

I’ve long been a fan and user of Camino, but it’s always badly lagged Firefox in terms of updating the underlying Gecko rendering engine. Safari on PPC (along with its WebKit-bundling brethren iCab and OmniWeb) is usable at the moment, and it’s my browser du jour, but it’s in maintenance mode and goodies like WebKit2 aren’t in its future for PPC. Unfortunately, with the recent release of Opera 11, it joins Safari as abandonware for the PowerPC platform. Opera 10 is only six months old, and it’s easily the next-best (or the best, if you’re a fan of Opera features like Opera Unite, syncing and long-beloved mouse gestures) and supports WebM and other emerging standards. There are still a couple of decent browser alternatives for the PPC faithful. All of this, despite a number of not-insignificant architectural changes under the hood to be Tiger-compatible.Ĭoming soon is AltiVec-accelerated WebM video, and it’s looking good so far for TenFourFox to be able to keep up with Firefox’s new “rapid-release” schedule through at least the fully awesome Firefox 5 this summer. Browser rendering and passes with flying colors. All my Firefox 4-compatible extensions upgraded and worked flawlessly.
#Tenfourfox browser full#
TenFourFox’s JavaScript performance tested 3x faster than Safari or Opera 10 on my Mac, thanks to a custom PPC-native JIT (see graph on the homepage for full breakdown). Other than that, it’s all good news, and getting better in the short term. I’d love SilverFox, tolerate OlderFox, and, honestly, even prefer the mocked IceWeasel. These are long-acknowledged issues, and the plan (partly forced because of upstream changes to Firefox) is to preference all plugins off by default in the 4.1 version.Īlso, I have to say, the name is terrible. (So if you’re a Firefox user, check it out!) The two major complaints I have - UI tearing and crashes - are both caused by Adobe’s badly aging, abandonware Flash plugin for PowerPC.
#Tenfourfox browser upgrade#
The good news is, TenFourFox is a big upgrade over Firefox 3. Introducing TenFourFoxįirst, let me point out that TenFourFox is a free, open-source project, and one unbacked by the deep pockets of the Mozilla Foundation and their Googlebucks, so let me thank the developer for this volunteer effort. Here’s a mini-review of my impressions after a week, and a look at what’s coming up in browser-land for those of us clinging proudly to the last generation of PowerPC Macintosh computers. Meanwhile, my Powerbook G4 is still running happily along on OS X 10.4 Tiger, so I was happy to find the answer to my Firefox 4 woes in TenFourFox, a Firefox fork with builds optimized for various G5, G4 and G3 processors.

In the meantime, the stock Android browser and Opera Mobile are both great (Opera’s font rendering needs work in the hinting/character spacing department, but that’s it). There’s a faint glimmer of hope there, but with the ARMv6 test builds already pulled, I’m not holding my breath.

My Android phone, the LG Optimus S, is only a few months old, but its ARMv6 processor isn’t supported.
#Tenfourfox browser for android#
Mozilla hit me with a double whammy of “your hardware sucks” last week, when they released major new versions of Firefox 4 and mobile Firefox 4 for Android (the first!) … but left me out of both parties. Sticks 10:04 pm Firefox 4 for PowerPC Macs: TenFourFox
