Thread

Firefox 4 on Tiger PPC

68kMLA PowerPC 63 posts Oct 16, 2010 to Mar 10, 2011

#1 Sat, 16 Oct 2010 - 18:58 68kMLA

From the if-you-want-something-done-you-do-it-yourself department, as posted to the OS 9 list.

This is mostly off-topic, but since I know that many (like me) use Tiger

as our preferred version of OS X [when in OS X ] because it runs Classic

apps, there had been discussion on the list on what to do when web browsers

start drying up for PowerPC and Tiger as they are now.

Mozilla has already announced that not only will Firefox 4 not run on Tiger,

it will also not be supported on PowerPC. Although there will come a time

when adding the hacks needed to get it to backbuild will no longer serve, that

day is still a long way off:

http://www.floodgap.com/iv/1074

Yes, this is Firefox 4.0b7pre "Minefield" running on my personal quad G5 with

10.4.11. It uses Mozilla's new Harfbuzz font shaper and part of Apple's

private CoreText framework secretly in Tiger that I reverse-engineered, and

no ATSUI. It also adds back the UI hacks from 3.6 for Tiger that were removed

for 4.0, and makes other changes to allow building. These changes are all

relatively straightforward to add and, like WaMCom was when 1.3 emerged without

OS 9 support, is overwhelmingly all Mozilla code still. It took less time than

I thought to do the legwork and make the tweaks, about a couple weeks.

Note that there are still some big challenges to come in Fx 4. Beta 7 final

activates JagerMonkey (which will run in TraceMonkey mode on PPC) and OpenGL,

and makes a lot of changes. I will pull source again when b7 comes out finally

and reapply all these changes to a new clean repo. If that works well, there

might be some public binaries for the adventurous to play with then. There will

be separate optimized builds for G3, G4 and G5 to wring as much performance

out of each CPU generation.

I have not decided if I will support Leopard PPC, but I will try to.

Making the jump from Firefox 3.6 to 4.0 is critical because Fx4 adds a

dramatically faster JS interpreter, OpenGL acceleration, improved HTML 5

support and improved CSS 3 support. Even if Fx4.1 dawns and I can't backport

it, we're at least at the point where we have next-generation browser support

and I can add high-priority new features to it separately like I do with

Classilla. Look at how long WaMCom lasted without anyone maintaining it.

This gives Tiger and PowerPC many more years of useful life.

By the way, Mozilla will almost certainly not accept my changes into the tree

since 10.4 is on their "tier WONTFIX" list now, so this will live as a

separate project and will get a Google Code proper repo for people to submit

code to (likely Mercurial since that is what Mozilla uses themselves). So this

PowerPC Tiger Firefox will not be called Firefox, and I'm soliciting names for

it. I have one in mind, but I want to see if someone comes up with something

better. (It has to be one no one is using -- I thought of "Tigerfox" but you

can see that's pretty much beaten to death. The one I have in mind is totally

novel. See if you can do better.)

#2 Sat, 16 Oct 2010 - 20:54 68kMLA

First, WOW. Another very cool project. I'm running 10.5, but if the plug is pulled on PPC builds, I'll be out of luck.

Second, can you lend me some of your free time?

My own s/w projects are stagnated because I have too little of it.

Third, names. KaiserFox, PhyrePhauCs, Webtastic, Longboard (surfing on old school equipment...get it?). I'm sure someone will offer something more clever than those.

#3 Sat, 16 Oct 2010 - 21:34 68kMLA

I do want to support Leopard, but none of my PPC machines run it and I don't want to set one up specially for that. I do have a solitary Intel Mac mini running Leopard that I use for development purposes, however, and I might test it under Rosetta (if it runs there, I would be surprised if it didn't run on a real PPC). Now that 10.7 is obviously in play, the end of Safari for 10.5 and therefore PowerPC is also clearly visible.

The PhyrePhauCs one took me a while to get

interesting idea though. Any others?

The compatibility portion I am most worried about is plugins, specifically Flash. That said, 10.1 looks like the last PPC Flash anyway, so it may all be a moot point soon.

#4 Sun, 17 Oct 2010 - 07:44 68kMLA

That's great ClassicHasClass!

I've been hoping someone would figure out how to do this.

Can't wait for a binary release. It'd be nice to see how well WebM videos play on my G4 Tibook. (I hope well enough to watch stuff!)

A name huh? Let's see, Debian has IceWeasel... Mozilla has FireFox, hmm... How about, Air/Wind/Stone/something-Bengal?

There's also Pixie-Bob,Savannah, and the Toyger

Now StoneToyger, that sounds kinda cool.

#5 Sun, 17 Oct 2010 - 19:48 68kMLA

Bengal. That could be a source of interesting variations.

I pulled more current source from them yesterday since they're down to a handful of blockers and I'll do a rebase when it gets final. I'd like to have a very, very, VERY slow debugging binary available with beta 7 so people can make sure it runs and prove it's for real.

#6 Mon, 18 Oct 2010 - 17:33 68kMLA

FoxForce 9

#7 Tue, 19 Oct 2010 - 04:35 68kMLA

Why not FireTiger?

Gives a nice allusion to Blake, or perhaps Spike Milligan if you're feeling silly.

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

Watch out! You'll set the jungle alight

#8 Wed, 20 Oct 2010 - 05:33 68kMLA

@morrick and I were jawing on Twitter and I think we have a name (which as it turns out we both independently came to), but I'll hold that for the "test alpha."

Small frownie: OpenGL acceleration (and possibly WebGL) is a no-go. This is Apple's fault; Tiger PPC only comes with OpenGL 1.x, and even in Leopard only about half the supported graphics chipsets for PPC support OpenGL 2. For example, the iBook G4 with its Radeon R200-series chip is still OpenGL 1.x, even with 10.5.8; so is the MDD with its stock Radeon 9000. Mozilla's code absolutely requires support for non-powers-of-two textures, so that's that. I shortcircuited the compositor to always render in software mode, although there still seem to be some graphics glitches which I can't tell if they're my bug or Mozilla's bug.

The list of blockers keeps building up in Bugzilla, so this will necessarily delay a public proof-of-concept, but it's coming as soon as they clean out that blocker list.

#9 Wed, 20 Oct 2010 - 06:57 68kMLA

Tiger PPC only comes with OpenGL 1.x

There's no software upgrade route, I presume?

even in Leopard only about half the supported graphics chipsets for PPC support OpenGL 2

Is there a list somewhere?

#10 Wed, 20 Oct 2010 - 11:57 68kMLA

10.5, 10.6, ..... recent macs

Of course, I'm probably not going to be gaming in Mac OS X anyway, because the 3D performance is so horrible. As important as OpenGL is to Mac OS X—and it is important, because it's used for important tasks like compositing the desktop—it ain't quick. It's not kept up-to-date, either. ... In Mac OS X? You don't even get 100 percent conformance with OpenGL 3.0. Which dates back to 2008. Because Mac OS X is unloved.

#11 Wed, 20 Oct 2010 - 16:12 68kMLA

Yes, here are the list of supported cards and OpenGL versions by Mac OS X release, direct from Apple.

http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/GLInfo_10411PPC.html

http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/GLInfo_1058.html

The part that really steams my broccoli is comparing it to the 10.4.11 Intel list.

http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/GLInfo_10411Intel.html

Even the software renderer is OpenGL 2! WTF, Apple! Why couldn't you have done this for PowerPC, you lazy

s?! AFAIK, there is no way to update the renderer in software. I would LOVE to be proven wrong.

So Peter Bright's slam on Apple's OpenGL support is right on (posted by applefreak above). Now I can see why Valve ripped on Mac gaming for many years. OpenGL 2 came out in 2004, for Zarquon's sake.

Anyway, now that that little rant is over, the Mozilla list is up to 18 blockers from 13 a couple days ago, so this is not looking good for a timely release.

#12 Wed, 20 Oct 2010 - 22:40 68kMLA

10.5, 10.6, ..... recent macsOf course, I'm probably not going to be gaming in Mac OS X anyway, because the 3D performance is so horrible. As important as OpenGL is to Mac OS X—and it is important, because it's used for important tasks like compositing the desktop—it ain't quick. It's not kept up-to-date, either. ... In Mac OS X? You don't even get 100 percent conformance with OpenGL 3.0. Which dates back to 2008. Because Mac OS X is unloved.

This guy is my new hero. He's managed to sum up everything I couldn't put into words. Sadly we know Jobs Inc. won't take onboard a single bit of it.

#13 Thu, 28 Oct 2010 - 04:58 68kMLA

Hmm. Seems like Firefox 4 b7 is going to be a bit delayed. Oh well, more time to work on it, I guess.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/27/firefox_4_slips/

#14 Mon, 1 Nov 2010 - 11:55 68kMLA

Seems your efforts made the LowEndMac news

#15 Tue, 2 Nov 2010 - 04:25 68kMLA

There had been a lot of bemoaning the state of PPC browsers, so I dropped a little tease to Charles Moore.

Good news is, as of this arvo, the list is down to five blockers and counting. Code freeze looks like it might be as soon as this week.

Edit: Btw, WebGL is confirmed to be a no-go, at least this time around. I'm looking into software renderers, but this is low on my priorities list currently.

#16 Wed, 3 Nov 2010 - 00:49 68kMLA

How about naming it "PowerFox" since the main aim is too have an up to date as possible browser for PowerPC Macs?

#17 Wed, 3 Nov 2010 - 02:45 68kMLA

"PowerFox," the first thing I thought of as an alteration to that was "Mighty Fox." Like the old cartoons of Mighty Mouse. :lol:

#18 Fri, 5 Nov 2010 - 03:26 68kMLA

The name has been chosen

(mostly because it's unique and expresses the original idea of a Tiger Fx 4).

Mozilla finally locked the tree today to run off beta 7, so I ran a quick pull+rebase and grabbed it. The original idea was to issue a debug version, but the debug version is just WAY too large (insert Mozilla bloat joke here). Instead, there will be optimized versions, including a G3, a "universal" 7400/7450 G4 version and a G5 version. In fact, I'm typing this on the G5 optimized version, and it's definitely faster than 3.6. Look for this next week (I'm visiting friends over the weekend, but I intend to push builds out on Monday).

#19 Fri, 5 Nov 2010 - 04:48 68kMLA

And we STILL don't know the name you've chosen!

A G3 build?!? Awesome!

I'll be sure to try that out on my Lombard. ^_^ Thanks so much for doing this ClassicHasClass! And I thought we'd be left behind in the "dawn of the HTML5 era."

#20 Fri, 5 Nov 2010 - 13:25 68kMLA

Of course there's going to be a G3 build! How could I leave all those Pismos out in the cold!

The G3 build is actually useful, because I use it to test under Rosetta since I have no Leopard PPCs.

There are a couple bugs I need to shake out over the weekend. The G5 build was a rocket, but started getting crashy, so I need to tune the optimization parameters a bit. The G3 and G4 builds are more solid once I countered a bug that could make the browser crash when the window was closed. I'm using the 7450 build for this post now.

#21 Tue, 9 Nov 2010 - 01:18 68kMLA

May I present ... TenFourFox.

http://www.tenfourfox.com/

I have consolidated the G4/G5 builds into a single AltiVec build, since there was only minimal speed differences and I could not get the G5 build to be stable. There is also a separate G3 build. Please read the Release Notes!

That said, I have completely converted over to TenFourFox myself on all of my systems. Camino will shortly be a distant memory.

#22 Tue, 9 Nov 2010 - 02:06 68kMLA

Cool! Can't wait to try it!

How does it compare to 3.6 on a G3?

#23 Tue, 9 Nov 2010 - 02:19 68kMLA

Will the 'fox run on Tiger? 10-4, good buddy!

#24 Tue, 9 Nov 2010 - 03:50 68kMLA

Hoo-rahh! I'm going to try this on both my Lomard and TiBook.

Love the professional look to the site, the fine-print at the bottom was hilarious.

Edit: Posting from TenFourFox on my TiBook. Looking good so far.

(Although the title at the top of the window is hard to read against the theme I have. Oh well.)

#25 Tue, 9 Nov 2010 - 06:01 68kMLA

agg23, I actually don't own a G3 running 10.4.11 at this time (I only recently got a PDQ WS 266, but I'm not sure if I'm going to use it as an 8.6 Classilla test rig or try to XPostFacto Tiger on it), so I couldn't say. I will say that the speed improvements alone are key, and the app is specifically tuned too, so you will probably notice a significant difference. However, a G3 and most low-spec G4s probably won't be able to play video well; even my 1.33GHz iBook G4 had a bit of trouble keeping up occasionally, though the G5 zips right along, natch, so I peg 1.25GHz as probably the minimum to play video reasonably.

PowerPup, glad it's working on your TiBook

I daresay that overall you'll find it snappier over 3.6. It's certainly snappier on this quad.

#26 Tue, 9 Nov 2010 - 07:32 68kMLA

I had a strange quirk happen when I re-opened it after deleting Camino and it's profile data.... Bookmarks, menu, and the address bar quit working. Might have had something to do with SyncFox addon being installed. So I deleted the profile data and let it generate a new one. Everything is working fine now. I'm really impressed with the new Firefox layout. I was a little surprised when I couldn't find the status bar, found out that they relocated the target link in the right side of the address bar and recalled the status bar to "addon bar." I've now deleted Camino & Firefox on my TiBook and have TFF as my default browser.

I'll report back after testing TenFourFox on my G3 Lombard.

#27 Tue, 9 Nov 2010 - 08:54 68kMLA

Well, currently posting from my G3 Lombard, and I must say I'm rather impressed. Comparing between TFF and an optimized G3 build of Camino, Camino seems to start up a little quicker, (only by a few noticeable seconds,) but TFF clearly renders things faster of the two.

Being a 333Mhz G3 with only 384MB of RAM and a 4GB HD, you can't expect Tiger or TFF to be very speedy. But it's fairly decent. I just need a bigger HD for my Lombard.

(A little more RAM wouldn't hurt either.)

#28 Wed, 10 Nov 2010 - 01:32 68kMLA

Well, I'm impressed by the limited testing so far. Seems quite speedy on the dual core G5. Another great job by Cameron!

#29 Wed, 10 Nov 2010 - 05:12 68kMLA

Okay, I figured out why TFF was acting a little weird on my TiBook. Turns out that the addon "WebMail Notifier" has a compatibility issue with the latest beta of FireFox 4. Dunno if it's Mac specific or not. But oh well. I can do without it on my mac for now.

#30 Wed, 10 Nov 2010 - 05:54 68kMLA

Yeah, the compatibility changes between 3.6 and 4 really bit some add-on authors. Extensions now need a manifest (which does reduce startup time), and there are some significant internal changes. I know my own extensions like OverbiteFF needed to be overhauled somewhat, and when Electrolysis comes, there will be another cathartic API gap. I'm hoping Electrolysis comes later than sooner, because I'm concerned it may make Mozilla no longer buildable on Tiger (among other things, it depends on Chromium IPC and IPC currently requires linking everything into a big fat libxul which makes the Tiger linker barf).

#31 Wed, 24 Nov 2010 - 18:19 68kMLA

When I try and unpack that .zip file, I get an "operation not permitted" dialog box (header is 'archive utility'). But I did this before, on another Pismo, with no problem. How do I work around that?

#32 Wed, 24 Nov 2010 - 18:54 68kMLA

Huh, I unzipped it on my Win XP machine and then loaded the .app file just fine. Weird. Something about .zip files that is locked down in OS X?

#33 Thu, 25 Nov 2010 - 00:54 68kMLA

Shouldn't be. Were you unzipping in a location that was read-only?

Incidentally, for those who want to follow along, I've put up a dev blog: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/

I should do the same for Classilla, and will soon.

#34 Sat, 27 Nov 2010 - 14:43 68kMLA

I was just about to post about this on the forum, but glad to see that it's had an early following already. Can't currently try on my iMac G5 because the caps went out on it again. Gonna have to replace those, probably over the Christmas break. Very eager to give it a try, though. My dad has a dual-proc Quicksilver that I'll probably test it on.

#35 Fri, 3 Dec 2010 - 06:57 68kMLA

Got beta 8 up tonight. Playing with some ideas for better G5 optimization, and there will be a G4/7400 version since the 7450 version is not doing well enough on those machines. Hoping for release in a week or so.

#36 Thu, 16 Dec 2010 - 06:03 68kMLA

Well, 12 days is close to a week, right? I put up the dev notes on http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2010/12/beta-8-now-available.html and you can get it now from http://www.tenfourfox.com/ . Notice new G5 and G4/7400-specific builds (along with G3 and G4/7450). The G5 version has very interesting tuning to maintain stability; the interested can look at about:buildconfig. It had to be done like that because -mcpu=G5 (let alone -fast) makes a very unstable Firefox. I'll have to debug this later, but the tweaks still squeeze out around 15% compared to 7450 on a G5. Lots of good stuff; see the release notes.

#37 Thu, 13 Jan 2011 - 06:26 68kMLA

For those using this, beta 9 is now available.

#38 Thu, 13 Jan 2011 - 15:20 68kMLA

I've been using TenFourFox as my sole browser (at home) for a couple weeks now. Very good performance overall, very pleased with it. The only thing I've noticed is that when I use Cmd-+ to scale up the page, it acts multiple times for one press. Sometimes only three increases, sometimes all the way to maximum (eight times). I don't have a sticky key, because this doesn't happen with other browsers.

#39 Fri, 14 Jan 2011 - 03:41 68kMLA

Is this 10.5? Seems okay on 10.4 G5.

#40 Fri, 14 Jan 2011 - 15:22 68kMLA

Is this 10.5? Seems okay on 10.4 G5.

Yes, sorry. Latest 10.5.x, dual 1.8 G5.

#41 Fri, 14 Jan 2011 - 23:34 68kMLA

Just tried TenFourFox on a G3 iBook after having used it on my G4 Mac Mini and it flies! :O

I can't believe how fast this browser is. I was about to browse sites at about the same speed as my MacBook.

Thank you so much ClassicHasClass

#42 Sat, 15 Jan 2011 - 02:52 68kMLA

TenFourFox beta 9's address bar is acting a little weird on my TiBook. Whenever I hover over a link, it disappears and reappears with the URL of the link, and the same when I take the cursor off the link. Like it's updating slowly. It worked perfectly fine in beta 8.

Just noticed that when I quickly hover over two links, it's fine, it has something to do with transitioning from normal to showing the destination link.

#43 Sat, 15 Jan 2011 - 06:01 68kMLA

There's apparently a performance regression in the version of cairo in Mozilla 2. They're supposed to fix this, but I haven't seen much activity on that front. :-/

agg23, since you've got a G3, how well does the nanojit work for you? (See the release notes on how to enable it.) I don't have a G3 with Tiger, so I'm depending on user reports.

#44 Sun, 16 Jan 2011 - 05:44 68kMLA

Well, well. The nanojit may be less effective on G5, but we're getting excellent reports on G4. A user wrote in to report that to my surprise, the G4 really benefits from it -- which makes me wonder where it gets it so wrong on the G5. On my iBook, it cuts SunSpider execution time in half, and matches the G5! So shame on me for assuming the G5 with all its fancy out-of-order hardware would be the last word.

#45 Sun, 16 Jan 2011 - 13:45 68kMLA

OK. I'll test it...

#46 Sun, 16 Jan 2011 - 14:22 68kMLA

I just ran sunspider tests and the results are outstanding. Basically, without nanojit it took 15926.9ms and with nanojit it took 8921.4ms...

You can see more detailed results below:

Without nanojit

With nanojit

#47 Sun, 16 Jan 2011 - 15:48 68kMLA

excuse my ignorance but what is nanojit?

#48 Mon, 17 Jan 2011 - 04:16 68kMLA

agg23, this is a G3, right? If so, that's fabulous. This means the only CPU that the nanojit doesn't broadly benefit is the G5.

highlandcattle, the nanojit is a component of Mozilla's JavaScript engine that translates "traces" of JavaScript execution into native assembly code. Previously, the only working nanojits were for ARM, x86, x86_64 and SPARC, and the SPARC one was "unofficial." PPC and MIPS had code present, but it was incomplete for Firefox. So, I finished it and now we have native code compilation for JavaScript for PowerPC for the first time. I submitted it back to Mozilla to get it into the source tree (bug 624164), but I put it in TenFourFox so people can use and benefit from it now. There is at least one bug I know of already, but it's so far been remarkably functional.

#49 Mon, 17 Jan 2011 - 12:57 68kMLA

Yes, it is a G3.

#50 Wed, 19 Jan 2011 - 03:10 68kMLA

Excellent.

#51 Wed, 26 Jan 2011 - 01:57 68kMLA

b9 is definitely a step backward from b8 on my G5. Tab bar is screwy, and I've had two system panics since I've been using it. (That may be completely coincidental, but ...) So for now I've reinstalled b8.

#52 Wed, 26 Jan 2011 - 05:37 68kMLA

The tab bar was a Mozilla bug, allegedly fixed in b10. However, I'm skipping b10 since b11 is supposed to be out next week. Not sure what to say about the crashes, although I did test drive it on my dad's 10.5.8 G4 mini and it seemed to be okay.

In better news, I think I cracked the performance issues with the nanojit on G5. I'm running off a test build right now, but I think I've got it benching faster than stock interpreter for the first time. The performance improvement isn't as dramatic as the G3 or G4, but it's still an improvement.

#53 Sun, 30 Jan 2011 - 20:59 68kMLA

This works great on my 'new' iBook G3 600Mhz! No problems with it.

Sites I tested so far are Youtube, MSN.com, Hotmail, 68kmla offcourse and Macintosh Garden. They all seem to work flawlessly, Flash does also work.

TFF itself does also look beautiful. Even HTML5 works, but the performance is not really good to be honest (but still works better than I thought), I used http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/ for the HTML5 test.

But I hope that you will keep developing this wonderful application!

#54 Tue, 1 Feb 2011 - 04:24 68kMLA

I suspect the big problem with that test is that TenFourFox doesn't have hardware acceleration, and unless Mozilla gets rid of the NPOT texture size requirement, it's not going to.

That said, beta 11 will have the JavaScript accelerator enabled by default for all systems, including G5s (although it has the most dramatic improvement on G3 and G4). This will be a big difference if you haven't already turned it on.

#55 Tue, 1 Feb 2011 - 15:41 68kMLA

What kind of JS acceleration are you seeing, overall, on G3/G4/G5? Which operations are seeing the biggest boost?

#56 Tue, 1 Feb 2011 - 20:58 68kMLA

agg23 posted his G3 numbers, but by and large for G3s and G4s it's about 2x speed. My father's 1.5GHz G4 mini, for example, benches at 6185ms without it but 2811ms with it in SunSpider.

For G5s, however, it seems to hit a wall with the extra hardware. SunSpider actually takes a hit, but with tuning to blacklist expensive JSOPs, Dromaeo and V8 both get wins. It's not as dramatic, however, and a very fast G4 will actually bench faster. I'm trying to figure out why; it seems that the G5's longer pipeline takes a bigger penalty for stalls. That said, the base interpreter without acceleration on my quad is around 3300ms. The accelerator "accelerates" that to 3700ms, but Dromaeo gains several runs/sec and the V8 score jumps, so I'm calling it an overall win.

#57 Wed, 2 Feb 2011 - 00:22 68kMLA

Hello,

I'm using TenFourFox on my G3 Power Mac (B&W) and it works great, It's a lot faster than firefox 3.6 and more responsive.

Thanks Cameron :beige:

#58 Thu, 3 Feb 2011 - 14:39 68kMLA

You're welcome, but now you have to upgrade it, because beta 11 is out

This version turns on JavaScript acceleration for everybody, even G5 users. G5 users will see less improvement, but will still see some. G4 and G3 owners will see the most improvement. There are also some bug fixes and the browser is overall quicker thanks to rendering improvements.

Just for yuks, I put a chart on the main page of a browser JavaScript speed comparison I did when I was at my folks' last (see above) since Dad runs 10.5.8 on his G4 mini so that he can use iTunes 10 (I'm the Nexus One heathen, my folks use their iPhone 3GSes still). This gave me a chance to test Safari 5. No points for guessing that TenFourFox won by a large margin, but I think people will be very surprised by which browser came in 2nd. I didn't expect this either.

#59 Wed, 23 Feb 2011 - 04:36 68kMLA

I've encountered a glitch on the G5. Using beta 11, sometimes when I attempt to login to this forum with the correct user name/password the browser claims "You have exceeded the maximum number of attempts blah, blah". This happens on the first login attempt. As I recall this did not happen with previous builds, but my memory may be faulty.

#60 Wed, 23 Feb 2011 - 21:38 68kMLA

I've gotten that randomly with other browsers, so I don't think it's a 10.4Fx issue specifically. I've seen it on my office PC with Fx 3.6, for example.

But since we're bumping this thread, watch for beta 12 to come down the wire (labeled b13pre due to an issue with checkout I didn't notice until the build was done, minor issue). This fixes most of the rest of the 10.4-specific bugs, and also is a lot more aggressive about memory consumption. However, it also really wrecked the plugin code and I hope I got all the gaps. QuickDraw-based plugins are dying, and it's going to be a cold hard CoreAnimation world, so it will be harder and harder to support PPC plugins that are no longer maintained (which is why I am deprecating them, and disabling them in the future).

Anyway, I've been using it on my G5 and iBook and looks good, so push out to beta channel tonight when I get back from work.

#61 Sat, 26 Feb 2011 - 19:42 68kMLA

Just a note that my network is down hard due to the winter storm that hit So Cal. I'm of course about 100 miles away visiting my parents so I'll try to get it up as soon as I can get back. If you want this, the googlecode project is still up:

http://tenfourfox.googlecode.com/

#62 Thu, 10 Mar 2011 - 04:14 68kMLA

Last post on this, I promise. Now that Mozilla has branched, we are now stable on mozilla-2.0 and Firefox 4 lives on in stable maintenance as TenFourFox on Tiger PPC. I'll push out 4.0 final as soon as Mozilla finishes their QA on the RC.

In a couple months, I'll post about Firefox 5 becoming TenFourFox 5

#63 Thu, 10 Mar 2011 - 20:40 68kMLA

played with this a while on a friends Powermac g3 and liked it