Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

PowerFox Web Browser - A brand new browser for PowerPC (Beta)

notabitail said:
Youtube with uBlock Origin and Vorapis V3 kinda works. I was able to get a short video to play pretty smoothly in 360p:
View attachment 2604594

A longer video caused this to happen:
View attachment 2604595

I'm pretty impressed with this. Best piece of software I've tried this year. I've never gotten this far on this laptop.
Click to expand...
you can use h264ify and it stops that error almost completely as its just tied to trying to run VP8 and VP9 video. in the PowerFox addon manager you can install the classic Firefox addon store that has h264ify in it :3
(also sorry for the almost 2 week late reply)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Matias_ and Appleuser201
attempting a 10.4 version of powerfox. i got gpu acel working on an imac g5 and youtube vids play. got some major issues with the ui. maybe in a week or so i think i might have something half usable lol
Jazzzny said:
Building for 10.4 would require significant time investment, much, much, work needs to be done to port the browser to 10.4. if you wish to try, you will need to install GCC 13 and the darwin-xtools linker - then start a build and start writing 10.4 code.
Click to expand...
 

Attachments

  • imac_screenshot.png
    imac_screenshot.png
    900.8 KB · Views: 69
  • Like
  • Love
Reactions: crimsonRE, Appleuser201, atarixle and 2 others
danupsher said:
attempting a 10.4 version of powerfox. i got gpu acel working on an imac g5 and youtube vids play. got some major issues with the ui. maybe in a week or so i think i might have something half usable lol
Click to expand...

Does this look like an endianness bug to anyone else?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Trekintosh
It’s an issue with how CoreGraphics renders differently on 10.4, its coordinate system is flipped.
 
Jazzzny said:
GCC 14 suffers from a bug that produces broken builds that do not run on G4 processors unless AltiVec is disabled (undesirable). Thus, I recommend GCC 13.
Click to expand...

That’s weird in fact, since, I think, this is the only instance of this bug?
Say, -mcpu=G5 breaks builds reproducibly with a lot of ports; however, we literally nowhere disable altivec, and I only use gcc14, and given that I do not see 200 issues opened about broken apps, I believe, everything works as expected. Can’t possibly be that nobody so far tried running anything on a G4 machine.

Jazzzny said:
install the required toolchain (GCC, darwin-xtools, Python 2.7), enter the directory, write a .mozconfig file (sample below), and run
Click to expand...

Any specific reason here for xtools? (I use xtools myself by default now in ports, but there was a specific reason for that: no other ld64 can build gcc for ppc64. Here, however, we do not deal with ppc64.)
 
barracuda156 said:
That’s weird in fact, since, I think, this is the only instance of this bug?
Click to expand...
I haven't had the time to properly diagnose and debug the issue, but it does exist. Not sure if its GCC faulting on something else or what.

barracuda156 said:
Any specific reason here for xtools?
Click to expand...
I've found xtools to be the most reliable toolchain, MacPort's other toolchain offerings seem to die a lot when linking the several hundred megabyte XUL library. In general I try to build with the newest toolchain possible.
 
  • Like
Reactions: barracuda156
Jazzzny said:
I've found xtools to be the most reliable toolchain, MacPort's other toolchain offerings seem to die a lot when linking the several hundred megabyte XUL library. In general I try to build with the newest toolchain possible.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that makes sense. (Besides, xtools port in non-default options got much newer linker with LTO support and Iain’s llas, but the default one is the most stable.)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jazzzny
notabitail said:
Youtube with uBlock Origin and Vorapis V3 kinda works. I was able to get a short video to play pretty smoothly in 360p:
View attachment 2604594

A longer video caused this to happen:
View attachment 2604595

I'm pretty impressed with this. Best piece of software I've tried this year. I've never gotten this far on this laptop.
Click to expand...
I had that happen to me too. It was extensions messing with Vorapis. Try disabling uBlock Origin for YouTube (or even completely disabled) and any other extensions, should work fine then. Also give h264ify a try, I’m able to watch 480p YT on my PowerBook using Vorapis and h264ify. It’s awesome.
 
  • Like
Reactions: notabitail
danupsher said:
fixed the flipped pages. seems to work ok, fixed a few more bugs today. View attachment 2609728
Click to expand...
The mere fact that we've gone from doubting the idea of PowerFox on Tiger to seeing *this* in less than a month is a real testimony to the power of a good forum with good people. I have a whole array of machines running Tiger (all the way from a G3 Clamshell to a 1.2Ghz iBook G4 to a 2.3 DC G5) so if there's a need for testing use on various devices feel free to drop a line.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Appleuser201 and AdamBuker
A modern browser running on my iMac Late 2006 (Yes, i know it's Intel) on Tiger would be a dream come true. The last time i was able to browse the web on Tiger without issues was back in 2013.
 
sXpTv said:
A modern browser running on my iMac Late 2006 (Yes, i know it's Intel) on Tiger would be a dream come true. The last time i was able to browse the web on Tiger without issues was back in 2013.
Click to expand...
This is primarily what I am curious about yeah. Problem is Intel has zero reason to be supported.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MacFoxG4
jktwice said:
This is primarily what I am curious about yeah. Problem is Intel has zero reason to be supported.
Click to expand...
Couldn't you run Powerfox on intel Tiger/Leopard using Rosetta? And Snow Leopard seems to be the base for projects like Powerfox to be developed for natively.
 
Was going to download from your GitHub since it mentioned a DMG being available (and building would be likely be a nightmare on my G4 and a night terror on my G3 😂) but the dl link returns a 404.
EDIT: Should have clarified, this was for @danupsher
 
Last edited:
Appleuser201 said:
Couldn't you run Powerfox on intel Tiger/Leopard using Rosetta? And Snow Leopard seems to be the base for projects like Powerfox to be developed for natively.
Click to expand...
Yes, and PowerFox probably works, but there’s zero guarantee that Rosetta can handle it well.

Currently Aquafox doesn’t work with Rosetta.
 
MachFox v3.0 is up! renamed the project to differentiate from PowerFox

Download: https://github.com/danupsher/machfox-browser/releases/tag/v3.0 (DMG + tarball)

@Dronecatcher @sparty411 the G4 issue should be fixed — the binaries were tagged as G5-only (ppc_970 cpu subtype). v3.0 uses -force_cpusubtype_ALL so it should run on any PPC Mac (G3/G4/G5). let me know if it works on your machines!

changes since last build:
- fixed G3/G4 compatibility (was G5-only by mistake)
- fixed the flipped CoreGraphics coordinate system
- smooth scrolling off by default (way better on slow hardware)
- fixed window frame / traffic light buttons
- new branding + icon

still cross-compiled from linux with GCC 15 + ld64, no mac needed for the build. source is on github if anyone wants to look: https://github.com/danupsher/machfox-browser

@Smithwick's sorry about the 404, repo got renamed. new link above. would love to know how it runs on your G3/G4/G5 machines!

@Jazzzny happy to share everything. all changes are committed to the repos above + the platform fork at https://github.com/danupsher/platform-uxp . would be awesome if tiger support made it upstream eventually!
 
danupsher said:
MachFox v3.0 is up! renamed the project to differentiate from PowerFox

Download: https://github.com/danupsher/machfox-browser/releases/tag/v3.0 (DMG + tarball)

@Dronecatcher @sparty411 the G4 issue should be fixed — the binaries were tagged as G5-only (ppc_970 cpu subtype). v3.0 uses -force_cpusubtype_ALL so it should run on any PPC Mac (G3/G4/G5). let me know if it works on your machines!

changes since last build:
- fixed G3/G4 compatibility (was G5-only by mistake)
- fixed the flipped CoreGraphics coordinate system
- smooth scrolling off by default (way better on slow hardware)
- fixed window frame / traffic light buttons
- new branding + icon

still cross-compiled from linux with GCC 15 + ld64, no mac needed for the build. source is on github if anyone wants to look: https://github.com/danupsher/machfox-browser

@Smithwick's sorry about the 404, repo got renamed. new link above. would love to know how it runs on your G3/G4/G5 machines!

@Jazzzny happy to share everything. all changes are committed to the repos above + the platform fork at https://github.com/danupsher/platform-uxp . would be awesome if tiger support made it upstream eventually!
Click to expand...
Now it fails with an unexpected error occurred notification
 
  • Like
Reactions: danupsher
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back