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

@Project Alice

Frustratingly I have to agree with your comment. I personally strongly prefer Tiger, but, While I personally prefer tiger, there are more reasons for me to enable and use Leopard on my older systems. The software, core internal features it unlocks, and deep system optimizations are noticeable. Now that I have a fully functional quartz / Core Image GPU on my 533, I feel that most overall use in Leopard is a bit snappier™, especially after doing some tweaks with 3rd party tools.

Jazzzny said:
The internet does not wait. The TenFourFox engine turns 10 years old this year, and I’m surprised that anything that requires JavaScript still loads at all these days in TenFourFox’s derivatives. With JIT, we will be faster than tenfourfox, which is why I am keeping the leopard build as a beta until we get JIT.
Click to expand...
True, though Fortunately many of the older sites serving these older computers intentionally delay, or skip features that will impact the older PowerPC systems (to a point). If one is not hitting a site with heavy Java (that is broken and buggy on TFF variants) this browser is plenty fast. On sites that are light on Java, I detect no difference in speed between this browser, TFF, or aquafox.

That said, efforts such as yours, and people working with the old TFF code are greatly appreciated by the classic community. I don't need to browse the internet to have fun with these systems, but it is a nice perk!
 
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Dronecatcher said:
On my 12" Powerbook, MR page even after loading sits at 100% CPU - do you see the same?
Click to expand...
Mine will do so occasionally (first image), but just reloading the page solves the issue (second image). Seems like a script or something that hangs from time to time. Most of the time it stops taxing the CPU immediately after the page has finished loading.

Picture 3.png

Picture 4.png
 
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840quadra said:
@Project Alice

Frustratingly I have to agree with your comment. I personally strongly prefer Tiger, but, While I personally prefer tiger, there are more reasons for me to enable and use Leopard on my older systems. The software, core internal features it unlocks, and deep system optimizations are noticeable. Now that I have a fully functional quartz / Core Image GPU on my 533, I feel that most overall use in Leopard is a bit snappier™, especially after doing some tweaks with 3rd party tools.


True, though Fortunately many of the older sites serving these older computers intentionally delay, or skip features that will impact the older PowerPC systems (to a point). If one is not hitting a site with heavy Java (that is broken and buggy on TFF variants) this browser is plenty fast. On sites that are light on Java, I detect no difference in speed between this browser, TFF, or aquafox.

That said, efforts such as yours, and people working with the old TFF code are greatly appreciated by the classic community. I don't need to browse the internet to have fun with these systems, but it is a nice perk!
Click to expand...
I'm an hour and a half into compiling PowerFox for Tiger with no errors yet, so it may be doable to get this ported to Tiger.
Call for help: if you have a G5 with a lot of RAM that you are open to me remote desktoping into, that might help a lot with getting a build that works on Tiger (my best machine is a Powerbook with 2 Gb of RAM, which I fear won't be enough). It does need to have Leopard installed - the idea is to build on Leopard against the 10.5 SDK but set the minimum deployment target to 10.4
 
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Interesting Idea!

Sadly not able to assist at this time, the G5 is at my office and offline currently. I will not be back to that location for a little over a week!

Be neat to know the process, I have compiled TFF on systems in the past, but I am sure the process is a bit different.
 
840quadra said:
Interesting Idea!

Sadly not able to assist at this time, the G5 is at my office and offline currently. I will not be back to that location for a little over a week!

Be neat to know the process, I have compiled TFF on systems in the past, but I am sure the process is a bit different.
Click to expand...
Honestly, the tool chain/process seems cleaner than TenFourFox, which I know was one reason people were excited about porting UXP based browsers to PowerPC Mac OS X. I followed the instructions given by @Jazzzny on the first page of this thread with my only change being lowering the deployment target from 10.5 to 10.4. Now I am in the stage of hoping it compiles or that whatever error it throws at me is something trivial, like having to choose a directory to be the Downloads directory because Tiger doesn't have one (had to do that when porting a program once).
The downside is that I am only building for G4 on Tiger. I don't have any G5s or G3s so I can't really do anything for those platforms without help. So even if I get PowerFox working on 10.4, it may not work on G3s
 
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headlessmike said:
Mine will do so occasionally (first image), but just reloading the page solves the issue (second image). Seems like a script or something that hangs from time to time. Most of the time it stops taxing the CPU immediately after the page has finished loading.

View attachment 2602912
View attachment 2602913
Click to expand...
@Dronecatcher The issue appears to be Javascript, likely related to the developers mention of JIT not being active. With Javascript disabled, my Dual 533 settles down quite nicely after the site loads.

Picture 1.jpg
(Javascript Enabled)

Picture 2.jpg
Javascript Disabled under Developer tools
 
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headlessmike said:
My PowerFox is completely vanilla, but it could be due to a combination software and hardware I guess.
Click to expand...
Success! I normally have a custom hosts file installed and I'd forgotten to add it - this instantly transformed the loading time of MR and the CPU settled down as per AquaFox.

AquaFox clearly wasn't effected by the lack of a hosts file problably because it couldn't handle the modern script ads are using?
 
Forest Expertise said:
I'm an hour and a half into compiling PowerFox for Tiger with no errors yet, so it may be doable to get this ported to Tiger.
Call for help: if you have a G5 with a lot of RAM that you are open to me remote desktoping into, that might help a lot with getting a build that works on Tiger (my best machine is a Powerbook with 2 Gb of RAM, which I fear won't be enough). It does need to have Leopard installed - the idea is to build on Leopard against the 10.5 SDK but set the minimum deployment target to 10.4
Click to expand...
An Intel Mac running Leopard or Snow Leopard can't build for PPC Tiger?
 
Dronecatcher said:
Success! I normally have a custom hosts file installed and I'd forgotten to add it - this instantly transformed the loading time of MR and the CPU settled down as per AquaFox.
AquaFox clearly wasn't effected by the lack of a hosts file problably because it couldn't handle the modern script ads are using?
Click to expand...
Will test when I get a chance.
 
Forest Expertise said:
Honestly, the tool chain/process seems cleaner than TenFourFox, which I know was one reason people were excited about porting UXP based browsers to PowerPC Mac OS X. I followed the instructions given by @Jazzzny on the first page of this thread with my only change being lowering the deployment target from 10.5 to 10.4. Now I am in the stage of hoping it compiles or that whatever error it throws at me is something trivial, like having to choose a directory to be the Downloads directory because Tiger doesn't have one (had to do that when porting a program once).
The downside is that I am only building for G4 on Tiger. I don't have any G5s or G3s so I can't really do anything for those platforms without help. So even if I get PowerFox working on 10.4, it may not work on G3s
Click to expand...
Hey, I have a spare Quad with 10GBs of RAM you could use. Maybe we could work something out?
 
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joevt said:
An Intel Mac running Leopard or Snow Leopard can't build for PPC Tiger?
Click to expand...
It probably could, but I don't have one of those. If someone wants me to remote in to one of those instead, I can try. I just passed hour 10 of building on the PowerBook.
jktwice said:
Hey, I have a spare Quad with 10GBs of RAM you could use. Maybe we could work something out?
Click to expand...
That would be excellent! VNC would probably work, if you can set up a host on your end. Timbuktu is another option, though I have only used that over a local network. May I PM you for details?
 
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Forest Expertise said:
It probably could, but I don't have one of those. If someone wants me to remote in to one of those instead, I can try. I just passed hour 10 of building on the PowerBook.

That would be excellent! VNC would probably work, if you can set up a host on your end.
Click to expand...
You can dm me yes. We can get something figured out.
 
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In good news, you can apparently build Powerfox from source on a Powerbook G4 1.67 Ghz with two GB of RAM, it just takes 19 hours and uses swap, so it may not be as stable as building with adequate RAM. I was then able to run the browser on Leopard with /.mach run --js-debugger, and it did not crash on launch.
I am now copying the whole power fox folder over to my Tiger partition to see what happens when I try to run it there. I expect a crash on launch, but hopefully in a way that tells us what changes need to be made to get this running on Tiger.
I also got 1509 warnings, so presumably no more than 1509 things need to be fixed for Tiger, if I understand correctly
@Jazzzny what needs to be changed in the .mozconfig to make a debug build?
 
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Luposian said:
Is there ANY way to make a web browser that will still work with MacOS X 10.3.9 (Panther)? My G4 Mac QuickSilver is relegated to JUST being a MIDI music composition machine. I don't have it connected to the Internet and it's useless on the Internet right now... it can't even render the Google start page correctly! I used a version of Linux on it about 10+ years ago, but stopped. I'd like to see just how "capable" my G4 still is, when it comes to rendering the Internet, with MacOS X 10.3.9 (Panther). I use this version
Click to expand...
Luposian said:
Just to see if it CAN be done... how much would I have to pay someone to update the MacOS X 10.3.9-capable version of Camino? Assuming backporting PowerFox wouldn't be easier. I'm really tempted to be willing to pay to have it done.
Click to expand...
Backporting PowerFox is almost certainly easier than updating Camino. You would need to install Leopard on a G5 with a lot of RAM (6 GB is probably enough). You then need to install Xcode 3.1 with a custom install to include the 10.3 SDK. Then you install PowerPC Ports and build gcc13, darwin-xtools, git etc.
You then follow the build instructions from page 1 of this thread, but change the minimum os required to 10.3. Ideally, you also change the build to be a debug build. Once the build finishes, hopefully successfully, you try running it on Panther and see how it crashes on launch. Hopefully it is something easy to fix. Then you change the source to fix what crashed and make a new debug build from your changed source.
Caveat: even if it eventually doesn't crash on launch, some features will likely be out of reach forever, like anything needing OpenGL 2 acceleration
 
Forest Expertise said:
In good news, you can apparently build Powerfox from source on a Powerbook G4 1.67 Ghz with two GB of RAM, it just takes 19 hours and uses swap, so it may not be as stable as building with adequate RAM. I was then able to run the browser on Leopard with /.mach run --js-debugger, and it did not crash on launch.
I am now copying the whole power fox folder over to my Tiger partition to see what happens when I try to run it there. I expect a crash on launch, but hopefully in a way that tells us what changes need to be made to get this running on Tiger.
I also got 1509 warnings, so presumably no more than 1509 things need to be fixed for Tiger, if I understand correctly
@Jazzzny what needs to be changed in the .mozconfig to make a debug build?
Click to expand...

Warnings showing up doesn’t necessarily indicate anything in relation to platform. Most large projects have several hundred warnings about code usage in various levels. I wouldn’t think about this problem in terms of “how many problems will I have to solve” and instead think “how complex are the problems I will have to solve”

Just as a fair heads up - this is a pretty large undertaking you’re talking about and as you go through the runtime crashes you will find it increasingly difficult to continue building without disabling large parts of the browser or writing entirely new modules that can work with 10.4 system APIs. It’s not just one or two parts of the codebase that need to be adapted.

Getting into PPC development, I initially tried to support Tiger as a default but it is just too old and has too many POSIX compliance issues to reliably develop for. Expect to chase down race conditions in the threading system and to run into crashes stemming from kernel bugs rather than anything you can fix yourself.

Not saying any of this to discourage you - I think what you’re doing with Tiger is a noble effort. Building any software on PPC is high effort, low reward, but PowerFox on 10.4 seems masochistic.
 
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Seems to work better if you use YouTube embedded like this: https://www.youtube.ttools.io

I wrote a one liner for Terminal to extract the video ID's which is handy for searching instead of using the main YouTube site:

Code: 
curl https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=power+mac+g5 --insecure | grep -o ".\{0,5\}videoId\".\{0,300\}" | grep thumb

You can copy and paste the video ID's into the URL bar for https://www.youtube.ttools.io i.e:


Can be improved upon massively by extracting the jpg and putting it in a web page and prepending https://www.youtube.ttools.io/watch?v= to the videoID field into an ahref. Plus grabbing the video title etc.

Hope that helps anyone struggling with YouTube on PowerFox. I also have UxPEP installed which probably makes a difference too.

Excellent work by the way, it's great to be able to use the web more fluidly, AquaFox and InterWebPPC are great but this is a real game changer.

I just need to sort the fans on my G5. There's a faulty whirring bearing somewhere but i'm not sure what fan it is, I just hope it's not the one that blows air onto the logic board!
 

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