Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130401145406/@comment-188432-20130407003243

Yeah, I feel your pain.

Until last year, I ran this wiki on an old PPC running 10.4.11. But the truth is that there's a huge difference between Firefox 3.6.24 and Firefox 4+. On the Mac side, 4 is the sort of "fault line" between "modern" and "old" Firefox. I totally remember that there came a time in 2011 where 3.6.24 just couldn't handle the site anymore. By 2012, it was having problems even with some parts of other Wikia wikis, so I had to start using Firefox only on the Monobook skin.

I used to try to convince myself that it hadn't been "all that long ago" that 3.6.24 came out. Sure, maybe the .24 revision is a little newer. But the cold, hard, fact is that 3.6 itself dates from late 2009/January 2010. Yes, you have incremental updates going all the way to 2012. But your core functionality is from 3 years ago. One of the confusing things about Firefox is how they keep giving all these new incremental releases alongside major new releases. Just because you get an update to 3.6.28 in March 2012, that doesn't mean you've got as good a version of Firefox as 10.0.2, also from March 2012. They are miles apart.

It's important to understand the development chains for Firefox to know why your browser isn't cutting it. There are nine major revisions in FF history: 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 3.5, 3.6, 4, 11, and 18. If you're at 3.6, you're actually three major revisions back. And, really, the gulf between these nine revision is not equal. The one between 3.6 and 4. is quite the doozy. Much bigger than the diff between 3.5 and 3.6, or even 10.0.12 (the end of the 4.0 chain) and 11.

To compound the problem, you're running OS 10.5.8. That specific revision is almost 4 years old. And 10.5 itself came out before Voyage of the Damned! Your core OS is 6 years old.

The truth is that even Firefox themselves, as of this year, no longer support a version of their browser that will work on 10.5. Firefox 16 was the last version that ran on 10.5. And we're now on Firefox 20.

Only about .5% of all users of Firefox are using the version you are. Well over 90% of all Firefox so that's why your browser simply isn't supported by Wikia or Tardis.

Like you, I didn't want to let go of my otherwise quite functional old Mac. But your stuff is more out of date than you think. It's simply not reasonable to support your setup here in April 2013.

If you can't change—maybe because you're still running a PPC Mac—then the only real advice I can give to you is that you might find using the Monobook skin a better option.