Firefox 4 on Tiger PPC

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.)

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