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Javascript is a blight upon the universe. I have been using a T23 as my daily driver for the last couple months and it is perfectly usable on websites without any Javascript, or that do not require it to render the page properly. My main complaint about Macrumors moving to Xenforo is that nothing works right without JS, even on the mobile site.
 
Changing the user agent string in TenFourFox or Safari (WebKit) will not force macrumors to serve a lighter mobile version :(.

After doing additional testing the monitor display resolution (returned from the browser) is the secret.

You can change the display resolution with a FireFox add on called "More Display Resolutions" if you want to view macrumors mobile webpages on your PowerPC.

Enjoy!

PS: Below is the user agent I tested with.... it works for other sites, just not here.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 9_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/601.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11D257 Safari/9537.53
 
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It amazes me that PowerPC struggles so badly on the web while even the cheapest smartphones - with much weaker processors and also 1-2 gb ram - flick through the web like its nothing...
Your average smartphone CPU is 2-4 times faster than a G4 and they have dedicated hardware for running javascript.
 
In my opinion the PowerPC needs a cloud based browser. If your not familiar take a look at Puffin Browser and then some of the reviews. Personally I use Puffin on my iPhone and iPad for sites with video content.

Several Intel Mac & Windowz users have reported running Puffin in an Android emulator. Alias there is no Android emulator for the PowerPC. And realistically the PowerPC market is too small and outdated for any developer to consider investing in an Android emulator or cloud browser, but wouldn't it be cool :cool:
 
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In my opinion the PowerPC needs a cloud based browser. If your not familiar take a look at Puffin Browser and then some of the reviews. Personally I use Puffin on my iPhone and iPad for sites with video content.

Several Intel Mac & Windowz users have reported running Puffin in an Android emulator. Alias there is no Android emulator for the PowerPC. And realistically the PowerPC market is too small and outdated for any developer to consider investing in an Android emulator or cloud browser, but wouldn't it be cool :cool:
I use Dolphin.

It's the closest I can find to Firefox (notwithstanding Firefox itself now) and has always been rock stable for me on iOS. I've used it since my iPhone 5.

I've tried Puffin in the past and it's a great browser, but I guess I like the way Dolphin functions better. With my jailbreak I've set Dolphin as my default browser.
 
Recently I "returned" to PowerPC Macs and now I have 1.42 iBook G4. It's been a while since i browsed the internet with these and I gotta say it is bit painful :D

I use TenFourFox with Adblock, as before.

Apparently YouView has stopped working since the last time I used PPC Macs.
 
Recently I "returned" to PowerPC Macs and now I have 1.42 iBook G4. It's been a while since i browsed the internet with these and I gotta say it is bit painful :D

I use TenFourFox with Adblock, as before.

Apparently YouView has stopped working since the last time I used PPC Macs.
If you do nothing else, remove Adblock and find a different adblocker. I'd suggest BluHell Firewall.

Adblock has a huge memory leak and they have never fixed it.

If you click on the link in my signature for TenFourFox (or see the first sticky post in this forum) you'll find a few different methods to tweak your performance.

But in general, getting on the internet on a PowerPC Mac using T4Fx is painful when used stock. Optimize it and it becomes much better.
 
But in general, getting on the internet on a PowerPC Mac using T4Fx is painful when used stock. Optimize it and it becomes much better.

Sad but true - internet performance is the 1 thing that stops my PowerBook from becoming my primary laptop.

Although not equal to a MacBook Pro, the dual processor G5 is very usable and considerably faster than the powerbook.

Thats just the nature of running hardware this old on an unsupported operating system.
 
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If you do nothing else, remove Adblock and find a different adblocker. I'd suggest BluHell Firewall.

Adblock has a huge memory leak and they have never fixed it.

Thanks, I switched to BluHell and altough I haven't browsed that much yet I think the speed improved a bit.
 
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Javascript is a blight upon the universe.


I agree. It's way too abused. Even the simplest things are corrupted. Anyone noticed what photobucket is doing these days? It used to be a simple image hosting service. Try and get a picture off their servers now. Even the google search page does a switcheroo from the links they show to the links that get loaded if you click on something. Very annoying. I've never had a newspaper get loose, run around my house, go though all my kitchen cabinets, take my checkbook and leave an upper decker on its way back to the publisher.
 
I recently rebuilt the LCS on my Quad G5 that had been collecting dust for years, and thankfully ran across this thread. uMatrix does a damn good job of cleaning up a lot of background crap going on I was not aware of. Could some of this slow down also be caused because a lot of these newer scripts especially the JIT (compile of the fly stuff) be caused by lack of optimization for the architecture? I know there is a lot of stuff getting offloaded to the GPU in modern browsers and that probably plays a part to it as well. Although the bloat and rampant scripts are the main issue, I completely agree.
 
Most websites are unadulterated crap and web developers don't even know it, much less care.

A really, really good read whether you know a lot about web development or none at all: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1403_02-08_mickens.pdf
Ugh! Thank you! I recently redid my site, and removed almost all Javascript, aside from the comments provider (removing that BS too, ugh). No tracking, no spying. Literally HTML5+CSS. All static. No PHP *cross my heart and hope to die* http://128keaton.com
 
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Could some of this slow down also be caused because a lot of these newer scripts especially the JIT (compile of the fly stuff) be caused by lack of optimization for the architecture?
Only if you are using really old versions of Firefox or the wrong version of TenFourfox for your CPU type.

Cameron Kaiser optimises the actual internal code. He creates stuff out of thin air so it will translate to PowerPC. The JIT is one of those things.

It's just that javascript has become so complex (and so crappily written) that it often bogs things down.
 
Only if you are using really old versions of Firefox or the wrong version of TenFourfox for your CPU type.

Cameron Kaiser optimises the actual internal code. He creates stuff out of thin air so it will translate to PowerPC. The JIT is one of those things.

It's just that javascript has become so complex (and so crappily written) that it often bogs things down.

Thanks for the clarification, now that I have started using some of your optimizations from your thread things are getting a little snappier. Almost seems like it's not wasting as much time waiting for certain page elements to load. Is that just my imagination?
 
Thanks for the clarification, now that I have started using some of your optimizations from your thread things are getting a little snappier. Almost seems like it's not wasting as much time waiting for certain page elements to load. Is that just my imagination?
No. It's a little sleight of hand in delivering the content, but the background processes are forcing content delivery to be faster.

ngpaintdelay immediately starts painting the page as content arrives, while pipelining allows multiple requests for content simulataneously. These are just some of the major ones. But all designed to render the page faster.

Other tweaks are designed to reduce your ram and CPU loads. The faster that is reduced and your Mac returns to idle the less time is spend actually processing the page and your Mac can do other things.

Lots of ways to approach things. Why I keep digging, even after all these years.
 
Right so it's almost the opposite of what it seems like Safari does (atleast the version on Leopard). It seems like Safari waits for the processing or loading to complete in the background before it renders and loads those elements to the screen.

More or less what your saying?
 
What is the technical reason the browsing experience on PPC is less than stellar in 2016?

I've got a 2.5 Quad with 8gb of ram. Generally, the computer is quite responsive to apps built in her era. To me, the general concept of the internet seems pretty simple. Code on a server, browser renders code. So, what gives? Love the concept of TenFourFox, but perhaps I've become 'spoiled' and generally want things delivered quicker and not 'sloth like' when I scroll. Webpages themselves, even MacRumors, seem like they should be much snappier. To my web design eye, the site itself seems quite basic. Surfing the net on my 1.67 PBG4 is even more daunting, almost unusable.

Thanks ahead! Just want to get a sharp understanding!

Your CPU(s) are 12+ years old and out-performed by the average dual core macbook (or smartphone, even - the smartphone chips have hardware decoding support for various media, hardware crypto, etc. - and even without that are probably faster anyway - their GPUs are most likely way way faster).

Web pages are a lot more complex in 2016 and written to take advantage of the above fact - new hardware can handle a lot more complex rendering.
 
Most of us realize the phones that are in our pockets and the modern processors we are using are hopefully orders of magnitude better than what was released 10 years ago. What we are discussing is why some text and images on a page (you know the internet for more or less 30 years) takes so long to load and how to disable the 20-30 background scripts that want to find out if I'm in the market for a new car or toothbrush. My Nexus 6p renders web pages twice as fast as my G5 and probably out does it in most categories. But that doesn't mean we can't dig into the root of the bloat and disgust that is a modern web site.
 
Right so it's almost the opposite of what it seems like Safari does (atleast the version on Leopard). It seems like Safari waits for the processing or loading to complete in the background before it renders and loads those elements to the screen.

More or less what your saying?
Yes, but that's only one aspect of it. Many of the other tweaks involved are designed to deliver more content faster and force faster processing of that content so that it can be displayed on screen quicker.

It's a bunch of different stuff all working towards to a common goal.
 
Most of us realize the phones that are in our pockets and the modern processors we are using are hopefully orders of magnitude better than what was released 10 years ago. What we are discussing is why some text and images on a page (you know the internet for more or less 30 years) takes so long to load and how to disable the 20-30 background scripts that want to find out if I'm in the market for a new car or toothbrush. My Nexus 6p renders web pages twice as fast as my G5 and probably out does it in most categories. But that doesn't mean we can't dig into the root of the bloat and disgust that is a modern web site.

Because the software is not optimised for your machine any more. Software is written to do more, based on more processing power being available. Your old CPUs do not have hardware support for crypto, do not have codec support for new image/video formats, etc.

You can whine about bloat, but it's not all just crappy web programmers (though they are most certainly a thing) - the modern web is doing a lot more in the background than web from 10-12 years ago. So much more javascript heavy.

Turn off javascript you'll probably find it helps, but you'll break a lot of sites now.

But at the end of the day, your CPU is 12+ years old. Any 12+ year old CPU be it PPC or intel is going to struggle on the modern web. It's not a RAM issue, it's just that the CPUs do not do what the web does in an expedient fashion in 2016. Time has well and truly moved on.

Try doing what you're trying to do on a Pentium D machine from 2004, for example. You'll get a similar result.
 
Your CPU(s) are 12+ years old and out-performed by the average dual core macbook (or smartphone, even - the smartphone chips have hardware decoding support for various media, hardware crypto, etc. - and even without that are probably faster anyway - their GPUs are most likely way way faster).

Web pages are a lot more complex in 2016 and written to take advantage of the above fact - new hardware can handle a lot more complex rendering.
Are you just commenting in general or was there some other intent here?

I ask because this thread is in the PowerPC forums. I don't want to accuse you of being an Intel Mac troll if that was not your intent.
 
Are you just commenting in general or was there some other intent here?

I ask because this thread is in the PowerPC forums. I don't want to accuse you of being an Intel Mac troll if that was not your intent.

No, as per my above second post, this isn't a PPC vs. Intel thing.

A 12 year old intel CPU struggles as well. Time and processing requirements move on. Much of the stuff on the modern web either was not invented or has drastically changed since the processor in a 2000-2004 machine was built. CPU caches are larger, memory buses are faster, local storage for cashing things is faster, GPUs are faster, processors have dedicated hardware instructions for crypto now, etc. Modern CPUs are built for this, whether they're ARM, intel, AMD or whatever. Old PPCs (along with old intel CPUs from the same era) were not. That is why they struggle.
 
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