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PowerFox Browser

108 points

by thisislife2

8 hours ago

| past

| 11 comments

| powerfox.jazzzny.me

| HN

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pndy

7 hours ago

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There was a similar project called TenFourFox that was halted in 2022:

https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfo...

Some 12 years ago I had to order a new motherboard and at that time all I had at hand was some old eMac. I'm not sure if it had 512MB or 1GB of ram installed by previous owner but browsing the Internet was tiresome. Still, both that chunky white boy and TenFourFox managed to help me and I've purchased that mobo.

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classichasclass

4 hours ago

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(TenFourFox maintainer) Thanks, glad it was helpful to you. There is some TenFourFox code in this respin which is being used to support the widget code, and there is work in progress to forward-port its JIT. I'm not writing that code but I am advising on it as questions come up.

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ndiddy

2 hours ago

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Thanks for keeping TenFourFox going for so long! It let me keep using a G4 iBook as a daily driver until ~2016 when the web got to be too much for it to handle.

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geerlingguy

3 hours ago

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Thank you for your work on it! I love that I can browse most of the modern web on G4 and G5 Macs still.

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ishanr

5 hours ago

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Seeing that aqua scrollbar fills me with such joy. This is when tech was joyful and fun. I think what happened to the scrollbar is such a reflection of our industry as a whole. A microcosm.

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JSR_FDED

3 hours ago

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Well put. It’s why I’m so happy that the beta of MacOS Golden Gate shows proper designers who sweat the details are in charge again.

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SmashDan

5 hours ago

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I remember spending ages as a kid fine tuning my scrollbar css

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userbinator

7 hours ago

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One thing that seems to be common amongst many of these Firefox forks is they're very difficult to find which official version they're equivalent in functionality to. This one is no exception.

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thisislife2

7 hours ago

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This is actually based on the Goanna web engine (a fork of the Firefox / Gecko web engine) derived from the https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ . You can find out more here - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=69&p=275829#p2758... .

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userbinator

3 hours ago

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The same complaint in my original comment applies - at what version was it forked from, what version of Firefox is it equivalent to?

https://www.basilisk-browser.org/features.html

Basilisk supports the technologies required for the modern web, while deliberately avoiding the rapid architectural and interface changes common in mainstream browsers.

Nothing but very vague and useless marketing-speak.

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thisislife2

3 hours ago

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Lookup PaleMoon and Basilisk in Wikipedia. The codebase of Goanna has diverged from Firefox / Gecko a lot, so trying to compare by versions won't tell you much. PaleMoon Goanna is regularly updated and supports nearly all the feature sets of a modern browser rendering engine and is feature compatible with Firefox / Gecko though it doesn't support webRTC - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=28182, DRM and webExtensions ... https://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml

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dblohm7

6 hours ago

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Ah, that explains why there is still NPAPI plugin support.

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thisislife2

3 hours ago

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Yup. The only browsers that still support Flash.

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spijdar

7 hours ago

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Probably because there often isn't a straight answer to that. I've no idea about the progeny of this browser, but I've seen several Firefox forks "interbreed", borrowing patches and feature backports from each other. So there might be a specific version of Firefox you can ultimately trace the repo to, it likely has code from newer versions spliced in. At least, that was my impression.

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userbinator

3 hours ago

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The closest they say is:

PowerFox is both standards compliant and feature-rich, supporting the latest web technologies to ensure compatibility with modern websites.

which means.. next to nothing. No "PowerFox version X has (at least) the same web standards support as Firefox Y".

it likely has code from newer versions spliced in

That's a good thing, but making it clearer what to expect will make it easier for potential users to decide whether to give it a try.

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sdf4j

3 hours ago

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> That's a good thing, but making it clearer what to expect will make it easier for potential users to decide whether to give it a try.

There are not that many options for the potential users.

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born-jre

3 hours ago

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Bashed of comments here I checked https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ which is this bashed on looks great when you want lightweight browser to run on old laptops or whatever. Look like still some work being done looking at the repo (not a abandonware) I opened 20+ random tabs and ram usage still round gig, very nice I use old laptops to show some dashboards and stock ticker updates etc and I am fine with opening some trusted site or own designed dashboard in this thing even if underlying engine might not be secure ( worse case I mean I don’t know security/patches of underlying engine but it opened all random stuff I opened )

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CursedSilicon

5 hours ago

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Wonderful timing. I just set up an old Mac Pro with Snow Leopard and Vista [1] for retro software compatibility testing.

I might download and give this a shot

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiZR3UFaWuU

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weisk

3 hours ago

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yeah Allright! talk about timing, I've also recently been restoring a bunch of these iMacs, from the 2011-13 era. Such beautiful machines, and quite capable once configured! Obviously these are not workhorses, but for lightweight electronic appliances they are delicious: beautiful, stable, hackable and super accessible. Things like home accounting, basic office, photo and media libraries.... The only big issue I've crashed into is getting the modern web to work.. I've had very faint success using some specific older ArcticFox releases, but nothing solid... But I'd be super happy if this could play LowRes youtube.

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HerbManic

4 hours ago

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I absolutely love that folks keep these old systems going with stuff like this.

But, I do wonder what the browsing experience is like. It was rough using Firefox back on Mac's in the mid 2000's and the internet has only gotten significantly more data heavy since.

Anything less than a G5 would be difficult to deal with.

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seabrookmx

7 hours ago

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I used TenFourFox to extend the usefulness of my PowerMac G5 for many years, though I last used it about a decade ago. I'd imagine running the modern web on a machine that slow would be painful.

The G5 was actually the last Mac I owned until buying a Neo just for giggles.

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system7rocks

4 hours ago

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So grateful for all of the dedicated coders and hackers in this space to keep our old Macs relevant and useable.

PowerFox has tweaks especially for Leopard and Snow Leopard and Mac-quality of life features. You can also try Basilisk, which is the upstream version without those tweaks.

Momiji is another variant targeting Mac OS Mavericks and other targets with ESR Firefox fixes. Works pretty well!

Finally, there is work being done to revive Safari for Mavericks and work to bring Netsurf to MacOS 9.

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treve

7 hours ago

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I've been meaning to dust off my black plastic intel macbook and see if it's still usable as a workstation. Go back to Snow Leopard

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walrus01

7 hours ago

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This is probably off topic to the browser itself, but a mac of that age due to its limited capabilities is probably best used as a thin client to a modern desktop environment (like a full screen VNC-over-SSH session to a x session and desktop environment running on a linux server) and will be overall a better experience. The screen, keyboard and mouse may be totally fine to use as a thin client.

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hagbard_c

7 hours ago

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Better still is to install some Linux on the machine which will make it useable for normal daily tasks. I'm typing this on a 'late 2009' 27" iMac running Debian, on longer train trips I'm using a 2011 Macbook Air also running Debian. No special browsers needed, just install Firefox.

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ndiddy

7 hours ago

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One thing you have to keep in mind is that most of the Macs this browser targets use PowerPC processors, not Intel. The heyday of Linux on PowerPC Macs was around 15 years ago, and most of the support has rotted by now (i.e. you won't be able to run a mainstream distro or even get accelerated graphics). Additionally, by now most people who still keep PowerPC Macs around do so because they have software that will only run on an older version of Mac OS X, or even Mac OS 9 (Tiger was the last version of Mac OS X to have support for running Mac OS 9 software) so running Linux wouldn't be a good option for that reason.

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walrus01

7 hours ago

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Right, you can definitely do that on any core2duo or later 2008, 2009 vintage Mac. The first gen 2006 macbook pro intel and other 'core duo' from 2006 are 32-bit only so that really limits the x86 linux OS selection for modern use. And PowerPC platforms even less.

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Dwedit

6 hours ago

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Some of these browsers for older systems will pretend to be a mobile browser. Sites might have a lighter mobile version than desktop version.

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franze

7 hours ago

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Nice, on the other hand if you are interested into a no / anti security browser that runs js as node.js on every page ... https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/nightmare

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CursedSilicon

5 hours ago

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This seems rather painfully irrelevant to the topic at hand and a pretty shameless plug