Most of us know that modern https websites can only be navigated in Webkit on Leopard or TenFourFox on both Tiger and Leopard - however, TFF is excruciatingly slow on underpowered G4s and virtually impossible on a G3.
This can be overcome with Google's transcoding service, Web Light:
support.google.com
In Safari for example, prefixing any website with, "http://googleweblight.com/i?u=" points your browser to the Google service which then converts your desired website into something more manageable for slower or mobile devices.
You can see the measured difference on this comparison site:
Admittedly, this method breaks formatting and strips out javascript but as you can see in the video, browsing is snappy and barely troubles the CPU - note how it idles whilst all the heavy lifting gets done server side - conversely TFF would hit the CPU at 100% whilst chewing it's way through the code.
Adding the Web Light address can either be done manually in the Safari bookmarks manager (took me about a minute for the video example) or you can export your bookmarks, open the html file in Text Wrangler and use find and replace to substitute https with the Web Light prefix - then import the altered file.
Using my 500Mhz G3 iMac was as low as I can go but I'd imagine this would be great for lower specced iBooks too.
This can be overcome with Google's transcoding service, Web Light:
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support.google.com
In Safari for example, prefixing any website with, "http://googleweblight.com/i?u=" points your browser to the Google service which then converts your desired website into something more manageable for slower or mobile devices.
You can see the measured difference on this comparison site:
Admittedly, this method breaks formatting and strips out javascript but as you can see in the video, browsing is snappy and barely troubles the CPU - note how it idles whilst all the heavy lifting gets done server side - conversely TFF would hit the CPU at 100% whilst chewing it's way through the code.
Adding the Web Light address can either be done manually in the Safari bookmarks manager (took me about a minute for the video example) or you can export your bookmarks, open the html file in Text Wrangler and use find and replace to substitute https with the Web Light prefix - then import the altered file.
Using my 500Mhz G3 iMac was as low as I can go but I'd imagine this would be great for lower specced iBooks too.
