Pretty much any site that isn’t dedicated to vintage computers. GitHub is but one example among thousands which won’t load in even Classilla under OS9.
2022 PowerPC Challenge!
- Thread starter Branchus
- Start date
This is the reason it is called the PPC Challenge. If it was easy then it wouldn't be a challenge then. LOL
It wont really be a challenge as i use my ppc macs daily for web browsing, email, youtube, twitch, discord, irc, etc, but i think i'll play along this year.
The rules set forth in the opening post allow for Linux to be installed and used in this challenge. I myself have never use Linux, nor am I inclined to use it regardless of the benefits. In fact, I have been Mac only since my very first home computer in 1984, which was the 128K model. I have used Windoze extensively, which is of course why I never wanted to own a Windows machine. Again I’m a 100% Mac only guy. And that’s why I am focused exclusively on Mac solutions to the browsing problem, especially for macOS 9 and earlier.
There are other useful tasks that can be done under macOS 9 and Mac OS X on PPC Macs, so I look forward to seeing how each of you are exploring that in your own way in this Challenge.
Okay, I'm in.
I tested the WebKit with Sorbet Leopard and it is the best browser available for Mac OS 10.5.x
The InterWebPPC (G4 version) is much slower, laggier then the Webkit 604.5.6_2.
@JDW I don't know if Mac OS 10.5.9 installed on your Cube but maybe you should give it a try. And then try your web-tasks with this Webkit version.
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#PPCChallenge
Written on an iBook G4 1.42 with 1.5GB RAM, MacOS 10.5.9, WebKit 604.5.6_2
I tested the WebKit with Sorbet Leopard and it is the best browser available for Mac OS 10.5.x
The InterWebPPC (G4 version) is much slower, laggier then the Webkit 604.5.6_2.
@JDW I don't know if Mac OS 10.5.9 installed on your Cube but maybe you should give it a try. And then try your web-tasks with this Webkit version.
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#PPCChallenge
Written on an iBook G4 1.42 with 1.5GB RAM, MacOS 10.5.9, WebKit 604.5.6_2
Wow! Thank you for testing that!
The G4 Cube officially only supports up to OS 10.4 Tiger, but I see that someone created a hack to get 10.5 on the Cube. I may try that.
It looks like Github doesn't work with Webkit 604.5.6_2 either. You can browse the projects but for example the "commit comment" and the "last modification date" is not visible - just the placeholder animated grayish gif displayed...
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#PPCChallenge
Written on an iBook G4 1.42 with 1.5GB RAM, MacOS 10.5.9, WebKit 604.5.6_2
@fehervaria I'd be interested to see how InterWebPPC runs once the TenFourFoxPEP preferences patch has been applied - which was one of my prior projects before Sorbet Leopard. Post-patch, let me know how its performance compares to WebKit 604.
Failing that, AquaWeb micro (another project of mine) will definitely blow WebKit away in terms of sheer performance, although it requires a standard version of TenFourFox present in order to run. And even that will be eclipsed by Alex Free's port of Links2, at the cost of being able to run site JavaScript, CSS, embedded media, etc.
Side note, WebKit 604 supports a maximum of TLS 1.2, while TenFourFox and Links2 go up to TLS 1.3, meaning the latter can connect to Wikipedia while the former cannot. Therefore, you may also get better website compatibility by using several browsers in tandem rather than relying on just one - thus making your time on PowerPC even easier.
@JDW Sorbet Leopard is distributed as a self-contained disk image, meaning the system has already been installed and configured. LeopardAssist was designed for OS X 10.5's traditional installer medium, which is absent altogether in Sorbet; therefore all the user has to do to install Sorbet is to simply restore the image to an available partition like any other DMG file using Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner.
Apple's official system requirements for Leopard are mostly bogus. In reality, Leopard will run on any system as long as a G4 processor is present - although a Core Image / OpenGL 2.0-supported GPU is strongly suggested if optimal graphical performance is desired.
I hope that was helpful.
Failing that, AquaWeb micro (another project of mine) will definitely blow WebKit away in terms of sheer performance, although it requires a standard version of TenFourFox present in order to run. And even that will be eclipsed by Alex Free's port of Links2, at the cost of being able to run site JavaScript, CSS, embedded media, etc.
Side note, WebKit 604 supports a maximum of TLS 1.2, while TenFourFox and Links2 go up to TLS 1.3, meaning the latter can connect to Wikipedia while the former cannot. Therefore, you may also get better website compatibility by using several browsers in tandem rather than relying on just one - thus making your time on PowerPC even easier.
@JDW Sorbet Leopard is distributed as a self-contained disk image, meaning the system has already been installed and configured. LeopardAssist was designed for OS X 10.5's traditional installer medium, which is absent altogether in Sorbet; therefore all the user has to do to install Sorbet is to simply restore the image to an available partition like any other DMG file using Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner.
Apple's official system requirements for Leopard are mostly bogus. In reality, Leopard will run on any system as long as a G4 processor is present - although a Core Image / OpenGL 2.0-supported GPU is strongly suggested if optimal graphical performance is desired.
I hope that was helpful.
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The issue with leopard webkit is that it hasnt been updated since 2018 and doesnt support full tls 1.2 and has no support for tls 1.3 at all. This makes even a simple website like wikipedia not work at all. While its fast, its dated and wont connect to many sites. Mozilla based browsers have always been slower, even on ppc linux, but they at least work with most of the modern web.
Cheers
Cheers
Thank you.@fehervaria I'd be interested to see how InterWebPPC runs once the TenFourFoxPEP preferences patch has been applied - which was one of my prior projects before Sorbet Leopard. Post-patch, let me know how its performance compares to WebKit 604.
Failing that, AquaWeb micro (another project of mine) will definitely blow WebKit away in terms of sheer performance, although it requires a standard version of TenFourFox present in order to run. And even that will be eclipsed by Alex Free's port of Links2, at the cost of being able to run site JavaScript, CSS, embedded media, etc.
Side note, WebKit 604 supports a maximum of TLS 1.2, while TenFourFox and Links2 go up to TLS 1.3, meaning the latter can connect to Wikipedia while the former cannot. Therefore, you may also get better website compatibility by using several browsers in tandem rather than relying on just one - thus making your time on PowerPC even easier.
@JDW Sorbet Leopard is distributed as a self-contained disk image, meaning the system has already been installed and configured. LeopardAssist was designed for OS X 10.5's traditional installer medium, which is absent altogether in Sorbet; therefore all the user has to do to install Sorbet is to simply restore the image to an available partition like any other DMG file using Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner.
Apple's official system requirements for Leopard are mostly bogus. In reality, Leopard will run on any system as long as a G4 processor is present - although a Core Image / OpenGL 2.0-supported GPU is strongly suggested if optimal graphical performance is desired.
I hope that was helpful.
I will check it tomorrow and I will give my feedback.
Thank you! Yes, it is true, I know, about the Mozilla browsers are generic "slower" than others.
HUGE thank you for all of You guys who invest time and energy to make vintage Mac OS versions usable in 2022 - I my honest opinion, this should have been done by Apple at the end of the PPC era. (They should do the Mac OS X 10.5.9!!)
About the browsing experience: I think most of the modern web sites are poorly designed AND poorly implemented. Security is important, BUT the implementations are poor, low quality. Sadly not possible to point into one exact problem, it is multiple layers and multiple places.
Why we need "super computers", with GHz-es, multi-cores, GB of RAMs, TBs of storage?! A Mac Plus or SE/30 should be enough.. or a PPC.
Sorry for the off-topic. Let's enjoy our PPC machines!
(my beloved machines are the G4 generation (iMac, PowerMac MDD, iBook and PowerBook 12")
Preparation iWork '09 on Mac OS X Sorbet Leopard.
Side note, WebKit 604 supports a maximum of TLS 1.2, while TenFourFox and Links2 go up to TLS 1.3, meaning the latter can connect to Wikipedia while the former cannot. Therefore, you may also get better website compatibility by using several browsers in tandem rather than relying on just one - thus making your time on PowerPC even easier.
I hope that was helpful.
This is my approach in that I use a combination of interwebPPC, foxboxes, fluid, tenfivetube & DicordPPC (amongst some others) to go and do what I need to online - a lot of that list is Wicknix's handywork. Webkit for me has been too unstable to reliably use - ymmv. Anyhow, zippiness isn't prioritized when using ppc hardware therefore perceived needs are tempered & along with addons and other familiar functionality is why I stick with mozilla based browsers for PowerPC. I've been so busy I haven't had time to check out z970's Sorbet yet so I've been saving that up as something fun to explore during this PPC challenge.
HrutkayMods
New Tinkerer
Super excited for this challenge!~ First year participating. Wasn't able to last year because I didn't own any PowerPC Macs, ha. Did follow along using a Snow Leopard white MacBook though!
But now this year I'm able to. Picked up an iBook G4/800 last year and this iMac G5 just a few weeks ago which is gonna be my daily driver for it. 1.8GHz, 17", 2GB of RAM. Still using the original HDD though, don't have any SSDs I can put in this thing at the moment.
Blogging the whole thing on my website, even made a special page for it. Ironically, it only loads in TenFourFox/InterWeb, but I blame that on Neocities more than anything.
Might try installing Adelie tomorrow per Action Retro's suggestion. Watched the whole MacYak stream thru PPCMC on this thing.
Thrilled for the next two weeks! Plan to do a lot of writing and listening to music, ha.
Gonna keep a daily log here, below this image. There are extended daily logs on my website!
Here's a link to my PPC challenge hub on my website - https://loveshock.xyz/powerpc.html
DAILY LOG
Day 1: Wrote my first blog post and figured out how my workflow will go when it comes to uploading blog posts. Watched a bit of YouTube with PPCMC, including watching MacYak live. Played a bit in a Minecraft survival world while listening to some music. Ripped all my CDs on Sunday, but was able to get a soulseek client up and running so I could fill out my library - wasn't able to reliably retrieve stuff from my Navidrome server. Tomorrow, will probably write some more and get a 1.5.2 Minecraft server up and running.
Day 2: Didn't start the Minecraft server yet. Haven't had much energy to fiddle with it, honestly. I did end up optimizing my system a good bit, though. Applied TenFourFoxPEP and disabled some system aesthetics, it's a much smoother experience now. I also tried both Adelie Linux and Void Linux. Adelie had some weird graphical errors - everything was blue?? - and was missing a lot of KDE Plasma apps (there was no preferences or terminal emulator installed!!) so I ended up ditching it for Void. Void certainly ... works, on this machine, but it feels a lot laggier than I had anticipated. Maybe the ATI Radeon 9600 in this thing really isn't all that good, lol. Impressed that it was able to run modern Firefox at all, even if it updated at a whopping two seconds per frame. Seriously, every time I scrolled it froze for a few seconds and had to redraw the whole page.
Needless to say, I went back to OS X. How do you do it, wicknix. Is the iMac G5/1.8 really just not up to speed for XFCE?
Did end up getting some work done, though - filled out form W2 for an employee straight from the Mac. Wasn't all bad an experience! Getting the numbers from my Google Drive did involve using my phone, though. GDrive does not work with either WebKit or InterWeb.
Not sure what I'm gonna do tomorrow. Maybe do some more writing.
But now this year I'm able to. Picked up an iBook G4/800 last year and this iMac G5 just a few weeks ago which is gonna be my daily driver for it. 1.8GHz, 17", 2GB of RAM. Still using the original HDD though, don't have any SSDs I can put in this thing at the moment.
Blogging the whole thing on my website, even made a special page for it. Ironically, it only loads in TenFourFox/InterWeb, but I blame that on Neocities more than anything.
Might try installing Adelie tomorrow per Action Retro's suggestion. Watched the whole MacYak stream thru PPCMC on this thing.
Thrilled for the next two weeks! Plan to do a lot of writing and listening to music, ha.
Gonna keep a daily log here, below this image. There are extended daily logs on my website!
Here's a link to my PPC challenge hub on my website - https://loveshock.xyz/powerpc.html
DAILY LOG
Day 1: Wrote my first blog post and figured out how my workflow will go when it comes to uploading blog posts. Watched a bit of YouTube with PPCMC, including watching MacYak live. Played a bit in a Minecraft survival world while listening to some music. Ripped all my CDs on Sunday, but was able to get a soulseek client up and running so I could fill out my library - wasn't able to reliably retrieve stuff from my Navidrome server. Tomorrow, will probably write some more and get a 1.5.2 Minecraft server up and running.
Day 2: Didn't start the Minecraft server yet. Haven't had much energy to fiddle with it, honestly. I did end up optimizing my system a good bit, though. Applied TenFourFoxPEP and disabled some system aesthetics, it's a much smoother experience now. I also tried both Adelie Linux and Void Linux. Adelie had some weird graphical errors - everything was blue?? - and was missing a lot of KDE Plasma apps (there was no preferences or terminal emulator installed!!) so I ended up ditching it for Void. Void certainly ... works, on this machine, but it feels a lot laggier than I had anticipated. Maybe the ATI Radeon 9600 in this thing really isn't all that good, lol. Impressed that it was able to run modern Firefox at all, even if it updated at a whopping two seconds per frame. Seriously, every time I scrolled it froze for a few seconds and had to redraw the whole page.
Needless to say, I went back to OS X. How do you do it, wicknix. Is the iMac G5/1.8 really just not up to speed for XFCE?
Did end up getting some work done, though - filled out form W2 for an employee straight from the Mac. Wasn't all bad an experience! Getting the numbers from my Google Drive did involve using my phone, though. GDrive does not work with either WebKit or InterWeb.
Not sure what I'm gonna do tomorrow. Maybe do some more writing.
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Here's the ibookg4 portable I will be using.
Software on portable includes:
Browsing: InterwebPPC
Music: Itunes
Youtube: TenfiveTube/InterwebPPC w/ Ipad user agent
Social: DiscordPPC, FaceIt
Mail: Basic HTML in browser
Productivity: iwork 08, iweb, PS, OmniGraffle 5, Toast 9, BBedit
Maintenance: DIsk Utility, CCC, ipartition, Onyx, coconut
Fun: FastIcns, Live Quartz
I'll get to my desktop later today.
Software on portable includes:
Browsing: InterwebPPC
Music: Itunes
Youtube: TenfiveTube/InterwebPPC w/ Ipad user agent
Social: DiscordPPC, FaceIt
Mail: Basic HTML in browser
Productivity: iwork 08, iweb, PS, OmniGraffle 5, Toast 9, BBedit
Maintenance: DIsk Utility, CCC, ipartition, Onyx, coconut
Fun: FastIcns, Live Quartz
I'll get to my desktop later today.
Below is my desktop - PowermacG4 Quicksilver.
Software is very similar to my ibook Im using for this except I have some games, emulators and different foxbox iterations - so won't relist all that.
Going into this, I thought email would be the biggest hurdle, but to date, using basic HTML gmail in browser has worked out fine for me and is quite snappy. For a lighter browser experience in general, I have been using the ipad UA built into InterwebPPC and it has been great especially with video, youtube etc. Streaming music is handled by itunes 10 and broadcast to BT speakers. DiscordPPC is something I'd like to tweak a bit. I can reduce text size & spacing in the center text field which is great but not the outer fields which makes viewing on moderate resolution 4:3 screens tough. It would be great to just be able to shrink those altogether & get them out of the way but I don't believe that is even an option anywhere in Discord's current vanilla client. Regardless,Discord on a mac made 15 or so years ago courtesy of Wcknix is pretty darn cool - crushes it on my powemacg5s.
Oh yeah, I ran into this weird behavior when updating icons today. Typically, I just copy n paste a .icns over the getinfo icon of whatever I want to change. This didn't work on 10.5.8. In Leopard, I had to open the icon in preview, then in menu, select all, copy, and then paste over the getinfo icon to get it to stick I figured it out but man it had me hacked off until I did. Aside from that oddity, everything has been fine - humming along at a leisurely pace.
Software is very similar to my ibook Im using for this except I have some games, emulators and different foxbox iterations - so won't relist all that.
Going into this, I thought email would be the biggest hurdle, but to date, using basic HTML gmail in browser has worked out fine for me and is quite snappy. For a lighter browser experience in general, I have been using the ipad UA built into InterwebPPC and it has been great especially with video, youtube etc. Streaming music is handled by itunes 10 and broadcast to BT speakers. DiscordPPC is something I'd like to tweak a bit. I can reduce text size & spacing in the center text field which is great but not the outer fields which makes viewing on moderate resolution 4:3 screens tough. It would be great to just be able to shrink those altogether & get them out of the way but I don't believe that is even an option anywhere in Discord's current vanilla client. Regardless,Discord on a mac made 15 or so years ago courtesy of Wcknix is pretty darn cool - crushes it on my powemacg5s.
Oh yeah, I ran into this weird behavior when updating icons today. Typically, I just copy n paste a .icns over the getinfo icon of whatever I want to change. This didn't work on 10.5.8. In Leopard, I had to open the icon in preview, then in menu, select all, copy, and then paste over the getinfo icon to get it to stick I figured it out but man it had me hacked off until I did. Aside from that oddity, everything has been fine - humming along at a leisurely pace.
I have had no issues with photos in DiscordPPC. For emoji support, you need to copy the 2 fonts symbola.ttf and symbola_hint.ttf to /Library/Fonts - although I did notice that recently with v1.3 that while the blue ?'s are gone, emojis are empty despite dropping the symbola files where it needs to go. Also, Ive noticed an increase in sluggishness on my g4 systems compared to crushing it on my Powermac G5s. I have not tried Dosdude's Discord Lite - I'd like to give it a go but was cornfused how to get it to function with the files on his github.
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Shouldn't need to mess with the files. Just download from the latest release and log in.
Been running a dream for me, personally, as a light but feature-complete-enough version of Discord. Only caveat is I had to disable some account security stuff to get it to work.