OS X Snow Leopard remains to this day the most loved version of macOS. I figured the best way to see if I was wrong was to buy a physical of Snow Leopard and install it on my Mac Pro 2008... in 2023.
The goal of this video is to see if OS X 10.6 is usable in the modern era as it was released nearly 15 years ago, with it's earliest beta being from October of 2008. I go on some tangents. I can't tell if these are interesting or just me wasting people's time. Let me know if they're entertaining.
OS X 10.6, also known as Snow Leopard, is the seventh major release of Apple's macOS operating system, launched on August 28, 2009. It is hailed for its focus on performance, stability, and under-the-hood improvements, rather than introducing groundbreaking new features. Snow Leopard brings significant refinements to system architecture and technologies, making it more efficient, faster, and with a smaller memory footprint. Key enhancements include full 64-bit support, Grand Central Dispatch for optimizing multicore processor utilization, OpenCL for harnessing the power of GPUs, and a new version of Safari with increased speed and HTML5 support. Snow Leopard's emphasis on optimization and compatibility make it a pivotal release that lays the groundwork for future macOS versions.
0:00 Intro
0:32 Downgrades
1:47 Video output issues & Snow Leopard Intro
2:51 Snow Leopard Installed
3:37 Adobe Flash is out of date!
5:57 Using Snow Leopard and Web Browsers
8:36 Browser Benchmarks
10:07 ArticFox install process
11:19 Testing YouTube
11:42 Oops...
12:15 I hate this GPU...
12:52 Adobe Photoshop and the iPhone 14 Pro
Useful Links:
GitHub hates old browsers, so it'll look different on them and you will not be able to download files from the release pages. Use another computer and then transfer the files to your 10.6 Mac.
InterWeb for 10.6
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Download for Interweb (use modern browser)
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SpiderWeb for 10.6
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FireFox Legacy:
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ArticFox
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Download for ArticFox (use modern browser)
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I didn't mention this in the video but all the browsers are forked versions of FireFox as it was last supported browser and I'm pretty sure all are using shims and polyfills to achieve modern compatibility. This means they'll never be able to render as fast as native browsers on a modern OS. If I were to use the 2008 Mac Pro with the exact same hardware on Monterey, and run speed benchmarks for JS compute, almost certainly modern FireFox, Chrome or Safari would be faster.
I cut the explainer on Javascript as I already had enough tangents in this video.
FireFox also went through an entire engine rewrite with Quantum in 2018/2019 to modernize it, so even if features were back ported from newer FireFox, there's a dead end with Quantum. However, I've been proven wrong before...
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------- Extra Stuff -------
Snow Leopard desktops in 5k - I upscaled these and hand treated them.
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Was Snow Leopard 10.6 the greatest OS X release? Demystifying a legend
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Mac OS X Snow Leopard Intro HD
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WAN Show August 4, 2023 (Time stamped to DMUG shout out)
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