An appreciation of Klingon culture, perhaps?
The merging of these threads now has the unintended consequence that some might mistake @Dronecatcher as the target of this post.
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The End Of TenFourFox
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An appreciation of Klingon culture, perhaps?
The merging of these threads now has the unintended consequence that some might mistake @Dronecatcher as the target of this post.
I was wondering about that, the merged post makes a lot more sense.
Klingons are more honorable...An appreciation of Klingon culture, perhaps?
Hi @wicknix,
Is clear to me that now you and Riccardo work on ArcticFox becomes even more critical than ever.
Is there any chance you can support 10.4/10.5 with Arctic? I know you have a basic working old version supporting it, but maybe you can give it a standard support for it?
ArcticFox will receive now a bigger share and attention from a larger userbase. What do you think?
I will toss a PM to Riccardo as well.
PS. Btw it has been a while you package a new version of AF. Riccardo has pushed tons of commits int he meanwhile 😅..
Thank you
Francesco
Is clear to me that now you and Riccardo work on ArcticFox becomes even more critical than ever.
Is there any chance you can support 10.4/10.5 with Arctic? I know you have a basic working old version supporting it, but maybe you can give it a standard support for it?
ArcticFox will receive now a bigger share and attention from a larger userbase. What do you think?
I will toss a PM to Riccardo as well.
PS. Btw it has been a while you package a new version of AF. Riccardo has pushed tons of commits int he meanwhile 😅..
Thank you
Francesco
A couple of examples.
Don't worry, I know where that particular reference was aimed
Cool.
An appreciation of Klingon culture, perhaps?
The merging of these threads now has the unintended consequence that some might mistake @Dronecatcher as the target of this post.
Nah, definitely not @Dronecatcher!
For posterity, I was most definitely referring to @Macbookprodude, who is presently sitting in the cool zone, likely getting piping-hot mad that I’m naming him on the record. I look forward to a lot less of that conspiratorial crusader ranting around here. Maybe this will serve as a teachable moment for him.
Had you asked me that question last year (before May) I would have replied 'yes'. But that is no longer true. I am about ~10 years behind the current offerings by Apple which puts me solidly in the early-Intel Mac era.
I still use PowerPC Macs, but my justification for it is starting to wear thin.
Dr. Kaiser provided a great service with TFF and Classilla, but it was inevitable that the development of the internet would outpace him, and fast. I am of the strong believe that rather than trying to get the modern Web directly onto vintage machines, we should rather focus on either doing it through proxy devices (which yes, essentially just makes you browse the 'net on a modern device through the vintage Mac, but going on the modern web with a vintage machine is generally a novelty anyways), or even better: Creating our own websites with value for retro users that do work with vintage machines, through simple HTML and minimal CSS and JS if necessary.
We're already seeing services like Macintosh Garden, System 7 Today and 68k.news fit this goal. Rather than decrying the spiritual "death" of our old machines, let's put in that effort and create our own webspaces, just like back in the days. Because that's truly what using these old machines is for, reliving computing days of the past.
We're already seeing services like Macintosh Garden, System 7 Today and 68k.news fit this goal. Rather than decrying the spiritual "death" of our old machines, let's put in that effort and create our own webspaces, just like back in the days. Because that's truly what using these old machines is for, reliving computing days of the past.
+1 on this. I know that this is not possible, but would be great if PPC users were able to login on MR just like these aforementioned websites do. Well, at least, for the PPC forums only. Maybe set up a separate MR forum for PPC users so they access it? VOGONS already moved on with the times and enforces https anyway. So we have essentially two options, use a proxy service (like WRP or Browservice), or develop services like the ones above for our vintage operating systems.
Maybe we could set up Browservice somewhere for everyone with a small fair subscription to allow acess? For example, one dollar for US, R$1 for brazilians, one euro for europeans... then the hosting for the service could be funded.
I don't use a PPC Mac exclusively - I have Intel iMacs and a MacBook Pro, and M1 MB Air - but I do use a PPC Mac almost every day, often for hours at a time.
There's a tendency to think that a computer is only useful if it is on the internet and can access web content, but in my case this is not the case at all. I spend a great deal of time working on document production, developing training courses and writing reports, and the internet is, in this situation, a major distraction and time waster.
Old systems with no internet are great platforms for productive work for me, and the age-appropriate software to go with them is perfectly usable, and doesn't really provide any less 'power' or 'speed' than current apps do on current systems.
A great big Thank You to Cameron and all the contributing developers of TenFourFox. Thank you for your fantastic browser. 👏
It is the wisest move to put the brakes on when the “Bridge Out” sign becomes apparent. Rather than drive on forward toward the abyss expecting you’ll figure how to rebuild the bridge once you’re in free flight...
The technologically ancient PowerPC OS X has hard limits. If anyone has any delusions about this, you’ll only come to disappointment. These limitations become part of the charm of any kind of “Retro” computing. Which should only ever be for the joy factor.
As much as I admire the old Macs, I haven’t solely depended on a PowerPC system since I bought my first Intel MacBook in 2008.
Nothing is permanent. We are on an ever transient timeline of change. Resistance to change will often leave us out in the cold...
Personally, I enjoy a mid summer camp out under the stars, but choose my battles come winter time!
It is the wisest move to put the brakes on when the “Bridge Out” sign becomes apparent. Rather than drive on forward toward the abyss expecting you’ll figure how to rebuild the bridge once you’re in free flight...
The technologically ancient PowerPC OS X has hard limits. If anyone has any delusions about this, you’ll only come to disappointment. These limitations become part of the charm of any kind of “Retro” computing. Which should only ever be for the joy factor.
As much as I admire the old Macs, I haven’t solely depended on a PowerPC system since I bought my first Intel MacBook in 2008.
Nothing is permanent. We are on an ever transient timeline of change. Resistance to change will often leave us out in the cold...
Personally, I enjoy a mid summer camp out under the stars, but choose my battles come winter time!
I was looking forward to setting up Browservice for myself (it's very complicated) but it still isnt mac compatible (only linux) so I'd have to either try it out on a terribly slow RPi 3B, or a linux VM on my macbook always on. Not really good options.
WRP should run fine from my macbook, it is quite good but not as good as Browservice seems to be.
WRP should run fine from my macbook, it is quite good but not as good as Browservice seems to be.
I highly doubt it myself also. As I said before, we have a split second left before we hit the wall and that's even WITH stripping out all the superfluous code via uMatrix or Reader View. But I still feel like we're at the last possible second of current use with TenFourFox.
As for me, I keep my trusty old PowerPC's because my G3's are workstations (iWork, iTunes, and Office 2004) and my G4 is a retro gaming spot in OS 9. Anything else can be handled easily on my 2011 mini or the hubs 09 MacBook.
Curious Post Script--I started these threads back in 2018...maybe it's time to fill those wikis up if anyone is taking a "Last Stand" in PowerPC:
The G4 Workstation Wiki | MacRumors Forums
The G3 Workstation Wiki! | MacRumors Forums
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Yeah, I concur on that. I was using my Quad last year with no real issues, but by that point I had abandoned using my 1Ghz G4 PowerBook for any internet use. Even with tweaking it's just no longer possible on that Mac. I don't even try on the other PowerPC Macs I have because they have even less specs than my PowerBook.
Having gotten used to Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge on my Intels hasn't helped either.
Brakes are for losers
(Sorry, just had to.)
"If in doubt, go flat out"Brakes are for losers
Y'know what would be a great project, for all sorts of use cases? Something like Web Rendering Proxy / Browservice, but with a purpose-built client app. All the rendering would still be done on a different PC, but it could be transmitted as something much more reasonable than a gif. Kind of like a much simpler, self-hosted version of Opera Turbo.
It would still be a fair amount of work, but once done it'd be far more maintainable a full web browser. And it would be possible for the client app to have a simple enough code base to target lots and lots of platforms.
Ideas are cheap, of course...
It would still be a fair amount of work, but once done it'd be far more maintainable a full web browser. And it would be possible for the client app to have a simple enough code base to target lots and lots of platforms.
Ideas are cheap, of course...
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These are the current browsing options for Windows 98SE, with Netscape 9 and NSS updates being my preferred option. For Windows XP, I use the last supported version of SeaMonkey. However, myself haven't been tried to do some browsing on them since last year so I don't know what is the current state as of today.
NOTE: The NSS updates to Netscape 9.0.0.6 are a few DLLs files to replace the ones within Netscape. I see that PPC Netscape 9 does have files with the same name. Obviously dropping the DLLS won't do it, one has to "translate" the changes made to these DLLs into the same files on their PPC counterpart. That would bring Netscape 9 to TLS 1.2. And, for a minute, I do think that Netscape 7.0.2 for OS9 could also benefit from that. However I do not possess the skills to do a such task.
I actually think that defunct PPC versions of SeaMonkey could be a more viable option for us. This, based on my (nearly 2 years) search for a Win 98/Win XP browser on MSFN. I have had much more luck with old SeaMonkey builds than old Firefox builds on vintage Windows and I would imagine if the same would be true with PPC OSX.
I think if we are getting to this point it might just be easier all the way around to use Screen Sharing (or another VNC viewer app) to remote in to an Intel or PC and use the web browser on that machine.
Just my opinion though. Same concept as using Dropbox on PowerPC - you still can, just share the Dropbox folder from a Mac or PC that is still capable of using Dropbox.
The difference is you loose a lot of really useful/important integration this way. Over VNC, I can't drag a tab out of one window to create a new one, or upload a file from an arbitrary location, or print to a printer connected to my Mac. There are all of these little edge cases that really add up, and which a client designed for remote browsing could fix.
VNC could be used as the underlying protocol (although IIRC there are more efficient options nowadays), alongside others for sound, file transfer, etc.
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Kind of like GeForce Now but with web browsing?
Putting this into practice here:
It would be delightful to see MR permit the forum development team to offer a low-bandwidth and/or a js/ajax-light portal for the forums — even if the principal parties who’d use it would be folks on the PPC, early Intel, and Classic Macs forums who access and use complementing gear to do so (or, as Cameron Kaiser noted in his TFF send-off post, circumstances where broadband isn’t necessarily a given).
Implementation might be similar to the way Wikipedia shunts mobile users to an almost-identical URL, with the addition of a “.m” in the secondary domain.
Set-up would be minimal: CSS for it would be little more than dusting off the archives of an earlier, less-JS-rich implementation of the forums — one which doesn’t employ keystroke shortcuts and other inline features (like pop-ups for finding a user) which have the pernicious tendency to slow keystroke echoes on vintage equipment to a crawl.
I have little expectation of this happening on here, but it could be done if a compelling use-case could be sold to their dev team.
Sure! You can also imagine a version where a bit more of the rendering was done locally, like Cloudflare's "S2 Remote Browser". Depends on how ambitious you wanted to be.
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