I reverted to OS 9 on our kitchen iMac today. Sad but true: it just didn’t work as well I would have liked.
- It was slow which is hard to take on a 500 MHz machine, especially when you see how zippy OS 9 is.
- It was less compatible with little things like the world wide web. One of its uses is for some relaxing game play, and that means Java in many cases. Java support is nowhere near as good on OS X as it is on OS 9, and it’s lousy on OS 9. Also, there may be a lot more browsers (OmniWeb, iCab, Chimera/Navigator, as well as IE, Netscape and Mozilla), but they’re all weak in some way or other. IE 5 on OS 9 is hard to beat with anything on OS X.
- Energy Saver won’t wake the machine up at a specific time each day: a small thing, but upgrades should never mean losing features.
I’ll give it another look when Jaguar/10.2 is released.