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Mavericks Forever

I love that this project exists, and I agree that sometime around the Mavericks era, new macOS versions became regressive in some sense. My primary frustration with modern macOS is the graphical pipeline, with its oversaturated colors, poor contrast balance, and visual flickering/dithering (I became sensitive to all these things over the past several years).

I personally decided on a different target, which is macOS High Sierra. The primary two factors for this were:

1. It is new enough for the boot drive to be formatted APFS. This provides better longevity by avoiding the Y2K40 bug in HFS+. Granted, the argument could be made it is too early to worry about 15 years from now. Also, people were working on patching the kernel to avoid this problem.

2. It is old enough that subpixel antialiasing is still available for standard-DPI displays. Starting with Mojave, font rendering in macOS changed and text became difficult to read on standard-DPI displays (these displays are what I find most comfortable to my eyes).

As far as eye strain, there were some reports strain was introduced when GPU drivers were changed mid-High Sierra (10.13.5), so sensitive users like me have to mind that as well (but this may only affect certain models or GPUs). Generally, the Intel iGPUs produce a comfortable image, especially on older macOS versions. Most people may be unaffected, however.
 
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>Do people have opinions on the animations?

willhbr.net

Light Mode InFFFFFFlation

Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine. What we...
willhbr.net willhbr.net

"Whoever came up with the design trend where each block on a webpage pops up into view after you scroll past it needs to pay for their crimes."
 
The Firefox Dynasty disappearance is disappointing. I keep hoping it is a blip. I upgraded to the last version available (148.0b5).

I am actually giving Basilisk a go - PowerFox also works on Mavericks. For general browsing, they seem fine. Typing this comment, however, gives me an occasional lag. Very strange. Curious if you want to point to Basilisk as an alternative, as PowerFox works but seems more geared toward x86 (or PPC) 10.5/10.6 machines.

My question re: Basilisk - is it a modern alternative? Or was Firefox Dynasty more modern?

BTW, I dropped a plug for your site on G5Center:

Mavericks Forever? – G5 Center

g5center.net g5center.net
 
NathanJHill said:
I am actually giving Basilisk a go - PowerFox also works on Mavericks. For general browsing, they seem fine. Typing this comment, however, gives me an occasional lag. Very strange. Curious if you want to point to Basilisk as an alternative, as PowerFox works but seems more geared toward x86 (or PPC) 10.5/10.6 machines.
Click to expand...
I haven't used either browser myself, but my instinct would be to use PowerFox because it's targeting OS X specifically. Also, Powerfox's developer helped me with the Mavericks download script, I feel like I know him somewhat.

But I also suspect that the Firefox Dynasty updates will resume in time. And if they don't, I also think you can keep using Firefox Dynasty for the foreseeable future. That could change very quickly if there's some terrible zero day (which can't be avoided by disabling the Javascript JIT compiler) but I think it will take a while. The latest build of Firefox Dynasty is extremely recent.

Edit: From your website:

The only major disappointment I encountered is rediscovering that Mavericks will simply not recognize a non-Apple SSD on an old MacBook Air. I forgot that High Sierra was the inflection point that opened up wider SSDs and TRIM support on many laptops with proprietary connections. However, I like this setup enough that I may install the original SSD and see if my MacBook Air running Mavericks can make a small but capable daily driver in 2026.
Click to expand...

Just to be clear, Mavericks does support TRIM. I have a TRIM enabler script on the website under the Hackintosh utilities link.

But, yes, you need a SATA SSD.
 

@Wowfunhappy I have an issue with downloading most of the files from the mavericksforever.com site and i don’t really understand why. My setup is down below if it will helps.

The downloading seems to start, but then nothing happens and it stays unfinished forever.
Same with curl requests, speed is just going to 0 in two seconds and never return back

May be that because of my location (Russia) or may be there is another reason for it?

1770332438159.png

 
NewbieTM said:
May be that because of my location (Russia) or may be there is another reason for it?
Click to expand...
That seems possible? It's a static website hosted on Cloudflare (with certain larger files hosted on Github). I really haven't done anything special. I'm sorry!
 
i'm realising it probably would have been a better idea to have posted this in the mavericks forever thread in the first place, so I'm just going to link it here. trying to figure out how to upgrade to mavericks from ML.. apologies if linking threads like this is frowned upon
forums.macrumors.com

Upgrading to Mavericks from Mountain Lion

hey all, I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade to Mavericks from Mountain Lion, i've been using ML for a few months and realised I should probably definitely upgrade. i used the command on mavericksforever.com to get a copy of the mavericks installer, but when trying to run it it just tells me...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com
 
Pushed a set of updates:
  • Replaced Chocolat with a customized build/backport of TextMate as my recommended code editor. Let me know if you discover any bugs, including anything in a bundle that doesn’t work or make sense anymore, or overly-outdated language grammars (I made a serious effort to update them, but there are a lot of languages).
  • Added iStudiez (planner for students) and Bento (personal database) to the App Library. Thank you to the person who emailed me to recommend them—I don’t take most recommendations because I’m very picky and have strict inclusion criteria, but these are truly excellent Mac apps which seem to work great.
  • Updated all of the web app template apps to use a newer build of Firefox (one of the last builds of Firefox Dynasty) as the base.
 
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>language grammars (I made a serious effort to update them, but there are a lot of languages).
Out of curiosity where did you get updated grammar bundles from?
 
f54da said:
>language grammars (I made a serious effort to update them, but there are a lot of languages).
Out of curiosity where did you get updated grammar bundles from?
Click to expand...
A variety of places, and I didn't keep great track of them as I was working, I should have.

Many came directly from VSCode. I had Claude write this script which can (usually) convert VSCode's JSON language format back into the plist-based TextMate format. Supposedly VSCode's format is actually based on TextMate's in some way.
 
Thought I would share my setup. I have been using my Mac Pro1,1 since 2019 daily with dual boot OSX/Linux. After stumbling across Mavericksforever.com I have been setting it up as OSX only. Only issue is the surfing the web. Currently using Basilisk as my browser. But I still wanted to watch streaming services while using it. Here is what I have setup.

Mini PC - Old unit 2 core
USB Selector - for Keyboard and Mouse
HDMI - USB 2.0 Capture Device
Quicktime or VLC to view
I mapped my Downloads folder from the Mac to Windows and use Chrome for the Internet. Audio comes across through Quicktime or VLC.
XPRA - for Desktop Control
RDP or VNC always seemed too slow

ScreenCap.jpg
ScreenCap2.jpg

download.webp
 
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Wowfunhappy said:
Momiji should work with many (albeit not all) streaming services now if you use the PrefPane on my website, which sets up a widevine re-implementation.
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I tried but the application crashes

Process: momiji [702]
Path: /Applications/Momiji.app/Contents/MacOS/momiji
Identifier: net.momiji.momiji
Version: 140.3.1esr-mj (14026.4.10)
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [216]
Responsible: momiji [702]


Date/Time: 2026-04-16 14:16:26.593 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.9.5 (13F1911)
Report Version: 11



Crashed Thread: 0 MainThread Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000
 
pmac0973 said:
I tried but the application crashes

Process: momiji [702]
Path: /Applications/Momiji.app/Contents/MacOS/momiji
Identifier: net.momiji.momiji
Version: 140.3.1esr-mj (14026.4.10)
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [216]
Responsible: momiji [702]


Date/Time: 2026-04-16 14:16:26.593 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.9.5 (13F1911)
Report Version: 11



Crashed Thread: 0 MainThread Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000
Click to expand...
Interesting. I wonder if the Mac Pro 1,1's CPU doesn't have an instruction the binary needs?

You should confirm if this happens with vanilla Momiji (I suspect it will, but make sure): https://github.com/aobaharuki2005/momiji-web-browser/releases

If it does, you should open an issue on that same Github including information about your hardware and CPU.
 
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I've recently gotten a few different emails from people who made cool stuff on Mavericks using Claude Code. And all of them were using weird SSH setups where Claude was running on a modern OS and SSH'ing into Mavericks. Aside from being annoying to set up, I am almost certain this hurts Claude's performance.

So, a friendly reminder that I have Claude Code working natively on Mavericks. The current way to install it is via curl mavericksforever.com/claude/install.sh | sh.

Claude + Mavericks is amazing. If you have any interest in developing or porting software for Mavericks—and you can afford a Claude subscription—I highly recommend it. Claude works well on Mavericks and is VERY good at porting software. Claude can do things on its own that used to take me days of work!
 
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Seeing this thread made me want to put my experiences with Mavericks here too!!

I don’t want to repeat my own thread , but I saw this website back when it was Old Projects for macOS (Late 2024-Early 2025) , and ever since ive been using Mavericks , and its such a satisfying OS to use , I really hope this masterpiece of an OS can live on forever!!

Screen Shot 2026-06-07 at 4.18.17 pm.png
Screen Shot 2026-06-07 at 4.18.23 pm.png
Screen Shot 2026-06-07 at 4.21.10 pm.png
 
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