alt Hacker NewsMac OS 9 was certainly not rock solid as far as crashes were concerned, but very much better than System 7, that was clear to me. Maybe it is my rose-tinted glasses colouring my memory but I also remember that there were very few small bug, you know the just annoying kind, than I have today with macOS 15, there may be fewer hard crashes, but the number of paper cuts have increased by many orders of magnitude.
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Well, I got my B&W G3 because MacOS 9 lunched the filesystem as it was prone to doing. SCSI drive so it wasn't that other disk corruption fun (which I went through in PC land). As far as I'm concerned MacOS 9 was mostly a bunch of paper cuts glued together. Lots of stuff that would've demoed in OSX if Apple had the time and patience.
So yeah Apple had tacked on vestigial multi-user support, an automatic system update mechanism, USB support, etc., etc. but underneath it was still the same old single user, cooperative multitasked, no memory protection OS as its predecessors. Unlike OSX, MacOS 9 (like 7 and 8 before it) still relied on the Toolbox which was a mishmash of m68k and ppc code.
I remember it crashing a lot but maybe that's because I came of age around the OS 8/9 era. IIUC OS 9 had no memory protection so it's not exactly a surprise it was fragile.