Recent Safari 1.3.2 Problems

Question

On one of my Mac's, I am still running Mac OX 10.3.9 and, consequently, have Safari 1.3.2. Recently (in the last 3-4 months) I have been starting to see some problems. Most notably, Google Maps no longer works and trying it results in Safari crashing. So for Google Maps, I now use Firefox but would prefer to stick with Safari. Some other websites also result in Safari crashing and there seem to be more and more of these situations. In addition, Safari seems to be taking longer to actually open certain websites. Note: It has no problem with others, like the Apple website.
So here are my questions: Is it time to re-install from scratch Safari 1.3.2 on my Mac OS 10.3.9 computer? If so, how do I do this? I know how to download 1.3.0 and 1.3.1 and 1.3.2 from Apple but do I have to remove the old Safari first? Messages seem to imply that it can not be installed on my Mac OS 10.3.9 so what am I doing wrong?
Are these problems related to still using 1.3.2 versus higher revisions with 10.4 or 10.5? I am in the process of moving my other Mac to 10.4 and will soon have a new Mac with 10.5; however, I still plan to use my 10.3.9 for a while longer.
Any assistance would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi JB Mac,
The Google Maps problems you mention are primarily due to Google changing some JavaScript they use on those pages. These changes expose a bug in Safari's JavaScript engine causing the browser to crash. There's a few discussions here in the forum that discuss this.
As Apple no longer support Safari 1.3.x, and Google do not seem to want to change their code, the only solution at present seems to be to use another browser on OS X 10.3.x (such as [Camino|www.caminobrowser.org]).