Safari 1.3.2 crashing on iMac G5 OS 10.3.9

Question

Safari 1.3.2 crashing on iMac G5 OS 10.3.9

I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro but have kept an old iMac G5 for occasional use when I want a large screen and it has worked well for some years. Having not used it for some time, when I tried yesterday Safari kept crashing. My home page is Google and that comes up when I click on Safari and I can usually enter a search term and then get a list of items, but either before I select one of them or when I do, Safari shuts down with a message that it closed unexpectedly. Software Update says that my software is up to date. I have tried starting in safe mode but that didn't help, nor did repairing permissions. Mail works and as far as I can see other progammes do also. Even if I could find another version of Safari, I couldn't download it. Any advice would be gratefully received.

iMac G5

Posted on Aug 12, 2012 6:20 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 12, 2012 1:18 PM in response to Jeremy R W Christie Brown

That version of Safari is pretty old, so there is probably something being used by Google that is not supported and causes this crash. More recent version of Safari do not work with Panther (10.3.9)

Some third-party web browsers are much more recent than that version of Safari, and do work with Panther. For example, version 1.6.9 of Camino (which is not that old) works with Panther.

http://mac.oldapps.com/camino.php?old_camino=32

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Answer 2

Aug 12, 2012 11:01 PM in response to Kenichi Watanabe

Many thanks. Before I try Camino, perhaps I should upgrade to OS 10.4. I am a begiinner at this kind of thing. Can you advise where I could get OS 10.4? It doesn't seem to be on the Apple site. And what is the highest I should aim for with my iMac G5.

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Answer 3

Aug 13, 2012 12:53 AM in response to Jeremy R W Christie Brown

You can run up to Leopard, 10.5.8, on a G5 iMac. It would be better if it had 1GB of RAM or more, to run Leopard, although 512mb is the minimum requirement. Tiger, 10.4.11, would also be a good fit. If you happen to have Mac OS 9 ("Classic Mac OS") applications, you can run most of them under the Classic environment in Tiger. Leopard does not support Classic. But Leopard has some useful features, such as Time Machine (for doing backups automatically) and Spaces (multiple desktops).

In either case, the only way to find a copy is used, from a source like eBay or Amazon. It needs to be a "retail" copy (a disc that was sold separately in a box), not a gray disc that came with a specific Mac model. They can be expensive, so shop around...

I would use it with Panther for a while, to make sure everything is working well. Then, if it's useful enough to have it around, update it to Tiger or Leopard. But if you just want a larger screen, you can get fairly cheap but large LCD display and connect it to your MacBook Pro. 🙂

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Answer 4

Aug 13, 2012 1:30 AM in response to Kenichi Watanabe

Very helpful, thank you. I'll try that and start modestly

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Answer 5

Aug 17, 2012 2:44 PM in response to Jeremy R W Christie Brown

FWIW on my Panther/G4 system at work Safari v1.3.2 still works for Yahoo! searches, albeit with a messy page layout (headers and sidebars not being isolated from the main text—Wikipedia pages behave similarly). Firefox v2.0.0.20 can access Google without crashing, and generally does somewhat better at sites with modern features.

OTOH both those browsers (but in somewhat newer versions), on my Tiger/G5 system at home, have recently started crashing when trying to access YouTube; I don’t know what the minimal versions are that still work there, but I’m pretty sure they won’t run on Tiger or PPC-based systems.

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