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How about them apples, Apple? :D

eyoungren

eyoungren

macrumors Nehalem
Original poster
So…I guess I should mention that I've been doing this since we got the Mac Pro at work. About a year and a half now. With the recent release of Yosemite though, I thought I'd show this off.

If you weren't aware, at one point there were some stark raving mad devs that wanted to run TenFourFox on their Intel Macs. So. They made a port. T4Fx 17 Intel.

Cameron Kaiser was aware of them, but he offers zero support. They haven't had an update in quite a while.

In my thinking, what better way to give Apple the middle finger for abandoning PowerPC then to run a PowerPC based browser on my work Mac Pro.

So, that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half. And it's still running on Yosemite.
 

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I run Firefox on my intel machines and of course TFF on the PPC stuff. The one thing that I love about TFF is the fact I can sync! I love that. Can't do that with Safari on Leopard 😀
 
eyoungren said:
So…I guess I should mention that I've been doing this since we got the Mac Pro at work. About a year and a half now. With the recent release of Yosemite though, I thought I'd show this off.

If you weren't aware, at one point there were some stark raving mad devs that wanted to run TenFourFox on their Intel Macs. So. They made a port. T4Fx 17 Intel.

Cameron Kaiser was aware of them, but he offers zero support. They haven't had an update in quite a while.

In my thinking, what better way to give Apple the middle finger for abandoning PowerPC then to run a PowerPC based browser on my work Mac Pro.

So, that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half. And it's still running on Yosemite.
Click to expand...

That's awesome! How is Yosemite, by the way? I haven't upgraded yet and just wanted to wait to se how it went.
 
RedCroissant said:
That's awesome! How is Yosemite, by the way? I haven't upgraded yet and just wanted to wait to se how it went.
Click to expand...



It isn't bad at all! I think the beta program really helped Apple get the stability aspect worked out. I only have had a few minor bugs with Expose and that is it (sometimes the windows would get "stuck" up in the sides).
 
Wellllll………

It's bright. And most of the icons are iOS like. For me, I think a lot of stuff under the hood has been fixed. I had a giant issue with Mavericks and SMB2. It wasn't a problem with our old SBS 2003 server because it didn't do SMB2, but once we got our new server (Windows 2012 Server) I started getting killed on InDesign documents.

The user session times out and with Mavericks and ID it results in a loss of connection whenever you try to save a document. Which means ID quits out. Over and over, unless you disconnect and reconnect OR you force a connection via CIFS. That forces the server to use SMB1. Of course that means slower file transfers and I don't get auto updating of folders.

Yosemite seems to have fixed this and so far I have not had to quit ID and disconnect from the server each night. It's been holding. So, for that alone right there this has been a great upgrade.

OTOH! It's damn slow. Almost like being back on the G4! That may be down to the fact that this MP only has 3GB ram, but Mavericks handled it just fine so, IDK.

I do like now that I can have a black menu bar. Although I assumed Night Mode would force dark windows and dark title bars/scroll bars and so on. I'm being blinded though so I guess not.
 
The flaw in the logic is that Apple didn't "abandon PowerPC" - the PowerPC manufacturers abandoned Apple. Freescale (formerly Motorola) targeted the embedded market, and IBM targeted game consoles. Neither PPC manufacturer committed to produce chips sufficient to keep Apple competitive.

Apple likely could have waited another year or two to switch, and the switch would have been better (largely by skipping the 32-bit Intel phase.) But it would have just delayed the inevitable. Apple's laptops wouldn't have been competitive at all for however long they delayed by.
 
Ugh, I hate many of the design elements. I am not a fan of this 'simplistic yet sleek' look that companies are aiming for these days... look at so many company's new logos and such. Everyone is going from making things elaborate to plane and simple. If you ask me, I'd rather not have solid shapes indicate my (x) (-) (+) buttons. *shudder* Reminds me of how you can change the Available/Away icons to 'shapes', in iChat. The 2D dock thing annoys me as well, as Apple probably doesn't care that they are taking a step back again. As for the application icons? Some guy stuck them in Photoshop and inverted the colors. I do realize that the Finder icon changed by 10.3 Panther or so, but what they changed it to this time makes it look like it was designed with kids in mind or something. I admit that this interface looks 'fresh', but I wish they had not drastically ruined things in this way. In my opinion, nothing looks better than Panther-Mountain Lion/Mavericks.

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eyoungren said:
So…I guess I should mention that I've been doing this since we got the Mac Pro at work. About a year and a half now. With the recent release of Yosemite though, I thought I'd show this off.

If you weren't aware, at one point there were some stark raving mad devs that wanted to run TenFourFox on their Intel Macs. So. They made a port. T4Fx 17 Intel.

Cameron Kaiser was aware of them, but he offers zero support. They haven't had an update in quite a while.

In my thinking, what better way to give Apple the middle finger for abandoning PowerPC then to run a PowerPC based browser on my work Mac Pro.

So, that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half. And it's still running on Yosemite.
Click to expand...


I don't necessarily hate that Apple switched to Intel, as Intel processors started becoming great at that time, but it does suck how Apple and programmers left PowerPC behind... I especially feel as if people at Apple, such as Tim Cook, don't even know anything about/give a *** about Apple's great past. It seems as though Cook wants complete change and doesn't appreciate Apple's past values.
 
Well I upgraded and I really like it! The Dock is great bc I was always trying to find a good dock (either 2-D or 3_d) that allowed for some type of transparency that went with my desktop and this is good. Plus, now it's the 2-d dock that I prefer. I haven't tested much else, but so far I am pleased with it.
 
eyoungren said:
Wellllll………

It's bright. And most of the icons are iOS like. For me, I think a lot of stuff under the hood has been fixed. I had a giant issue with Mavericks and SMB2. It wasn't a problem with our old SBS 2003 server because it didn't do SMB2, but once we got our new server (Windows 2012 Server) I started getting killed on InDesign documents.

The user session times out and with Mavericks and ID it results in a loss of connection whenever you try to save a document. Which means ID quits out. Over and over, unless you disconnect and reconnect OR you force a connection via CIFS. That forces the server to use SMB1. Of course that means slower file transfers and I don't get auto updating of folders.

Yosemite seems to have fixed this and so far I have not had to quit ID and disconnect from the server each night. It's been holding. So, for that alone right there this has been a great upgrade.

OTOH! It's damn slow. Almost like being back on the G4! That may be down to the fact that this MP only has 3GB ram, but Mavericks handled it just fine so, IDK.

I do like now that I can have a black menu bar. Although I assumed Night Mode would force dark windows and dark title bars/scroll bars and so on. I'm being blinded though so I guess not.
Click to expand...


I am surprised it is that slow! It seemed about the same on my MacBook and all of the people's MacBooks who upgraded.
 
Even on my hackintosh there is no slow-down on Yosemite, and I only have an i5-3570K, so I am a little surprised that a Mac Pro from only a few years ago would be slowing down. But anyways, Apple will fix slowdown in time
 
Altemose said:
I am surprised it is that slow! It seemed about the same on my MacBook and all of the people's MacBooks who upgraded.
Click to expand...
The Mac Pro at work has 3GB of ram (1GB less than the G5 actually!). I'm guessing that may be it, IDK. I understand that Yosemite is ram hungry. But they say, Mavericks was too and I had no issue with Mav.

So, no idea why yet. Hasn't ticked me off bad enough yet to cause me to figure out what's happening.
 
WAY TO STICK IT TO THE MAN!!

No, seriously though TenFourFox is really slow on my Quicksilver, even Safari is faster than that. I tried disabling Java, and that seems to help, but still, it's slower that Safari.

Can anyone help please?
 
I am long overdue to write about my optimizations for T4Fx. Unfortunately, right now the Mac I need is dead, so this is going to be a while.

I did write an earlier post though, but it's a couple years old. If you search for it here you might find it.

There are a number of things you can do, but I'd start with pipelining. Pipelining allows you to make multiple connections to the same server. That helps speed things up because you can make multiple requests for content instead of one request, wait until fulfilled, then the next request.

The more connections you make however makes your browser more aggressive (as perceived by the server). Past a certain amount excessive requests get ignored, so the generally accepted setting is between 1 and 9. However, my feeling is that if the server is going to ignore you anyway, make as many requests as you can. Both my pipelining for HTTP and HTTPS requests are set at 99.

ngpaintdelay is a control of how fast the page gets served up to you. Generally, the browser tends to present you with the complete page at once. But you can set ngpaintdelay to tell the browser to start displaying content the moment it's fetched. The downside to this is that the browser is still downloading content while it's showing you the stuff it already fetched. It can mean that your screen redraws a few times as new content gets downloaded and rendered.

So, those are two to start with. One of these days I will get to this writeup. My versions of T4Fx are heavily optimized, going back several years.
 
eyoungren said:
The Mac Pro at work has 3GB of ram (1GB less than the G5 actually!). I'm guessing that may be it, IDK. I understand that Yosemite is ram hungry. But they say, Mavericks was too and I had no issue with Mav.

So, no idea why yet. Hasn't ticked me off bad enough yet to cause me to figure out what's happening.
Click to expand...

Still seems odd as my friend has a MacBook Air with 2 GB of RAM and Yosemite is running fine. It is as fast as Mavericks. I wonder if you have some sort of issues with your install that was aggravated by the upgrade.
 
eyoungren said:
In my thinking, what better way to give Apple the middle finger for abandoning PowerPC then to run a PowerPC based browser on my work Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

I don't understand this. You are sticking it to the man by running a less secure browser than is available for your platform? Not to mention slower.
 
Altemose said:
Still seems odd as my friend has a MacBook Air with 2 GB of RAM and Yosemite is running fine. It is as fast as Mavericks. I wonder if you have some sort of issues with your install that was aggravated by the upgrade.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't doubt it. I should have stayed on ML with this Mac. OTOH, something else would probably have come up anyway. 🙁

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weckart said:
I don't understand this. You are sticking it to the man by running a less secure browser than is available for your platform? Not to mention slower.
Click to expand...
It's not slower, it works just fine. And this Mac Pro is the work Mac. I don't use it for banking and the only sites I visit are a few forum sites, stock art sites, Google and customer websites when I need.

I work for a newspaper that produces two weekly papers you have probably never heard of. I don't need Fort Knox security because nothing we have on any machine in our network has any value. And the one machine that DOES have that kind of info has no connection to the internet at all and is in a room controlled by and locked every night by one of the bosses.

In short, security is not much of a concern here.
 
eyoungren said:
I wouldn't doubt it. I should have stayed on ML with this Mac. OTOH, something else would probably have come up anyway. 🙁
Click to expand...



Mountain Lion wasn't bad but I think Mavericks' memory features like memory compression and memory pressure are great. Plus it was rock solid and fast at least by 10.9.5 time. I am going to downgrade from Yosemite due to some of my network engineering programs not working on it.
 
Altemose said:
Mountain Lion wasn't bad but I think Mavericks' memory features like memory compression and memory pressure are great. Plus it was rock solid and fast at least by 10.9.5 time. I am going to downgrade from Yosemite due to some of my network engineering programs not working on it.
Click to expand...
Ugh. Working in Mavericks was like Tiger for me. Tiger was fine on my laptops and home Macs, but a complete disaster at work. Finder took every opportunity to crash. Mavericks didn't do that, but because it has issues with SMB2 it took every opportunity to close out InDesign whenever I was trying to save a file.

Yosemite has been very stable so far, just frickin' slow!
 
eyoungren said:
Ugh. Working in Mavericks was like Tiger for me. Tiger was fine on my laptops and home Macs, but a complete disaster at work. Finder took every opportunity to crash. Mavericks didn't do that, but because it has issues with SMB2 it took every opportunity to close out InDesign whenever I was trying to save a file.

Yosemite has been very stable so far, just frickin' slow!
Click to expand...



I guess you need to go back to Mountain Lion then...
 
Altemose said:
I guess you need to go back to Mountain Lion then...
Click to expand...
LOL!!!! Easier said then done. Oh I could do it, but I do not want to spend all the time involved trying to downgrade and make sure every app I need is working.

Things would be a little different if I didn't need this Mac every day or my deadlines weren't so firm.

I'd come in on a Saturday or Sunday if I absolutely needed to, but it hasn't ever gotten to that point. Still looking for other solutions first.
 
eyoungren said:
LOL!!!! Easier said then done. Oh I could do it, but I do not want to spend all the time involved trying to downgrade and make sure every app I need is working.

Things would be a little different if I didn't need this Mac every day or my deadlines weren't so firm.

I'd come in on a Saturday or Sunday if I absolutely needed to, but it hasn't ever gotten to that point. Still looking for other solutions first.
Click to expand...



Is the CPU or RAM pressure spiking? Is there anything odd in Activity Monitor?
 
eyoungren said:
In my thinking, what better way to give Apple the middle finger for abandoning PowerPC then to run a PowerPC based browser on my work Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

That is not "giving Apple the middle finger" at all; it is not insulting at all. If they actually looked, they'd just look and not care...
They had PowerPC supported until 2011... or even 2014 because snow leopard was supported until some time in 2014.
 
poiihy said:
That is not "giving Apple the middle finger" at all; it is not insulting at all. If they actually looked, they'd just look and not care...
They had PowerPC supported until 2011... or even 2014 because snow leopard was supported until some time in 2014.
Click to expand...

PowerPC cannot run Snow Leopard. 🙁

And honestly I wish at least the G5's could have ran Snow. They needed a last gasp that just never happened.
 
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