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

[atarixle]

@Jazzzny himself said the graphics acceleration wouldn't make much difference. Besides that wouldn't account for the disparity between similar machines.

Oh, sorry, then I go your previous post wrong ... I minstakenly believed it compared Aquafox to Powerfox.
Knowing that GPU acceleration wouldn't make a huge difference is actually good for my Powerbook G4 12", as a previous post here descripes problems with the built-in GPU, and Jazzzny is about to blacklist it (it's the Nvidia FX5200 if I remember correctly).

EDIT: I see in this Forum it is still allowed to list all the owned devices in the signature ... may be I actually will add some of my machines too, while I guess I'd better limit it to my PowerPC machines.

 

[Jazzzny]

After some more testing, I believe that our graphics acceleration actually does provide a pretty nice performance gain, especially on machines with weaker processors on graphics-heavy tasks such as playing video. It seems like offloading the browser redraw to the GPU has really helped with performance in that regard.

 

[Dronecatcher]

After some more testing, I believe that our graphics acceleration actually does provide a pretty nice performance gain, especially on machines with weaker processors on graphics-heavy tasks such as playing video. It seems like offloading the browser redraw to the GPU has really helped with performance in that regard.

I just can't figure why my G5 is only good for 360P but @OuchMyFaceyHole 's G5 does 1080P - 0.3Ghz shouldn't make that much difference?
And the Quadro card I know for a fact is no improvement for GUI and video over the 6600 - despite the OpenMark score.

 

[barracuda156]

And the Quadro card I know for a fact is no improvement for GUI and video over the 6600

Based on what?

 

[Dronecatcher]

Based on what?

My tests:

Do I Need A Better Graphics Card....

That's the question I've asked myself again and again when I've suspected I could just get that little bit more performance out of my machine..... So, spying a NVIDIA Quadro FX4500 on ebay for a reasonable(ish) price, I decided to find out. My existing card was a NVIDIA Geforce 6600 which is...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[barracuda156]

My tests:

Do I Need A Better Graphics Card....

That's the question I've asked myself again and again when I've suspected I could just get that little bit more performance out of my machine..... So, spying a NVIDIA Quadro FX4500 on ebay for a reasonable(ish) price, I decided to find out. My existing card was a NVIDIA Geforce 6600 which is...

forums.macrumors.com

It doesn’t necessarily follow from that post that there is “no improvement for GUI and video over the 6600” though. It just shows that in some scenarios the difference is negligible. I agree that results look generally disappointing, yet they are inconclusive (at least nothing there justifies “for a fact” part).

 

[Dronecatcher]

It doesn’t necessarily follow from that post that there is “no improvement for GUI and video over the 6600” though. It just shows that in some scenarios the difference is negligible. I agree that results look generally disappointing, yet they are inconclusive (at least nothing there justifies “for a fact” part).

Why would I do comprehensive tests that aren't relevant to my everyday use to prove the capabilities of the card? The card is allegedly good for gaming and CAD - 2 things I don't do.

I did tests that were absolutely relevant to the performance increase I was expecting.

 

[MacFoxG4]

So glad to see this browser for PPC! Typing this from my Sawtooth now. The Sawtooth has a 1.5ghz CPU upgrade instead of the original CPU. This browser has been working great so far. Making bookmarks works, downloading files works, the forum works and TenFour Fox PEP works with this browser too. I did try playing a YouTube video and it played, but then a warning would pop up about a script and no matter if I clicked stop the script or continue, the video would freeze at the 1 minute mark. Reloading the page doesn't fix it and hitting pause and waiting a few seconds for the video to buffer doesn't fix it either. Not sure of resolution, but it was a good framerate with only brief stutters. Still, for one glorious minute I was able to get in browser YouTube on this Mac for the first time in years.

 

[Jazzzny]

Hey all, I've prepared a new release of PowerFox for PPC:

Release 26.2.1 PowerPC Beta · Jazzzny/powerfox-browser

Beta release for PowerPC Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Fixed OpenGL acceleration on ATI X1000 series GPUs Fixed black window issue on GeForce FX series GPUs Fixed crash on launch on non-QECI GPUs (i.e. Rad...

github.com

• Fixed OpenGL acceleration on ATI X1000 series GPUs
• Fixed black window issue on GeForce FX series GPUs
• Fixed crash on launch on non-QECI GPUs (i.e. Radeon 9200, GeForce 4MX, etc.)
• Fixed blue hue on videos when the browser is running without OpenGL acceleration

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.
- Jazzzny

 

[barracuda156]

Still, for one glorious minute I was able to get in browser YouTube on this Mac for the first time in years.

Specifically for YouTube you could use QMPlay2, which will arguably have a better performance than any browser in principle.

 

[MacFoxG4]

Specifically for YouTube you could use QMPlay2, which will arguably have a better performance than any browser in principle.

I just thought it would be fun to try in browser YouTube on this new browser. I normally use PPCMC to download videos and play them on QuickTime/VLC. Been doing so ever since PPCMC 7 came out.

 

[z970]

It's alive!! It's finally alive!!

My jaw hit the floor when I first saw the record-high frame rate of page scrolling in PowerFox for PPC, and then after some coaxing was able to smoothly stream a 720p video in regular YouTube without any tricks or user agents, which hasn't been possible for nearly a decade (and even then we needed WebKit to reach such feats)! Furthermore most web apps I tested function perfectly, and everything renders properly! And this is all just an early baseline on a clean slate, WITHOUT a JIT engine, and BEFORE any compiler or config optimization! TFF45 FPR32 could NEVER get this caliber of performance in an equally rudimentary state, yet the user experience on a 2005 G5 is now literally almost completely indistinguishable from a 2006 C2D because the playing field has just become level! At long last, the hardware is finally firing on all cylinders!

This is groundbreaking! Considering these are now over 20-year-old processors, the importance to end user accessibility of being able to leverage full GPU acceleration for content rendering and page manipulation cannot be overstated (for example to allow the CPU to fully concentrate on running DOM workers or executing JS unhindered, or the rest of the OS and all of its daemons for that matter), let alone the simultaneous update to a 10-year-newer codebase than the previously latest available; I never thought such things were possible, I was thoroughly convinced the modern web on PPC OS X was dead and gone! But this is a completely new development platform altogether with entirely untapped potential, meaning PowerFox is easily the most significant software breakthrough for the average user to happen to these systems since the genesis of TenFourFox in 2010!

This means I may very well be able to switch back to my beloved Leopard full-time, in which case I foresee a refresh to foxPEP just around the corner! Indeed, if this is what this Fox can do straight out of the box, I can't wait to see what the rest of UXP can achieve after some upgrades and well-placed fine-tuning! We have just entered a brand new era!

Thank you, @Jazzzny! You (and dbsoft) are superheroes among men!

 

[atarixle]

dang! Now that I wanted to try it on my G5, I just booted into Leopard via Firewire. But the iMac does not have Airport so it lacks of the USB-Wifi-drivers. But resizing the Window is previewing some of the performance. I am looking forward to install Leopard plus the Wifi-drivers to my iMac G5.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Still, for one glorious minute I was able to get in browser YouTube on this Mac for the first time in years.

Doesn't TenFiveTube work for you?

 

[MacFoxG4]

Doesn't TenFiveTube work for you?

I tried it once and I believe it worked, but in browser YouTube isn’t that important to me on PPC. I just saw other users trying in browser YouTube on this browser and I thought I would try it out too.