Firefox 4 on Tiger PPC

[ClassicHasClass]

Of course there's going to be a G3 build! How could I leave all those Pismos out in the cold! The G3 build is actually useful, because I use it to test under Rosetta since I have no Leopard PPCs.

There are a couple bugs I need to shake out over the weekend. The G5 build was a rocket, but started getting crashy, so I need to tune the optimization parameters a bit. The G3 and G4 builds are more solid once I countered a bug that could make the browser crash when the window was closed. I'm using the 7450 build for this post now.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

May I present ... TenFourFox.

http://www.tenfourfox.com/

I have consolidated the G4/G5 builds into a single AltiVec build, since there was only minimal speed differences and I could not get the G5 build to be stable. There is also a separate G3 build. Please read the Release Notes!

That said, I have completely converted over to TenFourFox myself on all of my systems. Camino will shortly be a distant memory.

 

[agg23]

Cool! Can't wait to try it!

How does it compare to 3.6 on a G3?

 

[ChristTrekker]

Will the 'fox run on Tiger? 10-4, good buddy!

 

[PowerPup]

Hoo-rahh! I'm going to try this on both my Lomard and TiBook.

Love the professional look to the site, the fine-print at the bottom was hilarious.

Edit: Posting from TenFourFox on my TiBook. Looking good so far. (Although the title at the top of the window is hard to read against the theme I have. Oh well.)

 

[ClassicHasClass]

agg23, I actually don't own a G3 running 10.4.11 at this time (I only recently got a PDQ WS 266, but I'm not sure if I'm going to use it as an 8.6 Classilla test rig or try to XPostFacto Tiger on it), so I couldn't say. I will say that the speed improvements alone are key, and the app is specifically tuned too, so you will probably notice a significant difference. However, a G3 and most low-spec G4s probably won't be able to play video well; even my 1.33GHz iBook G4 had a bit of trouble keeping up occasionally, though the G5 zips right along, natch, so I peg 1.25GHz as probably the minimum to play video reasonably.

PowerPup, glad it's working on your TiBook I daresay that overall you'll find it snappier over 3.6. It's certainly snappier on this quad.

 

[PowerPup]

I had a strange quirk happen when I re-opened it after deleting Camino and it's profile data.... Bookmarks, menu, and the address bar quit working. Might have had something to do with SyncFox addon being installed. So I deleted the profile data and let it generate a new one. Everything is working fine now. I'm really impressed with the new Firefox layout. I was a little surprised when I couldn't find the status bar, found out that they relocated the target link in the right side of the address bar and recalled the status bar to "addon bar." I've now deleted Camino & Firefox on my TiBook and have TFF as my default browser.

I'll report back after testing TenFourFox on my G3 Lombard.

 

[PowerPup]

Well, currently posting from my G3 Lombard, and I must say I'm rather impressed. Comparing between TFF and an optimized G3 build of Camino, Camino seems to start up a little quicker, (only by a few noticeable seconds,) but TFF clearly renders things faster of the two.

Being a 333Mhz G3 with only 384MB of RAM and a 4GB HD, you can't expect Tiger or TFF to be very speedy. But it's fairly decent. I just need a bigger HD for my Lombard. (A little more RAM wouldn't hurt either.)

 

[mac2geezer]

Well, I'm impressed by the limited testing so far. Seems quite speedy on the dual core G5. Another great job by Cameron!

 

[PowerPup]

Okay, I figured out why TFF was acting a little weird on my TiBook. Turns out that the addon "WebMail Notifier" has a compatibility issue with the latest beta of FireFox 4. Dunno if it's Mac specific or not. But oh well. I can do without it on my mac for now.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Yeah, the compatibility changes between 3.6 and 4 really bit some add-on authors. Extensions now need a manifest (which does reduce startup time), and there are some significant internal changes. I know my own extensions like OverbiteFF needed to be overhauled somewhat, and when Electrolysis comes, there will be another cathartic API gap. I'm hoping Electrolysis comes later than sooner, because I'm concerned it may make Mozilla no longer buildable on Tiger (among other things, it depends on Chromium IPC and IPC currently requires linking everything into a big fat libxul which makes the Tiger linker barf).

 

[J English Smith]

When I try and unpack that .zip file, I get an "operation not permitted" dialog box (header is 'archive utility'). But I did this before, on another Pismo, with no problem. How do I work around that?

 

[J English Smith]

Huh, I unzipped it on my Win XP machine and then loaded the .app file just fine. Weird. Something about .zip files that is locked down in OS X?

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Shouldn't be. Were you unzipping in a location that was read-only?

Incidentally, for those who want to follow along, I've put up a dev blog: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/

I should do the same for Classilla, and will soon.

 

[QuadSix50]

I was just about to post about this on the forum, but glad to see that it's had an early following already. Can't currently try on my iMac G5 because the caps went out on it again. Gonna have to replace those, probably over the Christmas break. Very eager to give it a try, though. My dad has a dual-proc Quicksilver that I'll probably test it on.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Got beta 8 up tonight. Playing with some ideas for better G5 optimization, and there will be a G4/7400 version since the 7450 version is not doing well enough on those machines. Hoping for release in a week or so.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Well, 12 days is close to a week, right? I put up the dev notes on http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2010/12/beta-8-now-available.html and you can get it now from http://www.tenfourfox.com/ . Notice new G5 and G4/7400-specific builds (along with G3 and G4/7450). The G5 version has very interesting tuning to maintain stability; the interested can look at about:buildconfig. It had to be done like that because -mcpu=G5 (let alone -fast) makes a very unstable Firefox. I'll have to debug this later, but the tweaks still squeeze out around 15% compared to 7450 on a G5. Lots of good stuff; see the release notes.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

For those using this, beta 9 is now available.

 

[ChristTrekker]

I've been using TenFourFox as my sole browser (at home) for a couple weeks now. Very good performance overall, very pleased with it. The only thing I've noticed is that when I use Cmd-+ to scale up the page, it acts multiple times for one press. Sometimes only three increases, sometimes all the way to maximum (eight times). I don't have a sticky key, because this doesn't happen with other browsers.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Is this 10.5? Seems okay on 10.4 G5.