the first thing I did was when I launched the application I went to the add-on manager and installed pale fill this undoubtedly hacks in modern JavaScript and browser security features once installed I went to apple.com and holy hell it rendered correctly the next browser on the list was interweb which doesn't require any Hoops just double click and it'll go I went to apple.com and of course it also rendered the webpage well the next browser on the list was Firefox Legacy although it was sunsetted earlier than interweb and spiderweb it too rendered apple.com's website correctly if you're like me you probably want to know which of these three web browsers is the best one so I decided to run two simple browser tests the first one is html5tests.com to see if there's any significant differences in compatibility what you're seeing right now is the final scores and it goes from left to right spiderweb interweb and then finally Firefox Legacy with interweb taking the lead html5test.com works by testing a browser for assorted features then giving you the score based on how many features are supported by the browser for a reference point here's the scores compared against modern browsers Firefox 116 gets a score of 512 and Safari technology preview release 174 gets a score of 515. all three of the Legacy browsers are pretty damn close each other also during this test with three browsers open my memory usage was exceptionally low modern Mac OS has much more sophisticated memory management but there's something to be said about how lean snow leopard is the next Benchmark was browseraudit.com which issues warnings it features are missing browser audit is a bit more dated so I don't expect much from this test this test isn't as meaningful as is not super up to date again there wasn't a significant difference between the three browsers from left to right we have spiderweb interweb and Firefox Legacy the wind going to Firefox Legacy of course after running all these benchmarks I discovered one more browser that you can use in snow leopard called Arctic Fox as you may have guessed this is another Firefox spin-off but with the caveat that's still being actively developed installing it takes a bit more work and there were any instructions so it took me a minute or two to figure out here's what you need to do when you download Arctic fox for 10.6 you'll also need to download the lib files these come in the format of two lib CC plus die-lib files I hope I said that right these must be installed manually to the USR slash lib directory to do this you need to First enable visible files which requires the terminal command which is on screen then restarting the finder once you do that it's now time to navigate to the root of your boot drive and then go to USR then lib then drag the two dylib files into this directory it should ask you to confirm and of course confirm it now install arctic fox to your applications arctic fox surprisingly doesn't score as well as the other browsers in the browser tests but if it's being actively developed that might change in the future for one final test I decided to go to youtube.com Arctic foxing use YouTube's custom UI for the media player which means it's missing some features the other three browsers all supported the native YouTube player I was able to watch 1080p without hitches in all three browsers at least on a Mac Pro 2008 even with a piece of trash video card oh oh this is a really great video definitive Mac upgrade guide is the name of this channel that's embarrassing how'd that clip get in this video oh man I'm so embarrassed guys here let's get back to oh geez that's just me being featured on another LTT video that's just my video between Marquez and Luke you know no big deal oh geez there's a Linus commenting on my video Ah that's this is awkward all right let's get back to it speaking of gpus this thing really sucks so I'm going to skip trying to run any retro games on this computer if there's enough interest I might try 10.6 gaming because somewhere I think I still have a Radeon 4870 the best snow leopard browser today is interweb and that's for several reasons it's a zero hassle install process and it doesn't seem to have any of the jankiness or weird behaviors I saw in spiderweb and it seems to be the most feature complete web browser you're going to find under snow leopard this of course is subject to change especially like if say arctic fox gets a major update for some Nostalgia I decided install Adobe Photoshop from CS 5.5 this was released roughly the same time as snow leopard but just running an old version of Photoshop on OS it was designed for isn't really that interesting I wondered what would happen if I were to try and download photos off my iPhone 14 pro to my surprise image capture and app bundled with snow leopard actually connects to my iPhone 14 pro and lets me download all the media assets on it the iPhone 14 pro is nice because it shoots raw images into dng Photoshop was able to open up without any hitches a 48 megapixel photo shot on an iPhone 14 pro dng's AKA digital negatives are a open format but they were created by Adobe so raw images would have a standard almost certainly if you had a newer camera you would have to convert your raw images into dngs if you wanted to open them up in a Photoshop version this old Quicktime and snow level was able to open up 4K video files shot on my iPhone 14 longest they were in MP4 playing these back is a different story but that's not surprising because the video card is trash although I'm not sure if I had a better GPU it'd be enough or if it supports Hardware decoding in this experiment I found 10.6 snow leopard surprising it was fast enough to be pleasant to use and I was able to access the modern internet what's crazy is I could have realistically edited this video on Snow Leopard and uploaded it to YouTube it would have been more painful for sure but that's still remarkable if you haven't seen it I recommend watching my video was Snow Leopard the greatest release of Mac OS and I think that's a good place to close this video

Channel: Definitive Mac Upgrade Guide

Views: 5,604

Keywords: Apple, Mac, macOS, Mac Pro

Id: OXRFr8AFC9A

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023