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

kencu said:
really nice work

very cool to be able to build it on a current system

powerfox-sdk is a private repo? I presume must be the MacOS Tiger sdk with some added gcc? cross compilers and darwin-xtools maybe?
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Yes, that’s precisely it, though I have some patches in xtools to fix a Tiger bug.
 
Btw, if you’re curious, I was able to get the i386 build done by using GCC combined with LLVM’s assembler, though it is wrapped in a preprocessor to fix up some assumptions that clang doesn’t make.
 
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Fabulous work done by you, as well as danupsher and, of course, dbsoft. I do have some cases where Powerfox seems to be failing. 3 of the 4 seem to be perhaps using the same Cloudflare tool (challenges.cloudflare.com): attempting to even view nextcomputers.org (THE hangout for users of NeXT computers and the NextStep OS) and the wiki.preterhuman.com website (lots of retrocomputing info), as well as logging into anotepad.com (my favorite for online notes, until this issue about a year ago killed it for TenFourFox). The fourth is attempting to log into my Reddit account - Powerfox eventually crashes... Trying to even look at the debug console is pretty much impossible - the error box seems to be added to in real-time so viewing it is an exercise in frustration. These all occur whether or not I am using a JS blocker (NoScript)...
 
crimsonRE said:
(NoScript)...
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There is probably some of your issue right there. The UXP devs highly recommend not using NoScript as it’s known to destroy your browser profile along with a ton of websites (enabled or not). At one point in time they even “hard blocked” it from being able to be installed in Pale Moon. I recommend uMatrix (or its forks) that can be found on Pale Moon / Basilisk extensions web pages.

Sadly you just can't uninstall or disable NoScript. You have to delete your browser profile and start fresh, otherwise NoScript leaves a ton of remnants behind and you’ll still have issues.

The issue with NoScript is well documented on Pale Moons forum.
 
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Jazzzny said:
A small thing, but I'd say that the credit for the 10.4 port should go to Cameron Kaiser. Without his patches, I would not have been able to get 10.4 to work properly at all!
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Indeed - I read his notes as he was porting the SpiderMonkey JS JIT years ago - pretty amazing, and obvious deep knowledge of the Tiger frameworks...
 
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I am still unsure about that. Their JIT is fully written by AI, which makes me very nervous to ship it. In a web browser, around 50% of all vulnerabilities are caused by the JavaScript JIT. Shipping a JIT that has not been fully audited by humans is a poor idea in my opinion. Additionally, AI cannot fundamentally write a well-designed JIT, as JIT requires very low-level programming involving a near-complete knowledge of the CPU architecture that only highly experienced individuals such as Cameron Kaiser have been able to pull off. In short, AI is unable to write such highly specific and optimized code.

In my opinion, adapting the TenFourFox JIT is still a much better idea, and I would rather ship JIT-less builds until a human port (or at least a port that is fully audited by humans) can be done.
 
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Jazzzny said:
I am still unsure about that. Their JIT is fully written by AI, which makes me very nervous to ship it. In a web browser, around 50% of all vulnerabilities are caused by the JavaScript JIT. Shipping a JIT that has not been fully audited by humans is a poor idea in my opinion. Additionally, AI cannot fundamentally write a well-designed JIT, as JIT requires very low-level programming involving a near-complete knowledge of the CPU architecture that only highly experienced individuals such as Cameron Kaiser have been able to pull off. In short, AI is unable to write such highly specific and optimized code.

In my opinion, adapting the TenFourFox JIT is still a much better idea, and I would rather ship JIT-less builds until a human port (or at least a port that is fully audited by humans) can be done.
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FWIW I like the notion of PowerFox being secure and solid by nature. Different forks doing stuff like MachFox certainly help to show proof of concept, but that "vibe coded" or AI assisted stuff can serve as that proof springboard to help bring a secure equivalent to the OG PowerFox.
 
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Smithwick’s said:
FWIW I like the notion of PowerFox being secure and solid by nature. Different forks doing stuff like MachFox certainly help to show proof of concept, but that "vibe coded" or AI assisted stuff can serve as that proof springboard to help bring a secure equivalent to the OG PowerFox.
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Agreed. Especially since many of us will be using it for secure logins and things like that. Aquafox is still great for things like forum viewing, Google searches, old reddit, and basic tasks, but isn't good for logins and captchas. PowerFox is great for most of these advanced things, and keeping it secure is crucial for logins.
 
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Jazzzny said:
No, all builds are done on apple silicon. The issues are definitely not related to altivec, as I have seen the crash reports and they indicate something else. Either way, MacPorts is no longer used at all in the PowerFox build process.
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incredible!
 
Hello everyone,

I've been working on something which I think will be quite useful:
1774829901735.png


PowerBird will be an email client, news reader, and calendar based on Thunderbird, and it'll feel very familiar if you use PowerFox.
I've been able to log into my Gmail account using modern Oauth + 2FA, meaning it should be very secure with a very simple setup procedure!
 
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Jazzzny said:
Hello everyone,

I've been working on something which I think will be quite useful:
View attachment 2618039

PowerBird will be an email client, news reader, and calendar based on Thunderbird, and it'll feel very familiar if you use PowerFox.
I've been able to log into my Gmail account using modern Oauth + 2FA, meaning it should be very secure with a very simple setup procedure!
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You’re targeting Tiger with this too? That’s awesome, @Jazzzny!
When this releases and combined with PowerFox, I may just run Snow Leopard on my 17” MBP full time. Thanks for the hard work as always. 😃
 
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Jazzzny said:
PowerBird will be an email client, news reader, and calendar based on Thunderbird,
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Nice. Much needed for Tiger/Leopard. Is this actually based on a “clean” ThunderBird or more of a rebranding of the existing UXP E-Mail ports like IceDove, FossaMail, Epyrus, InterLink, SeaMail, etc?

Second, why not just rebrand my BrassMonkey fork? It is the full “Internet Suite" with a browser, email client, calendar, news/rss reader, composer, address book, and irc client all in one binary. All of that only adds about 10mb to the app vs the size of the other UXP based apps. All the hard work is already done. Just rebrand and build against your modified UXP. Heck call it “Power Monkey”. ;-)

Cheers
 
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wicknix said:
Is this actually based on a “clean” ThunderBird or more of a rebranding of the existing UXP E-Mail ports like IceDove, FossaMail, Epyrus, InterLink, SeaMail, etc?
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This is based on Epyrus for its improvements in the codebase, but with the stock Australis UI fully restored to pair it with PowerFox.

wicknix said:
It is the full “Internet Suite"
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This is actually my problem, I am not a fan of the Mozilla Suite. I find it to be quite clunky and outdated overall. Remember that Firefox (and Thunderbird) exist in the first place because Mozilla found the suite to be hopeless.
 
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Jazzzny said:
because Mozilla found the suite to be hopeless.
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Actually, without Netscape/Mozilla Suite there wouldn’t be a Firefox or Thunderbird. It wasn’t hopeless until they made it that way. When Mozilla shifted their focus on Firefox and Thunderbird as standalone apps they ditched the Mozilla Suite. They even eventually blocked the community of devs that took over to form SeaMonkey from using their infrastructure to make sure the project died, but it didn’t. Not yet anyway, even after Mozilla ditched it 20 years ago.

Jazzzny said:
I find it to be quite clunky and outdated overall
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That’s your personal preference. I adore the UI. Maybe it’s because i’m old and used Netscape early on and i’m use to it. Me personally i hate the Australis UI. The Firefox 4 UI (same UI that Pale moon uses) was peak Mozilla. Every UI change after that was, and still is, garbage.

My reason for asking is because each app (PowerFox and PowerBird) will chew through the limited ram and cpu on G3/G4’s if they are open at the same time. Having it all in one app would have little effect on performance. Opening the mail client in *Monkey would be equivalent to opening a new browser tab vs loading another heavy app.

The best quote i read online about this subject:
I think they're just angry that the Suite they threw away in 2006 gets updates and is still cooler than Firefox.
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Anyway, keep on keeping on.
 
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Jazzzny said:
For anyone interested, I have done further video playback tests on 10.4 and I can play YouTube in 720p with 0 frames dropped using H264ify on my 2.0 GHz Dual Core Power Mac G5 with GeForce 6600.
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Did you recompile h264ify yourself to work on PowerFox or? I haven't found any version that works on Pale Moon/Basilisk/PowerFox.
 
To me (and to my shame) the most important thing is: will Hotmail work with it? This OAuth2.0 thingy seems to break all. And while that even is available in a Thunderbird-ESR-Version running in El Capitan, it does not work at all there.

To speak PowerFox: PowerFox for Tiger works pretty well on Leopard PowerPC. Nice to have all the bug-fixes you promised. Can't wait to use the stable release! On Intel there are some quirks, which I may mention in the PowerFox Intel thread (I tested it in Snow Leopard, and Tiger Intel).
 
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atarixle said:
To me (and to my shame) the most important thing is: will Hotmail work with it? This OAuth2.0 thingy seems to break all. And while that even is available in a Thunderbird-ESR-Version running in El Capitan, it does not work at all there.

To speak PowerFox: PowerFox for Tiger works pretty well on Leopard PowerPC. Nice to have all the bug-fixes you promised. Can't wait to use the stable release! On Intel there are some quirks, which I may mention in the PowerFox Intel thread (I tested it in Snow Leopard, and Tiger Intel).
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I've never been able to log into Hotmail/Outlook or into my Microsoft account at all on PowerFox. I suspect its a user agent issue, as the Brassmonkey browser on Leopard works with logging in and checking my outlook. Someone here mentioned switching the user agent on PowerFox to the KaiOS user agent from Aquafox and being able to get it to work.
 
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