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.
8 responses to “TenFourFox Is Here To Bring HTML5 to Your PPC Mac”
I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, and it seems stable and works just fine. It’s not quite as fast as Camino, but I’m not sure what is/is not HTML5, and it’s not exactly a big difference. But no matter what, I end up back with Safari. I sdon’t know why, but it just feels better than all the other browsers, including Opera and FireFox. But it also sucks when I run into a crappy Flash element, which is happening more often. the beach ball starts spinning and I’m gone for 15 seconds to forever. So I’m spending more time on TenFourFox to see if I can get used to it.
This works great as far as I’m concerned. Not slower than I’m used to in FireFox 3.x. Fantastic that someone has ported this to PPC, as I was extremely disappointed at Mozilla for not porting FireFox 4.0 to PPC. I use a PowerBook G4 12″, so this was just perfect. Well done.
Tenfourfox is utterly fabulous on my old ibook G4, use it everyday. Cameron Kaiser (main developer) is currently hard at work acclerating WebM video for Altivec, which is an amazing sentence if you stop and think about it. Flash is a major problem for the future as Adobe has dropped support for PPC, likely it will HTML5 or nothing with future releases. Fortunately I’ve found a couple standalone apps that replace youtube video with either quicktime or ffmpeg, they also work spectacularly well on a six year old ibook. For other sites I download and watch in quicktime or VLC. I’ve given up on Hulu.
I’ve tryied it for a couple of week (ver. 7450 for G4 1Ghz) and it seems faster than FF 3.6… but some animations doesn’t work so I need sometime to go back using FF 3.6. Unfortunately isn’t possible to use both browsers at the same time so you have to close TenFourFox before starting FF 3.6