Best Mountain Lion Browser in 2020?

[im_to_hyper]

I have a friend with a MacBook 4,1 which really doesn't work with graphics acceleration on newer operating systems, and so basically is stuck using Mountain Lion on his machine.

I told him there are newer browsers available; since he's basically using Firefox from ages ago which does not have a lot of support for... well... anything.

But... uh... does anyone have any ideas?

 

[BrianBaughn]

I'm in the process of putting El Capitan on one of these MacBook 4,1 models and looked around for the answer as, yes, graphics support would be nice…but since I didn't come across a good solution I went for the newest macOS so that the kid that gets this laptop can actually do something on it.

 

[CooperBox]

For anyone stuck with using Mountain Lion, I can recommend without hesitation Waterfox Classic web browser.
Another possibility is to use the dosdude1 patcher to upgrade the MacBook to Sierra, this being generally possible on any unsupported machines mid-2008 or later.
For systems running OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) or newer, there is another version of Waterfox which is also recommended.

As I have both Mountain Lion and Sierra on several of my Macs I use both versions of WaterFox, in fact I have not used Safari for many years, having preferred FireFox, and WaterFox (also Mozilla based) is speedy and ethical/more secure as no data or telemetry is sent back.
I also always make sure that my search engine within WaterFox is not Google, and there is facility in WaterFox Preferences/Search to change this, and I highly recommend setting it to DuckDuckGo for even greater non-tracking security.

 

[BrianBaughn]

deleted

 

[im_to_hyper]

I'm in the process of putting El Capitan on one of these MacBook 4,1 models and looked around for the answer as, yes, graphics support would be nice…but since I didn't come across a good solution I went for the newest macOS so that the kid that gets this laptop can actually do something on it.

Yeah this makes sense to me in a way, but I feel like one running 10.8 which has full GPU acceleration, along with Waterfox and Office 2011 will yield a far more satisfactory experience as far as "getting stuff done online" is concerned -- otherwise yes, it can run newer apps, but without acceleration that makes Youtube and other video sites basically unusable.

For anyone stuck with using Mountain Lion, I can recommend without hesitation Waterfox Classic web browser.
Another possibility is to use the dosdude1 patcher to upgrade the MacBook to Sierra, this being generally possible on any unsupported machines mid-2008 or later.
For systems running OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) or newer, there is another version of Waterfox which is also recommended.

As I have both Mountain Lion and Sierra on several of my Macs I use both versions of WaterFox, in fact I have not used Safari for many years, having preferred FireFox, and WaterFox (also Mozilla based) is speedy and ethical/more secure as no data or telemetry is sent back.
I also always make sure that my search engine within WaterFox is not Google, and there is facility in WaterFox Preferences/Search to change this, and I highly recommend setting it to DuckDuckGo for even greater non-tracking security.

Thanks for this suggestion! 10.8 is a solid go! Much obliged!

 

[wicknix]

See this post for more browser options.

Cheers