I've had 2 Quads in the past and apart from video transcoding I've never felt any massive difference between them and my dual core - I can only assume there's some special sauce with the GPU choice?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
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)
- Thread starter Jazzzny
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The GPU should not matter that much, as long as it supports acceleration in PowerFox (check about:support). Hardware decoding doesn't exist at all on 10.5, we are only able to take advantage of the GPU to paint the video frames 30 times a second, which takes load off from the CPU to work on decoding the actual video. I've seen PowerFox use up to 280% CPU (keep in mind, the Quad is 2.5GHz), while decoding 1080p, which means that slower dual-core or single-core systems with a lower clock speed will probably struggle with 1080p.
One more screenshot for good measure:
One more screenshot for good measure:
Last edited:
I installed and used this on my mid 2005 iBook G4 1.33ghz with 1.5gb of ram and ATI Mobility Radeon 9550 graphics.
Overall this browser is way faster than Aquafox. But it’s slow in other ways. It loads YouTube, I got a video to play fairly smoothly, but many elements on the page were missing and the video controls weren’t showing up.
When loading YouTube I got a script warning that came up a few times. I just clicked continue.
This browser seems really promising!
Overall this browser is way faster than Aquafox. But it’s slow in other ways. It loads YouTube, I got a video to play fairly smoothly, but many elements on the page were missing and the video controls weren’t showing up.
When loading YouTube I got a script warning that came up a few times. I just clicked continue.
This browser seems really promising!
With multithreading the Quad will have an edge I guess. I can't come up with any reasonable answer (my Powerbook is equally incapable of decent results) but as I say, it's a godsend for my early intel Macs.
Most likely because of it's current lack of JIT for Javascript causing the missing elements/script warnings. There will be extremely slow websites that may not even work at all because of it, but it's still impressive at what it's currently able to do. Hopefully JIT will eventually be implemented as this is a beta version, but very impressive results even in it's early form.
I'm going to tentatively say that 1080p video playback on PowerPC desktop YouTube will require a 2.3 GHz or faster Dual Core/CPU G5 paired with a graphics card that supports QECI.
In all honesty, I'm still surprised that any of these 20+ year old machines can play 1080p on the desktop YouTube site at all. Anything slower doesn't run fast enough to provide enough CPU cycles to actually decode the video.
In all honesty, I'm still surprised that any of these 20+ year old machines can play 1080p on the desktop YouTube site at all. Anything slower doesn't run fast enough to provide enough CPU cycles to actually decode the video.
It really wouldn't surprise me if some of the differences between similarly-specc'd machines come down to the early nature of the app or peculiarities to the OS install on the specific device.
Just as a quick anecdote on YouTube: my 1.5GHz 12" PBG4 running stock 10.5.8 can run 480p with no issue, but 720p is right out. My 1.67GHz 17" running a fresh Sorbet install struggled to even do that much - BUT after doing the customary permissions fix (which I forgot after first boot) it's better than the 12". My DC 2.3 G5 can run 1080p in stock 10.5.8 but barely runs 480p in 10.6.8a.
All this is to say, please keep at it!
Just as a quick anecdote on YouTube: my 1.5GHz 12" PBG4 running stock 10.5.8 can run 480p with no issue, but 720p is right out. My 1.67GHz 17" running a fresh Sorbet install struggled to even do that much - BUT after doing the customary permissions fix (which I forgot after first boot) it's better than the 12". My DC 2.3 G5 can run 1080p in stock 10.5.8 but barely runs 480p in 10.6.8a.
All this is to say, please keep at it!
With exactly the same Powerbook and OSX, I have to wait 3 minutes for the page to load and settle then get around 1FPS at 100% CPU for 480P.It really wouldn't surprise me if some of the differences between similarly-specc'd machines come down to the early nature of the app or peculiarities to the OS install on the specific device.
Just as a quick anecdote on YouTube: my 1.5GHz 12" PBG4 running stock 10.5.8 can run 480p with no issue, but 720p is right out. My 1.67GHz 17" running a fresh Sorbet install struggled to even do that much - BUT after doing the customary permissions fix (which I forgot after first boot) it's better than the 12". My DC 2.3 G5 can run 1080p in stock 10.5.8 but barely runs 480p in 10.6.8a.
All this is to say, please keep at it!
Does your Powerbook have a SSD - though it shouldn't make a difference?
Some issues I noticed (beside the known hangs and few crashes which is the nature of beta):
it scrolls always one page when clicking the scrollbar-arrows - it simply ignores them and scrolls one page instead (may be that is because it comes from Basilisk which runs on Lion which has no arrows in the scrollbar).
About shows still 26.2.0 instead 26.2.1.
The german language pack makes the browser not work anymore at all. All I get is this
after setting the general.useragent.locale to de-DE ... it works perfectly fine on PowerFox 32 Bit in Snow Leopard x86.
it scrolls always one page when clicking the scrollbar-arrows - it simply ignores them and scrolls one page instead (may be that is because it comes from Basilisk which runs on Lion which has no arrows in the scrollbar).
About shows still 26.2.0 instead 26.2.1.
The german language pack makes the browser not work anymore at all. All I get is this
XML:
XML-Verarbeitungsfehler: Nicht definierte Entität
Adresse: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Zeile Nr. 1320, Spalte 7: <toolbarbutton id="panelMenu_manageContainers"
------^
Last edited:
This is because I didn't release a new language pack release with 26.2. Please update your language packs:
Release 26.2.1 · Jazzzny/powerfox-languagepacks
Language Packs for the PowerFox Browser. Contribute to Jazzzny/powerfox-languagepacks development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
The new release is pretty stable. On a top end G5 this is very usable.
I'm super excited for the future development of PowerFox and optimizing JS for it. It will especially help G4 machines stay in the race. I'd wager a majority of PowerPC users on OS X use a G4 machine.
I'm super excited for the future development of PowerFox and optimizing JS for it. It will especially help G4 machines stay in the race. I'd wager a majority of PowerPC users on OS X use a G4 machine.