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

[atarixle]

My 2x1 GB DDR400 memory just arrived and I just built it into the G5. It doesn't make it fly, but hey, it's overdue anyway.

additionally I have a third feature-request: is it possible to add the functionallity of the "Theme Color Polyfill" addon for Firefox? Currently this is the only actual fully working addon that implements the theme color thingy known from every mobile browser yet (and Safari's small tabs GUI). As an addon, it is open source, and it just works out of the box.

 

[Jazzzny]

It should be possible (and actually hopefully pretty easy because of how XUL works), but I'm not sure if it would work very well with the Australis philosophy.

 

[OuchMyFaceyHole]

Got around to testing on a G4 MDD with dual 1.42GHz 7455B 2MB of L3 per CPU and 2GB of ram. 480p is pretty much perfect. Did drop a few frames randomly but considering what we are doing here it is pretty impressive. The lack of JIT is much worse on the G4 than it was on the G5 DC. I did try 720p which every now and then can produce maybe a second of good playback before going back to a stutter slideshow.

 

[Jazzzny]

I've finally been able to fix our issue with masking (boxes), meaning sites like MacRumors will render 100% correctly now on 10.5.

Also fixed an issue with image rendering when CSS filters are used, like on HowToGeek:

Next release is coming along very nicely, we'll also have some more JavaScript support thanks to upstream developers, most notably support for module JavaScript await.

 

[atarixle]

Aquafox also does not render masked SVGs correctly. May be it's something to contribute to Aquafox for 3.2 or so ...

 

[Jazzzny]

That is a waste of time. You would first need to backport 10 years of CSS functionality, as the only reason it wasn't working properly on 10.5 was because of an issue specific to 10.5, PowerFox otherwise is completely set up to support CSS mask.

 

[PowerHarryG4]

Is webGL supported on the PowerBook 15" 1.67 with Radeon Mobility 9700? I tried going to get.webgl.org but I get this error.

 

[Jazzzny]

WebGL isn't supported on 10.5 (for now, hopefully), 10.5's older OpenGL driver (compared to 10.6) needs workarounds that I need to research and implement. I don't think any browser on 10.5 has ever supported WebGL correctly, so we'll be the first if it can be coerced to work.

 

[Appleuser201]

WebGL isn't supported on 10.5 (for now, hopefully), 10.5's older OpenGL driver (compared to 10.6) needs workarounds that I need to research and implement. I don't think any browser on 10.5 has ever supported WebGL correctly, so we'll be the first if it can be coerced to work.

Do you have issues with logging into or accessing Microsoft services on your end? I tried logging into my Outlook email and it opened a new tab and a blank screen. And someone else said they couldn't login to their Microsoft account due to "unsupported/outdated browser". Personally I quite dislike Microsoft services to begin with, but would be nice to access my email to do work related things on Powerfox.

 

[ww2_1943]

Do you have issues with logging into or accessing Microsoft services on your end? I tried logging into my Outlook email and it opened a new tab and a blank screen. And someone else said they couldn't login to their Microsoft account due to "unsupported/outdated browser". Personally I quite dislike Microsoft services to begin with, but would be nice to access my email to do work related things on Powerfox.

That was me. I just tried again. I was able to login to OneDrive. I couldn't use Office apps like Word. That was my mistake.

 

[atarixle]

That is a waste of time. You would first need to backport 10 years of CSS functionality, as the only reason it wasn't working properly on 10.5 was because of an issue specific to 10.5, PowerFox otherwise is completely set up to support CSS mask.

Yeah, I totally understand ... in that case, MacRumors should add a fallback of any kind 🙂 unfortunately I don't have a Leopard Intel at hand (I am too lazy to dig out my Hackintosh and find a proper powerbrick) so I could have tested it on Intel.

Tell me, what is the main difference between InterWeb from Dec 2024 and PowerFox, other than backporting it to 10.5?

 

[Caleb Hauge]

Yeah, I totally understand ... in that case, MacRumors should add a fallback of any kind 🙂 unfortunately I don't have a Leopard Intel at hand (I am too lazy to dig out my Hackintosh and find a proper powerbrick) so I could have tested it on Intel.

Tell me, what is the main difference between InterWeb from Dec 2024 and PowerFox, other than backporting it to 10.5?

InterWeb is based off TenFourFox, which itself is based off of Firefox 45. Which is from around 2016… PowerFox is based off of Basilisk, which has a much, much more modern engine for both rendering and JS.

 

[Jazzzny]

Try opening https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox in both browsers, you'll quickly see the difference.

 

[Caleb Hauge]

Try opening https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox in both browsers, you'll quickly see the difference.

If you don't mind me asking, is JIT JS a "working on it now" thing or a "I'll get to it when I get to it" thing? It really doesn't matter, what we've got is already leaps and bounds ahead of TFF (I didn't realize just how bad TFF was getting with standards support until now), but I am curious.

 

[srp]

If you don't mind me asking, is JIT JS a "working on it now" thing or a "I'll get to it when I get to it" thing? It really doesn't matter, what we've got is already leaps and bounds ahead of TFF (I didn't realize just how bad TFF was getting with standards support until now), but I am curious.

There has been talk in the community of crowdfunding a bounty for the implementation of the JIT - it would be up to somebody with the necessary skills to implement as it’s very difficult low level work.

The osx-ppc JIT that Dr. Cameron Kaiser wrote for TFF can be ported, but new primitives need to be added and it needs to be integrated with the UXP codebase. It’s not trivial work.

 

[Appleuser201]

There has been talk in the community of crowdfunding a bounty for the implementation of the JIT - it would be up to somebody with the necessary skills to implement as it’s very difficult low level work.

The osx-ppc JIT that Dr. Cameron Kaiser wrote for TFF can be ported, but new primitives need to be added and it needs to be integrated with the UXP codebase. It’s not trivial work.

That's why it totally makes sense when "PPC first" operating systems like MorphOS cost money. Because developing for this platform is extremely time consuming and tedious. With Morph, you get a fully updated WebKit browser that will run decently on even G4 machines and an OS that gets updates and treats the PPC platform like a first class citizen. But it comes at a cost and very few complain when they see the incredible amount of time and effort it takes to maintain our beloved (but dead) PowerPC platform. I certainly wouldn't mind chipping in to bring a usable JIT to Powerfox.

 

[atarixle]

InterWeb/PowerFox ...
Oh I think I simply asked this question in the wrong thread ;-) of course, InterWebPPC and PowerFoxPPC are worlds apart. This clearly was my fault. If you don't mind I'll ask the same question in the PowerFox Intel thread because I am really curious about it.

 

[Forest Expertise]

In terms of porting to 10.4, after much work I can get the OS to recognize PowerFox is trying to launch and crashing, and it produces the correct crash dialog. I wonder what Apple would think if I clicked report haha

 

[Smithwick’s]

In terms of porting to 10.4, after much work I can get the OS to recognize PowerFox is trying to launch and crashing, and it produces the correct crash dialog. I wonder what Apple would think if I clicked report haha

What's kind of funny is that while I've never gotten it to work on Tiger, Leopard will at least act like it submitted successfully if you have aproxy (available somewhere on this forum, can't recall where) running. I seem to recall 10.6.8a doing the same without any proxy but I may be mistaken. I do wonder if it is actually going through and confusing the dickens out of someone at Apple, haha. Do you get any helpful info from the crash report? I think you can use Onyx to change the verbosity of reports to include more info.

 

[Forest Expertise]

What's kind of funny is that while I've never gotten it to work on Tiger, Leopard will at least act like it submitted successfully if you have aproxy (available somewhere on this forum, can't recall where) running. I seem to recall 10.6.8a doing the same without any proxy but I may be mistaken. I do wonder if it is actually going through and confusing the dickens out of someone at Apple, haha. Do you get any helpful info from the crash report? I think you can use Onyx to change the verbosity of reports to include more info.

I do on the command line. Current issue is the libsystem.b.dylib on Tiger missing some symbols XUL expects. I am trying to recompile just the XUL library against the 10.4 SDK to see if that fixes linking for that module without having to recompile everything against 10.4
Alternately, I might try incorporating LegacySupport outside of the Macports/PowerPC ports framework, which should be possible (see @barracuda156 detailing an attempt to do so with vlang here: https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/24227 )
I know LegacySupport has some stuff in place to help with libsystem.b.dylib missing symbols on Tiger.

 

[barracuda156]

I do on the command line. Current issue is the libsystem.b.dylib on Tiger missing some symbols XUL expects. I am trying to recompile just the XUL library against the 10.4 SDK to see if that fixes linking for that module without having to recompile everything against 10.4
Alternately, I might try incorporating LegacySupport outside of the Macports/PowerPC ports framework, which should be possible (see @barracuda156 detailing an attempt to do so with vlang here: https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/24227 )
I know LegacySupport has some stuff in place to help with libsystem.b.dylib missing symbols on Tiger.

legacy-support got 0 dependencies. You can compile it and bundle into the Tiger build of the browser.

 

[Forest Expertise]

@Jazzzny To build PowerFox against stlport, would there be anything special I would have to do other than drop it in the /build folder? I am trying to work around stdlib being included in mozilla/mozalloc.h
I may just end up going with LegacySupport to provide that header, but since stlport was used in many Firefox based browsers for a similar purpose, I am curious whether it might be easier to integrate.

 

[Jazzzny]

I doubt that it would even work, I have never even heard of this before your message. Build with libstdc++ if you do not want more issues. Also, the C++ library should support the same functionality between 10.5 and 10.4, its the C library that differs in functionality, which you need to resolve using legacysupport.

Also, 10.4's SDK has stdlib.h?

MacOSX-SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include/stdlib.h at master · phracker/MacOSX-SDKs

A collection of those pesky SDK folders: MacOSX10.1.5.sdk thru MacOSX11.3.sdk - phracker/MacOSX-SDKs

github.com

 

[Forest Expertise]

I doubt that it would even work, I have never even heard of this before your message. Build with libstdc++ if you do not want more issues. Also, the C++ library should support the same functionality between 10.5 and 10.4, its the C library that differs in functionality, which you need to resolve using legacysupport.

Also, 10.4's SDK has stdlib.h?

MacOSX-SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include/stdlib.h at master · phracker/MacOSX-SDKs

A collection of those pesky SDK folders: MacOSX10.1.5.sdk thru MacOSX11.3.sdk - phracker/MacOSX-SDKs

github.com

Huh, it may just be an issue of the build system not finding it then when building against 10.4. Thanks for the input, I will try to see what is going wrong on my end.

 

[eyoungren]

I'm just here to report that PowerFox is installed and working on my 17" PowerBook G4. My only initial hitch seems to be that the profile I coped over from TenFourFox does not seem to be applying my dark theme. And there seems to be no way to enable it.

With PowerFox on my Intel MBP, the issue with this same profile was that certain extensions were not working. But the theme was applied. Here, all the extensions seem to be working, but not the theme.

In both cases, the extensions are shown as disabled.

Of course, my profile has always been extreme, so I'm not expecting anything to be working actually. And I have no intent to browse on my PowerBook. Everything I was doing today was done through ScreenSharing because it's in clamshell mode on my desk (and won't be moving). But I'm happy it even works!