![]() It’s a fun read, and I think it’s worthy of a look if you are curious of how PowerMac G5s influenced console gaming history. I missed this article from a couple of years ago which detail how to get the Xbox 360 SDK environment working on very specific PowerMac G5s. Nathan Categories News Tags end of life, tenfourfox, web browsing 6 Comments In the meanwhile, does this mean our G5s are useless? Of course not! You can still do so many things on the modern web via your G5 – like chatting on IRC, sharing files, serving webpages, programming your dream projects, and browsing into the foreseeable future (but hopefully not accessing anything that needs to be sensitive/secure).īut it is ultimately another reminder that our Macs are getting older and older, and as Apple transitions full bore to Apple Silicon, we are not just one distant architecture behind but two. Maybe PowerPC users could think about collectively pooling resources to hire 2-3 programmers to update javascript, add features, and optimize the browser. I’d be fully supportive of such an endeavor. ![]() ![]() ![]() Of course, someone could come along and pick up on TenFourFox code and decide to tweak and add new features on their own. He’s a brilliant and kind guy, and we owe him our immense gratitude. It was awesome to thank him personally and find out how many other vintage projects he has going on. I had the privilege of meeting Cameron back at vintage computer conference near Sunnyvale, CA several years back. You can make workarounds to gracefully degrade where we have missing HTML or DOM features, but JavaScript is pretty much run or don’t, and more and more sites just plain collapse if any portion of it doesn’t. For better or for worse, web browsers’ primary role is no longer to view documents it is to view applications that, by sheer coincidence, sometimes resemble documents. However, JavaScript is what probably killed TenFourFox quickest. Writing and maintaining a browser engine is fricking hard and everything moves far too quickly for a single developer now. The modern web, even on a somewhat updated browser, will struggle on our older computers. The internet will continue to introduce new technologies and make life miserable. Plus, despite many PowerPC users upgrading to solid state drives, flashed graphics card, occasional CPU upgrades, and maxed out RAM, there isn’t any processing power to gain out of our aging and venerable Macs. There was always going to be an end to development for TenFourFox. There really are not any alternatives beyond jumping to Linux, which carries with it its own set of tradeoffs and challenges. Cameron has performed coding miracles figuring out ways to add features, squeeze better performance, and generally give us a secure and somewhat modern option for PowerPC Macs running 10.4 and 10.5 in recent years. The project shared administration with Classilla, a fork of Mozilla Application Suite for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS 8.6.I was away enjoying the pristine beauty of western Maryland earlier this week when the news dropped from Cameron Kaiser that TenFourFox, the most important piece of software to keep our Power Mac G5s somewhat relevant in this modern era of complex interweb technology, is nearing the end of its active development.įirst, this should be no surprise. It also includes JavaScript just-in-time compilation, custom builds for specific PowerPC processor families and AltiVec acceleration of key media codecs.The primary maintainer is Cameron Kaiser. Like Firefox, it includes compatibility with a wide range of addons, Acid2 and Acid3 compliance, and HTML 5 and CSS 3 features. The project was started after Mozilla announced that it would not release Firefox 4 for PowerPC versions of OS X. It is a port of Mozilla Firefox for PowerPC-based Macintosh computers running Mac OS X to retain compatibility with the older architecture and older versions of the operating system, and to add PowerPC-specific optimizations for improved performance. TenFourFox is a web browser for Power Macintosh computers, based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine. When Mozilla decided to stop releasing Firefox this was released to fill the gap. This project is not affiliated with nor supported by Mozilla in any way, and is not an official build. A fork of Firefox to maintain support for the Power Mac, supporting Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, with special features and optimizations for PowerPC processors and AltiVec.
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