Mac OS 8 had been released five days earlier, on July 26. Included on the magazine’s CD-ROM was a Mac OS 8 Preview Pack that consisted of technology demo presentations and Aaron, a popular shareware extension that let you make System 7.5 through Mac OS 7.6 look like OS 8. Installing Mac OS 8.1 on a Power Mac 6100 via CD-ROM – even a 24x one – is a very slow process. Not only is this because Mac OS 8.0 followed by the 8.1 updater is big, but in part because the installer insists on putting Netscape Navigator 3.01, Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01, and Claris Emailer Lite on each and every computer. This is Netscape's final release for Mac OS 9. Based on the Mozilla platform introduced in version 6, it renders modern websites far better than any other OS 9 browser. There's an occasional graphical glitch here and there, but it won't stack 16 images on top of eachother and delete half the text like IE and Netscape 4 will sometimes.
Developer Felix Rieseberg won our hearts and minds a couple of years ago, when he released Windows 95 as an Electron app that you could run in Windows, macOS and Linux. He even updated it a year ago to make it faster and bundled playable versions of gaming classics such as Doom and Wolfenstein3D alongside the OS.
Now he’s back with an installable version of Mac OS 8 that you can run on any modern computer, and he’s included a number of Mac apps and games with it, including Photoshop 3, Premiere 4, Illustrator 5.5, Oregon Trail, and Duke Nukem 3D.
SEE ALSO:New version of Windows 95 runs faster on Windows 10, macOS and Linux
This time around, he’s moved to JavaScript for his macintosh.js app which uses a virtual machine to emulate a 1991 Macintosh Quadra 900 with a Motorola CPU. This was the processor Apple used before switching to the PowerPC architecture (Apple/IBM/Motorola) in the mid 1990s.
As for the software that’s included, Rieseberg says:
You'll find various games and demos preinstalled, thanks to an old MacWorld Demo CD from 1997. Namely, Oregon Trail, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Alley 19 Bowling, Damage Incorporated, and Dungeons & Dragons.
There are also various apps and trials preinstalled, including Photoshop 3, Premiere 4, Illustrator 5.5, StuffIt Expander, the Apple Web Page Construction Kit, and more.
You can transfer files from and to the system but you can’t connect to the internet in this release. Non-working versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape are installed, as is the Web Sharing Server, if you fancy playing around with those.
Netscape Download Windows 8
macintosh.js app is available to download here.