How many Mac fans are still using OS 9? It’s a difficult statistic to track, or at least I’ve found it so. Hitslink’s November 2008 market share report shows pre-Intel Mac operating systems still represent a respectable (nearly three times the penetration of Linux) 2.35 percent of total OS usage (vs. 6.51 percent for MacIntel), but it’s not broken down between OS X and Mac OS Classic PPC systems.
Cult of Mac’s Giles Turnbull notes that way back in 2004 he posted a column entitled “OS9 – Blimey Some People Still Use It” for Mac DevCenter, but never imagined he’d be posting a similar piece four years later.
“But – blimey,” Turnbull wrote last week, “there are STILL some people out there using OS 9 and very happy with it too, thank you very much.”
Actually, I’m still using OS 9 daily for production. I can’t recall the last time I booted directly into Mac OS Classic (I still have three Macs in service that can do that), but OS X Classic Mode is another story. What keeps me using Nine is an old shareware add-on called Scrollability which automates scrolling in an intuitive, effortless, and elegant manner that has never been duplicated for OS 10 as far as I know, and which is a balm to my neuritis-plagued arms and hands when editing and doing HTML markup.
If it weren’t for that, I would have bid fond farewell to OS 9 for routine work long since, but because I do use it, I’m constantly reminded how much more lively, responsive, and solid-feeling the Mac OS Classic Finder is compared with OS X’s. I’ve been using OS X as my production platform since the release of OS 10.3 Panther in 2003, but I still find OS 9 superior in some respects. No Dock; virtually instantaneous menu response; no Trash dodging the cursor; and that delicious “right now” responsiveness.
Nevertheless, on the balance I wouldn’t go back, and I had to wean myself off Classic Mode when I upgraded to Leopard on my main workhorse Mac over a yearago. It’s been less traumatic than I had anticipated, and I love Spaces and Quick Look, but I still miss Scrollability, and that keeps my number two and three machines, both hotrodded Pismo PowerBooks running OS 10.4.11 Tiger, in pretty intensive service.
How about you? Anyone else out there still using OS 9, either by booting into it directly or with Classic Mode in pre-Leopard OS X?
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