TenFourFox: 'Mozilla left you. Apple left you. But we didn't.'

Apple news, views and reviews

TenFourFox: ‘Mozilla left you. Apple left you. But we didn’t.’

28 April 2011 1,700 views 4 Comments

Camino’s a fine, fine browser that’s pretty darned fast on older Macs, but it will never get the updated JavaScript and Gecko goodness baked into the latest Firefox release. Thereupon, Mozilla hasn’t included PowerPC support in Firefox 4. What’s a dedicated PPC Mac lover to do?

The other day, Low End Mac declared that Safari 5.0.5 is the fastest browser on PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard. That’s all well and fine for 867MHz and faster G4s, but there are still tons and tons of older still G3 and G4 Macs out there — what about them?

PPC Mac lovers’ pleas have been heard. FloodGap, a.k.a. Cameron Kaiser, has released TenFourFox, which is based on Firefox 4 and tuned for use on Macs running OS X 10.4.x (10.5.x compatible).

The fastest JavaScript implementation on PPC Macs, says FloodGap

“…Apple’s been giving us Power Mac users the proverbial middle digit since 2006,” says FloodGap on their website. “That’s why your MacBook has the same hoary old architecture in ye old generic Wintel box, and if you want to use your perfectly good OS 9 software, you’re using Tiger or bust.”

That said, you can download processor specific versions (G3, G4, G4e, G5) of this browser for your specific Mac.

I don’t have a PowerPC Mac to test FloodGap’s aggressive claims. Anybody out there in PPC land feeling the TenFourFox love?

4 Comments »

Tim said:

TenFourFox is my main browser on both my eMac and my clamshell iBook g3. It’s just as fast and stable as firefox 4 is on my Ubuntu and Windows 7 machines. Only time it even begins to slow to a crawl is when I enable flash on my iBook, but all browsers slow to a crawl with flash enabled.

# 28 April 2011 at 10:15 pm

Thunderbird 5: Faster start up, better performance with Gecko 5 engine | FairerPlatform said:

[...] measure of feature parity is available in TenFourFox, a private label build, which brings much of the goodness of Firefox 4 to the PowerPC [...]

# 29 June 2011 at 5:08 pm

Dave P. said:

Any chance of a PowerPC port of Thunderbird 5?

# 1 July 2011 at 7:57 am

Stan Arnold said:

Love TebFourFox 4.0. BUT how do you get to view your bookmarked pages in order, starting with the most recent at the top. Mine just seem to be listed in a random order.

bit of the software just seems over-engineered – with too many badly signposted options, and it doesn’t default to the obvious chronological order.

Any help gratefully received.

Stan Arnold

# 2 July 2011 at 4:38 pm