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Firefox 4 on Tiger PPC

agg23

Well-known member
Just tried TenFourFox on a G3 iBook after having used it on my G4 Mac Mini and it flies! :O

I can't believe how fast this browser is. I was about to browse sites at about the same speed as my MacBook.

Thank you so much ClassicHasClass :)

 

PowerPup

Well-known member
TenFourFox beta 9's address bar is acting a little weird on my TiBook. Whenever I hover over a link, it disappears and reappears with the URL of the link, and the same when I take the cursor off the link. Like it's updating slowly. It worked perfectly fine in beta 8.

Just noticed that when I quickly hover over two links, it's fine, it has something to do with transitioning from normal to showing the destination link.

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
There's apparently a performance regression in the version of cairo in Mozilla 2. They're supposed to fix this, but I haven't seen much activity on that front. :-/

agg23, since you've got a G3, how well does the nanojit work for you? (See the release notes on how to enable it.) I don't have a G3 with Tiger, so I'm depending on user reports.

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
Well, well. The nanojit may be less effective on G5, but we're getting excellent reports on G4. A user wrote in to report that to my surprise, the G4 really benefits from it -- which makes me wonder where it gets it so wrong on the G5. On my iBook, it cuts SunSpider execution time in half, and matches the G5! So shame on me for assuming the G5 with all its fancy out-of-order hardware would be the last word.

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
agg23, this is a G3, right? If so, that's fabulous. This means the only CPU that the nanojit doesn't broadly benefit is the G5.

highlandcattle, the nanojit is a component of Mozilla's JavaScript engine that translates "traces" of JavaScript execution into native assembly code. Previously, the only working nanojits were for ARM, x86, x86_64 and SPARC, and the SPARC one was "unofficial." PPC and MIPS had code present, but it was incomplete for Firefox. So, I finished it and now we have native code compilation for JavaScript for PowerPC for the first time. I submitted it back to Mozilla to get it into the source tree (bug 624164), but I put it in TenFourFox so people can use and benefit from it now. There is at least one bug I know of already, but it's so far been remarkably functional.

 

ChristTrekker

Well-known member
b9 is definitely a step backward from b8 on my G5. Tab bar is screwy, and I've had two system panics since I've been using it. (That may be completely coincidental, but ...) So for now I've reinstalled b8.

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
The tab bar was a Mozilla bug, allegedly fixed in b10. However, I'm skipping b10 since b11 is supposed to be out next week. Not sure what to say about the crashes, although I did test drive it on my dad's 10.5.8 G4 mini and it seemed to be okay.

In better news, I think I cracked the performance issues with the nanojit on G5. I'm running off a test build right now, but I think I've got it benching faster than stock interpreter for the first time. The performance improvement isn't as dramatic as the G3 or G4, but it's still an improvement.

 
This works great on my 'new' iBook G3 600Mhz! No problems with it.

Sites I tested so far are Youtube, MSN.com, Hotmail, 68kmla offcourse and Macintosh Garden. They all seem to work flawlessly, Flash does also work.

TFF itself does also look beautiful. Even HTML5 works, but the performance is not really good to be honest (but still works better than I thought), I used http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/ for the HTML5 test.

But I hope that you will keep developing this wonderful application!

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
I suspect the big problem with that test is that TenFourFox doesn't have hardware acceleration, and unless Mozilla gets rid of the NPOT texture size requirement, it's not going to. :(

That said, beta 11 will have the JavaScript accelerator enabled by default for all systems, including G5s (although it has the most dramatic improvement on G3 and G4). This will be a big difference if you haven't already turned it on.

 

ChristTrekker

Well-known member
What kind of JS acceleration are you seeing, overall, on G3/G4/G5? Which operations are seeing the biggest boost?

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
agg23 posted his G3 numbers, but by and large for G3s and G4s it's about 2x speed. My father's 1.5GHz G4 mini, for example, benches at 6185ms without it but 2811ms with it in SunSpider.

For G5s, however, it seems to hit a wall with the extra hardware. SunSpider actually takes a hit, but with tuning to blacklist expensive JSOPs, Dromaeo and V8 both get wins. It's not as dramatic, however, and a very fast G4 will actually bench faster. I'm trying to figure out why; it seems that the G5's longer pipeline takes a bigger penalty for stalls. That said, the base interpreter without acceleration on my quad is around 3300ms. The accelerator "accelerates" that to 3700ms, but Dromaeo gains several runs/sec and the V8 score jumps, so I'm calling it an overall win.

 

kite210

Well-known member
Hello,

I'm using TenFourFox on my G3 Power Mac (B&W) and it works great, It's a lot faster than firefox 3.6 and more responsive.

Thanks Cameron :beige:

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
You're welcome, but now you have to upgrade it, because beta 11 is out :) This version turns on JavaScript acceleration for everybody, even G5 users. G5 users will see less improvement, but will still see some. G4 and G3 owners will see the most improvement. There are also some bug fixes and the browser is overall quicker thanks to rendering improvements.

Just for yuks, I put a chart on the main page of a browser JavaScript speed comparison I did when I was at my folks' last (see above) since Dad runs 10.5.8 on his G4 mini so that he can use iTunes 10 (I'm the Nexus One heathen, my folks use their iPhone 3GSes still). This gave me a chance to test Safari 5. No points for guessing that TenFourFox won by a large margin, but I think people will be very surprised by which browser came in 2nd. I didn't expect this either.

 

mac2geezer

Well-known member
I've encountered a glitch on the G5. Using beta 11, sometimes when I attempt to login to this forum with the correct user name/password the browser claims "You have exceeded the maximum number of attempts blah, blah". This happens on the first login attempt. As I recall this did not happen with previous builds, but my memory may be faulty.

 
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