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TFF with Firefox branding & no google

wicknix

wicknix

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jun 4, 2017
2,634
5,324
Wisconsin, USA
I just managed to build the latest TenFourFox with a few minor tweaks. The build took 10.2 hours on my PowerMac G5 1.6ghz w/4gb ram. Yikes! In comparison my 1.83ghz c2d imac with 2gb ram builds Palemoon (firefox fork) in 72 minutes.

Anyway i enabled official branding, and disabled webrtc, necko-wifi, and safe-browsing to make it a tad more secure as there is no need to have google spying on your location or websites you visit. This is the generic G3 tuned build so it'll work on any G3/G4/G5 on 10.4 or 10.5. Other than that it's still good 'ol TFF. I built this for myself, but if anybody wants to give it a spin you can check it out here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wg3QD8IMjGObCJJTmHGAU8BJ-oPDUolm/view?usp=sharing

ffesr.png


Cheers
 
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It's great that you're doing this - and don't consider this an ungrateful feature request, just a query - but how difficult would it be to enable the Quicktime plugin (if possible)?

My thinking is then Greasemonkey/Viewtube could play video in browser - instead of only available option of downloading/launching player?
 
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@Dronecatcher Hmm. I'd have to take a look. I'm not sure what they did to disable that in the first place. They could have ripped all that code out, or simply disabled some plugins via a script, or commented out that code wherever it's hidden in the source tree. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in any of their mozconfig's, so it's definitely not a mozconfig enable/disable option.

Cheers
 
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Nice one. I always changed the icon of TFF to the standard firefox one. Thank you so much.

Would the G4 build be faster than this in the same machine? If it is not so difficult to do, i might compile the 7450 build in my PowerBook. I can let it work as i'm not using it so often.
 
EnriqueG said:
Nice one. I always changed the icon of TFF to the standard firefox one.
Click to expand...
I prefer using the icon of Aurorafox.

43362.png


Aurorafox was a browser developed in the same manner as T4Fx but for Leopard.

Unfortunately after about version 23 it was abandoned. I keep it alive on all my PowerPC Macs by using the icon for T4Fx though.
 
@EnriqueG In theory a G4 specific build *should* be a tad faster, however in my personal experience i find the generic powerpc or g3 optimizations work better on my g4 and g5 machines for some odd reason. Startup times seem quicker and page loading is way quicker. Every time i would install the 7450 builds on my ibook g4 they were slow as snot. I'd then download the g3 version and it'd run like a champ. Never understood that. Anyway, your mileage may vary. That's just my observation on my machines.

@sawpits I'm looking in to that. I don't have a vast knowledge of mozilla/firefox inner workings, but i'm slowly learning that it's a messy mashup of different programming languages tossed together. On top of that the TFF team have made changes to keep it buildable on old PPC machines when official PPC support was dropped years ago.

@eyoungren That's one of the reasons why i took a stab at compiling it myself as i absolutely hate the stock TFF icon. The second reason being i wanted to free up a few resources by disabling googles background "services" if you can call them that.

Cheers
 
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wicknix said:
@eyoungren That's one of the reasons why i took a stab at compiling it myself as i absolutely hate the stock TFF icon. The second reason being i wanted to free up a few resources by disabling googles background "services" if you can call them that.
Click to expand...
What I find interesting is that a few years back, Kaiser ackowledged that the icon was "bad". Or rather that people complained about the look. He kept it though because for him it communicated the project, even if it wasn't so great looking.

But he also said you could change it if you wanted. That's around the time I started changing it. Not that I needed his permission, but it just hadn't occured to me at the time.
 
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wicknix said:
@EnriqueG In theory a G4 specific build *should* be a tad faster, however in my personal experience i find the generic powerpc or g3 optimizations work better on my g4 and g5 machines for some odd reason. Startup times seem quicker and page loading is way quicker. Every time i would install the 7450 builds on my ibook g4 they were slow as snot. I'd then download the g3 version and it'd run like a champ. Never understood that. Anyway, your mileage may vary. That's just my observation on my machines.
Click to expand...


Is it too complicated to compile the ttf source? Only XCode is needed right? I'll try to read the documentation this afternoon and put the good old PowerBook to work. Let's hope I doesn't burn.
 
Downloaded the first link to look at the about:buildconfig. Note if you ever plan on building with a 7450-oriented .mozconfig you may consider using gcc5 also from the macports prefix (https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox/issues/468 , https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox/issues/461).

You can save a lot of time on setting up the environment by doing the build on leopard instead of tiger as macports provides binary packages for most important ones (libgcc, gcc, cctools, python, gmake, etc.) for 10.5. https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox/issues/498 leverages pretty much everything.

Plugin code is completely disabled after the plugin API has changed too much; Even compiling plugin code back into the browser won't work with any powerpc OSX plugins. It was already a tweak before Fx24 to get them to work on TFF. It wasn't just "a security measure".

By the way, I know my place but remain careful about the MPL..
 
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