I was happy with Panther on a CRT iMac for quite a time after the appearance of Tiger, but the change to Tiger was prompted by its greater Web security. Tiger's 'stealth mode' and firewall logging, as well as the ability to close off even unwanted UDP traffic give just that extra degree of protection. Just to sit and watch the firewall log incrementing while there is no active connection to any site is quite a sobering activity.

At 500MHz and at least 768MB of RAM there is little to choose between Panther and Tiger for speed and reliability, but Tiger's apps are just that little more mature, ignoring the gew-gaws.

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