Stuck on an ancient PPC Mac? That’s cool: they’re still great machines, and I have an old Powerbook I keep around as a guest laptop myself. The problem, unfortunately, is that while these machines are still quite excellent at lighter computing tasks, the thing they have primarily been good for — doing some light browsing and emailing — has become more and more difficult, thanks to the heady advances of HTML5 and CSS3, and the decision of browser makers to leave the PPC architecture behind.
Mozilla’s excellent Firefox browser decided with version 4 to drop support for the PPC architecture, but thankfully, there’s TenFourFox, which takes Firefox 4 and gets it up and running under OS X 10.4 and 10.5, with precisely tuned builds for each PPC processor.
What does this mean? Firefox 4’s advanced Javascript engine, WebM video support, HTML5 and CSS3 on your old Mac. That old Mac just might have some Facebooking in it left yet.
[via TUAW]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
