PowerFox - new web browser for Leopard on PowerPC!

3lectr1c

Active Tinkerer
May 15, 2022
670
339
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the United States
www.macdat.net
I can't believe it, but it's true! It looks like browsing the modern web on PowerPC isn't dead quite yet.


PowerFox is an FF-based browser released earlier this month with a target platform of Snow Leopard. Just a couple days ago though, they released a beta build for Leopard which runs on PowerPC G4 or G5 hardware. JIT isn't implemented (yet?) so I don't know how well it will perform compared to TFF. Since it's got a newer browser engine, it should at least be able to render websites which no longer work on TFF or InterWebPPC.

I'd love to try this out myself, but unfortunately I'm away at college until March and I didn't bring any PowerPC hardware with me. Curious to see how well it performs for y'all.
 

scj312

Tinkerer
Oct 29, 2021
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It's a bit slow on my G5 without JIT, but it does work quite nicely!
 

phunguss

Active Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
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Stillwater, MN
Great find! It does work slowly, but it does WORK.
Picture 1.png
 

ClassicHasClass

Tinkerer
Aug 30, 2022
421
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www.floodgap.com
Because UXP's widget layer is not too different from TenFourFox's, it should be possible to port the rest of the 10.4 changes (and there are quite a few), and it should "just work" without a lot of fuss on Tiger.

The JIT is a different story. The basis would still transfer, but it would require a fair bit of additional programming, and the JavaScript compiler has advanced quite a bit since Fx45. This also doesn't include Wasm, which is inherently little-endian (there is some hacking to make asm.js look little-endian to the PowerPC in TenFourFox but not everything has an asm.js equivalent).