Amaya Toman This fall, Mac owners got another update to Apple's desktop operating system. The novelty called macOS Mojave brought a lot of great features and improvements. But at the beginning of this journey stood a handful of operating systems, named after wild cats. One of them – Mac OS X Panther – celebrates its anniversary these days.
Apple released Mac OS X Panther on October 25, 2003. For its time, the relatively innovative operating system for Apple computers served users with a number of innovations and improvements, many of which have survived in Apple's desktop operating systems to this day.
New features that debuted in Mac OS X Panther included Exposé. Thanks to it, users could clearly display the list of active windows and conveniently switch between them. Apple also improved communication capabilities in Mac OS X Panther - the new iChat AV allowed users to communicate via audio and video as well as text messages. Those who liked Apple's Safari web browser could make it their primary browser for the first time.
"Panther established a new gold standard for operating systems," said then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a press release announcing the arrival of Mac OS X version 10.3. "With more than 150 new features today, we're bringing innovations that you won't see in any other operating system for the next several years," the release continued.
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The release of the Mac OS X Panther operating system followed the arrival of another big cat Apple family, Mac OS X Jaguar. The successor was Mac OS X Tiger. Although Panther was not generally considered a "must have" update that would revolutionize the field of desktop operating systems from Apple, its new features, along with improved compatibility with Windows, caused a very positive reception by users. The improved Safari, which became the default browser in Mac OS X Panther, also gained great popularity. This was not possible until now because Apple made a deal with Microsoft in 1997 to make Internet Explorer the primary browser for the next five years.
Another relatively inconspicuous but very important new feature in Mac OS X Panther was the new, redesigned Finder. It received not only a new look, but also a useful sidebar, thanks to which users had easier access to individual items, such as network locations or drives. Along with Mac OS X Panther, the encryption tool FileVault, Xcode for developers or perhaps simpler options for managing system fonts came into the world. Apple was selling its new operating system for $129, and customers who bought a new Mac two weeks before the update was released got it for free.
Source: Cult of Mac, git-tower
