Can I still surf the web on macOS X 10.4.11?

melvinisabanana wrote:

Can I still surf the web on macOS X 10.4.11?

Probably not in any satisfactory way. There are two reasons for this.

One is that the original method used to secure https connections against eavesdropping was discovered to be less secure than people originally thought. There was a big push to upgrade Web sites and browsers to support a more secure method. Safari first got an upgrade to the new methods in OS X 10.11 (El Capitan). Many modern Web sites are unwilling to make https connections to browsers that only support the old security method. That locks out the versions of Safari that run on Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger) and probably all other browsers that run on Tiger, too.

Another is that there have been many changes to Web standards for displaying Web page contents. Tiger predates many of these changes, and so its version of Safari might not be able to display Web pages correctly even if a Web site allowed Tiger's version of Safari to make a connection.

if not can i switch to a new/diferent os?

Any Mac that is so old that it can run Tiger is too old to run modern versions of macOS. How far you can upgrade will depend on the specific Mac model (including hardware release year / time of year), but the news won't be too good even in the best possible case.

Tiger ran both on PowerPC-based Macs and on early Intel-based Macs.

If you have a PowerPC-based Mac, best case is that it can upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard) – which will be in the same boat. Leopard was the last version of the Mac operating system that shipped for PowerPC-based Macs. Apple never made it available for electronic download. They sold upgrades on optical discs. The only place where you could get those now would be on the used market (if you were lucky).

Many of the early Intel Macs that could run Tiger can only upgrade as far as Snow Leopard or Lion – both of which are too old to have received the updates for the newer form of https security.

Some early Intel Macs could run Tiger and could upgrade as far as El Capitan. Apple stopped supporting El Capitan years ago, and even Mozilla stopped supporting it two or three years ago. (Firefox for El Capitan got its last critical security update two or three years ago, and will never get any update ever again.)

You might be able to install Linux – but that machine is old.

If it is an Intel-based Mac, the latest it could be is a 2007 one. You'd be looking at an ancient Core 2 Duo CPU, and maybe 3 GB of RAM, tops, of a type that's so ancient that you'd probably have trouble finding more if your machine had less, and you wanted to upgrade. If it is a PowerPC-based Mac, you'd need to find, and install, a PowerPC distribution of Linux. On a machine with an even older CPU, and likely even less RAM.

Keeping that thing running is something you would do as a hobby, say, because that Mac had historical interest (like the "iLamp" sitting on my side desk) or because you liked playing ancient games that were left stranded by their developers.

If you want something that is suitable for browsing the modern Web, get a modern Mac or PC – or even an iPad, Android tablet, or ChromeBook.

No, you won't be able to surf the web as you'd like. With the old browsers available for that old OS, your Mac will not be able to securely connect to websites that use current security standards.

There is no OS upgrade that can run on the obsolete hardware that is running OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Servant of Cats wrote:

If it is an Intel-based Mac, the latest it could be is a 2007 one. You'd be looking at an ancient Core 2 Duo CPU, and maybe 3 GB of RAM, tops, of a type that's so ancient that you'd probably have trouble finding more if your machine had less, and you wanted to upgrade.

I was able to install & use Linux on an older Apple Intel Laptop with just 2GB of RAM (shared with the GPU). I was surprised that performance was decent. I was able to successfully use two browser tabs/windows, but that would be the limit on such memory constrained system. A system with 4GB should work fine though depending on the task/workload.

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If it is a PowerPC-based Mac, you'd need to find, and install, a PowerPC distribution of Linux. On a machine with an even older CPU, and likely even less RAM.

Some years ago I tried to find a Linux PPC distro, but was unsuccessful. The best I could locate was an unofficial Debian PPC install which was for a recent version (at the time), but there was very little software available in the repository. I'm not even sure it had the Chromium browser available. Even that unofficial Debian PPC installation was difficult to locate on the Debian website. I think it was only for a very small number of PPC chips such as the G5. So Linux on a PPC system is probably not an option these days....at least for Internet access.