so i found a version of firefox that's still being somewhat updated that works on OSX 10.8... 

https://parrotgeek.com/fxlegacy.html

it's really nice to have this. i haven't found any broken websites yet on Chrome 49, but eventually that will happen... the version of Chrome i'm using is 4 years out of date so... 

my quest to be able to spend a lot of time in OSX 10.8 is becoming reality, which i love just because of how fast this OS feels.