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Firefox on Powermac/Linux

M

mrkapqa

Cancelled
Original poster
Hello ,

i would like to ask how the developemnt of Firefox on PowerPC/Lnux is going;
am stuck ad Debian Wheezy so dont know what the latest official version for Powerpc Users is.

thanks to a generous user here at macrumors, was able to install arcticfox 27.10 on wheezy,
although i dont like how Firefox has become "inflated" and bit slow sometimes in recent developement,
it is still my favorite browser, hence the question.

Sadly, Iceape is gone, and Seamonkey never took much off.
Thanks veryone for the answers.
 
Depends on what your system is. 32-bit is pretty much stuck at FF52-60 code base (InterWeb/SpiderWeb). 64-bit has FF102 at the moment but it's quite unusable on a G5. It browses fine, but it has major endianess color issues making it hard to use. Otherwise FF68 and FF78 are still quite usable yet.

bad-firefox.png


Cheers
 
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nice to see the "Navigator" logo up there, didn§t notice it yet for newer Firefox on other platforms.
Debian Wheezy is "quite responsive"; remember the OS taking quite a hit with upgrading to Debian Jessie , performancewise, also stability terms.
Wonder how well those newer OS fare, on a Powermac G5 DC.
 
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I'm running Void on a DC 2.3ghz in the above photo. Runs extremely well. Very lightweight and no systemd. I also run it on a couple of powerbook G4's. Sadly Void might be dropping support for our machines come spring of 2023 if they can't find a maintainer. I just downloaded all the popular -devel files so i can compile select apps when needed if that happens. This way i can eek out a few more years before i jump to another OS. Similar to what some of us do with macports on tiger and leopard.

Edit: the navigator icon is from the win95/win2k theme im using.

WinLinG5.png


Cheers
 
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from Adrian Glaubitz:
NodeJS has not been ported to powerpc 32
NodeJS is mainly driven by Google and they're usually not interested
in supporting old architectures. Last time I checked, NodeJS still had
broken support for ppc32 though.
 
Jeroen Diederen said:
from Adrian Glaubitz:
NodeJS has not been ported to powerpc 32
NodeJS is mainly driven by Google and they're usually not interested
in supporting old architectures. Last time I checked, NodeJS still had
broken support for ppc32 though.
Click to expand...

If Adrian will be interested to work on this together, I have V8 which builds (not totally broken but does not work, needs fixes) and NodeJS which almost builds (linking fails, this might be a 32-bit stopper, but also might be a build system fault).
 
If i recall correctly, i thought RUST was an issue with ppc32 as well, but that was years ago. UXP (pale moon / sealion / brass monkey / basilisk) had removed RUST, so it was never an issue.
 
wicknix said:
If i recall correctly, i thought RUST was an issue with ppc32 as well, but that was years ago. UXP (pale moon / sealion / brass monkey / basilisk) had removed RUST, so it was never an issue.
Click to expand...

I think Rust works on Linux ppc and maybe NetBSD ppc. It is still broken on macOS and OpenBSD, AFAIK.
 
Reviving an old thread, but is anyone still genuinely interested in getting modern Firefox on 32bit PPC Linux when we've got Sealion and other Basilisk/UXP based browsers that do great? Although seeing the latest Firefox actually running on an iMac G3 on Linux would be a real mindtrip moment.
 
Modern Firefox is an awful lot of development work just to satisfy curiosity.

The Basilisk-based browsers seem to be a much saner path, with a group of folks doing the active port work moving things ahead in a very satisfactory pace. The big gap is jit, and that is being worked on, with advice from Cameron Kaiser.

If Basilisk works well enough with the modern web, and allows G4/G5 Macs to be useful again that’s a real breakthrough.
 
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I would echo the above. Actual modern Firefox would be a ton of work for very little payoff. Basilisk, and the excellent work on BrassMonkey/PowerFox/MachFox, are definitely the way forward. If JIT gets fixed and there's enough maintenance over the years we Power Mac users may be in an even better position than when TFF was running at its peak.
 
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Smithwick’s said:
I would echo the above. Actual modern Firefox would be a ton of work for very little payoff. Basilisk, and the excellent work on BrassMonkey/PowerFox/MachFox, are definitely the way forward. If JIT gets fixed and there's enough maintenance over the years we Power Mac users may be in an even better position than when TFF was running at its peak.
Click to expand...
I agree honestly, the UXP/Basilisk platform offers the same capabilities as Firefox with consistent development, so the roadmap is looking very good for it. And mainstream Firefox will be very unoptimized and heavy/ram hungry.

I've chatted a bit with the Basilisk developer, and hes actively invested in the PowerPC platform and cares about it.
 
Just for the record, on installing MintPPC64 utilizing A. Glauber's Debian 12-6-25 PPC64 iso, Firefox PPC64 was automatically installed and remains quite functional through this date on my G5 dual 1.8...
 
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olddoc said:
Just for the record, on installing MintPPC64 utilizing A. Glauber's Debian 12-6-25 PPC64 iso, Firefox PPC64 was automatically installed and remains quite functional through this date on my G5 dual 1.8...
Click to expand...
I've never had FF work on ppc64 Linux, this is excellent. It has always segfaulted. Do you know which version it is?
 
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