Introducing Aquafox: A New Hope (TenFourFox fork) | Updated Aug 25, 2025

[barracuda156]

What is it with web developers breaking things? It's as if they want to reinvent the wheel time after time. I understand that stagnation is not good, but we've had collapsible menus and fade/slide animations for years. Why complicate them to such a degree that they completely break functionality when our JavaScript support is a little older? It's not like we don't have JavaScript; we do, but it's just not really up-to-date anymore. @Ryan Bremer, is this specific Github issue addressable with a userscript?

Regardless, I've been experimenting with injecting a local polyfill package (from Cloudflare) in tab-content.js, but I haven't had any success so far. I think I'm injecting it too late in the loading processes. But loading this into every tab, I'm unsure of the effects on performance.

@GA204 @f54da, any updates on this? I'm quite new to modern JavaScript (anything beyond basic JS; my personal website is just plain HTML/CSS, and the only JS included is a third-party frame link script which updates the URL for convenience), but I'm willing to dedicate time to this. I just need a plan of approach, as I'm not entirely sure where to even start, especially since my initial experiments proved less than fruitful.

P.S. There's a GitHub issue related to this here.

It been ridiculous with GitHub, they really put efforts to have it broken. For example, I could not view plain text files in repos last few days. (That worked not long ago, broken just now.) Issues in repos do not work for ages.
Besides, not just on PowerPC; GitHub does not work properly in Palemoon on Catalina (!). And even in Safari it is super-slow (no hyperbole, it is like opening web in 2000). Either developers there are just b*****t bad – or deliberately break things.
And this is the website which could have been usable in plain text!

 

[davisdelo]

No offense to web devs, but I deal with a lot of them at work, and it seems like about 20% of them are geniuses, while the rest are/were just kids who's grandmas said they're good with computers, so they thought they should make websites for a living lol. I've seen that 80% do all kinds of bonehead things, and often make changes for the sake of change alone.

As a former web developer I couldn't agree more. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It used to be that you showed your competence and got the job, blow away your clients expectations and you'll have work for years. Now they hire by the numbers/degrees and wonder why nothing works.

 

[z970]

No offense to web devs, but I deal with a lot of them at work, and it seems like about 20% of them are geniuses, while the rest are/were just kids who's grandmas said they're good with computers, so they thought they should make websites for a living lol. I've seen that 80% do all kinds of bonehead things, and often make changes for the sake of change alone.

Can confirm. I've been in the web design and digital marketing business for a few years now, and what I've since learned is that, in layman's terms, true websites as we knew them don't really exist anymore. What we have now are most of the time web applications running not on pre-compiled optimized binaries like a traditional piece of software usually does, but running on a mess of incoherent and poorly strung-together interpreted code processed in real-time instead—which from a computational perspective is literally like building an application in Xcode or another IDE every time you visit at least 75% of the mainstream websites today. And that's not even factoring in the many ad / tracking / fingerprinting / analytics networks that smother pages and steal bandwidth before most of them even finish loading.

And here's the funny thing; technically-speaking, this trend still doesn't make any sense because more intelligently-engineered websites that load and respond faster generally have better on-page search engine optimization scores and thus are more likely to rank higher in search engine result pages all else being equal, and also not alienate visitors with slow response times, thus winning more potential traffic and business. You'd wonder why more web developers don't capitalize on delivering faster sites to their clients in order to get better ranking results than the competition.

Google even measures this metric as one of the factors to determine domain ranking! You might think more web development firms would care about this, even if it's only to accommodate leads visiting from older mobile phones on rural or poor-quality cellular connections.

...Anyway, it just goes to show the importance of supporting projects like Protoweb and Old'aVista so that our vintage systems can still participate in their own special network, rather than futilely trying to keep up with the bloated and excessively-monetized modern one that not even the masses are having fun with anymore.

Food for thought.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

No offense to web devs, but I deal with a lot of them at work, and it seems like about 20% of them are geniuses, while the rest are/were just kids who's grandmas said they're good with computers, so they thought they should make websites for a living lol. I've seen that 80% do all kinds of bonehead things, and often make changes for the sake of change alone.

Gotta love "bug fixes" as the only release notes. Or the terrible "as part of our weekly release cycle, we've fixed bugs." - meaning you release new versions every week even if nothing actually needed to change.

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @z970! I had never heard of ProtoWeb, but I love the idea. I will set it up and try it out. Thanks again!

 

[barracuda156]

meaning you release new versions every week even if nothing actually needed to change.

Not infrequently that means something got broken which was working earlier.

 

[mac57mac57]

What it is is CI/CD, [Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment], often part of the Agile software development "religion". It is a ghastly mistake, but one that the software prophets hugely hype.

"Let's release our stuff every day/week, pushing out new features (that, typically, no one really wants) at warp speed". Move fast and break stuff... sound familiar?

This approach is SUPPOSED to be backed by exhaustive and automated regression testing, but in my experience, that testing was usually grossly insufficient, allowing large volumes of bugs to "escape" into the field, where ordinary users like you and I would encounter them, and wonder, as I often have, "does anyone test this sh#t before foisting it on the unsuspecting public???".

Change for it's own sake is not progress... it is just frustrating!

 

[Doq]

Change for it's own sake is not progress... it is just frustrating!

But the shareholders! Won't somebody please think of the shareholders!

Let it be known that the stock market is the backbone of all corporate regression, big or small.

 

[ervus]

I've been tinkering some with linux, and zram is proving very helpful on older machines. If you have not heard of it, it's like an intermediate step between RAM and swap. It's a section of compressed RAM, that is slower than RAM but still much faster than swap.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

I'm guessing that zram would be too difficult to implement on OS X (anyone know?), but I remember reading in the TFF Blog that there was an optional alternate memory handler for firefox. Could compression be added to this, such that it works something like zram under linux? I've noticed that TFF is a memory hog once I get a few tabs open, and profiling shows that the CPU is not the limit, RAM is.

Just a thought...

 

[Forest Expertise]

Looks like GH added some more JS garbage in their website. Before you could choose to have SMS sent as an alternative. Now it is perhaps inside More options, but the thing is unclickable. Any solution?

View attachment 2527313

I was able to log in without two-factor authentication with Aquafox. Would disabling two-factor authentication be a viable solution?

 

[barracuda156]

I was able to log in without two-factor authentication with Aquafox. Would disabling two-factor authentication be a viable solution?

I found a way to log in by manually deleting an ending part of the URL (which sets auto). Then it sends SMS.

GH remains largely unusable otherwise though (this is a long-standing issue).

 

[thewireless]

Hey everyone! For Aquafox version 3, I am collecting user feedback regarding user agents. The list of standard Firefox versions is getting a little long, and I have my doubts about the usefulness of some of them. So, what are some user agents for the best compatibility and compromise? What are the user agents that you personally use?

Spoiler: UAs currently in Aquafox

• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:115.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0
• NokiaN90-1/3.0545.5.1 Series60/2.8 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 (en-US; rv:9.3.3) Clecko/20141026 Classilla/CFM
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0)
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
• Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; Pixel XL Build/OPM1.171019.021) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.109 Mobile Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_2_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.5.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0 Mobile/15D100 Safari/604.1

Spoiler: UAs from other MacRumors users

• Mozilla/5.0 (iPod touch; CPU iPhone OS 9_3_5 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/13G36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; rv:48.0) Gecko/48.0 Firefox/48.0 KAIOS/2.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 12.0; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/604.5.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0.3 Safari/604.5.6

Since I don't use Aquafox all that much myself, and I don't know which websites you frequent, I can't really test these out myself. Any feedback is appreciated!

 

[mac57mac57]

Chrome, Firefox, Safari: the most current versions possible!

 

[Forest Expertise]

Hey everyone! For Aquafox version 3, I am collecting user feedback regarding user agents. The list of standard Firefox versions is getting a little long, and I have my doubts about the usefulness of some of them. So, what are some user agents for the best compatibility and compromise? What are the user agents that you personally use?

Spoiler: UAs currently in Aquafox

• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:115.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0
• NokiaN90-1/3.0545.5.1 Series60/2.8 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 (en-US; rv:9.3.3) Clecko/20141026 Classilla/CFM
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0)
• Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
• Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; Pixel XL Build/OPM1.171019.021) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.109 Mobile Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_2_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.5.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0 Mobile/15D100 Safari/604.1

Spoiler: UAs from other MacRumors users

• Mozilla/5.0 (iPod touch; CPU iPhone OS 9_3_5 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/13G36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/537.36
• Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; rv:48.0) Gecko/48.0 Firefox/48.0 KAIOS/2.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 12.0; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0
• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/604.5.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0.3 Safari/604.5.6

Since I don't use Aquafox all that much myself, and I don't know which websites you frequent, I can't really test these out myself. Any feedback is appreciated!

Whatever user agent was user in Aquaweb micro would be great to have in Aquafox. I believe it was some sort of mobile user agent, and it helped speed browsing even more.

 

[wicknix]

• Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; rv:48.0) Gecko/48.0 Firefox/48.0 KAIOS/2.0

This UA still makes watching YouTube possible in TFF/IW/AF on a G5. Well, last time i used my G5 anyway.

 

[thewireless]

Aquafox 2.4 - One Year of Aquafox​

Happy Aquafox anniversary! Today marks exactly one year since Aquafox 1.0 was released, and we've come a long way since then. This celebratory security update will be the last for Aquafox 2 and includes security updates to the final version of 128 ESR—nothing else; no confetti (it's more of a formality than a celebration).

Thank you all for your continued support, and a special thank you to Santiago Lema and Forest Expertise for their donations! I’ll see you all again in October with the release of Aquafox 3, so stay tuned!

Direct downloads here:

https://github.com/BlackBirdLC/Aquafox/releases/expanded_assets/v2.4