TenFourFox
45.28.0Harness the power of Firefox 45 on your PowerPC Mac.
Overview
TenFourFox is a fast, efficient Web browser always based on the current version of Firefox, but unlike the main distribution TenFourFox is compatible with OS X 10.4 and 10.5 running on PowerPC processors. It comes in different tuned versions for specific PowerPC processor families:
- TenFourFox for G3 processors
- TenFourFox for G4 7400/7410 processors
- TenFourFox for G4 7450 processors
- TenFourFox for G5 processors
If you feel unsure what type of PowerPC processor your Mac has, go to the Apple menu and choose "About this Mac" and check the processor field. On the G4 Mac open the Terminal app (in Applications -> Utilities) and type the command machine.
TenFourFox no longer supports plugins or Flash - As of the previous TenFourFox 6.0, for the following reasons plugin support ships disabled. Sites will now act as if no plugins were installed at all. Plugins on PowerPC are of special concern because Mozilla is making updates to their plugin architecture which may require the plugins themselves to be updated, and there are certain difficult-to-correct bugs with them already on Tiger. Most importantly, Adobe Flash for PowerPC is no longer maintained and has known security risks that can crash or leak data, some sites require versions not available on the PowerPC, and QuickTime for Leopard will lose its own support with the release of OS X Lion. For these and other reasons, TenFourFox does not run plugins, and they cannot be enabled.
What's new in TenFourFox
- TenFourFox FPR19 is a feature, performance, bugfix and security update.
- Full list of changes available here
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TenFourFox Screenshots
- PPC 32
- Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later
Downloaded & Installed 54,463 times
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93 TenFourFox Reviews
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• Thanks to TFF's dev, I've learned that those browsers enumerate the available fonts in your system, so minimizing their number will gain a considerable amount of time, especially for slow machines.
• my second point is about extensions: most of you already know it, but keep them as few as possible
• final point: built-in basic adblock of TFF. My little G4 mini was lacking RAM until today, so it was faster filtering heavy pages with uBlock +uMatrix +Decentraleyes (as calculations were made in virtual memory i.e. on disk). Now, with its RAM maxed out, TFF's built-in basic adblock alone is the overall best choice — if you don't mind trackers, etc.
Before applying those advices, TFF ate CPU for 50s at launch before calming down, then nearly the same time for loading very heavy sites: now I've achieved 20s launch time and even the heaviest site takes less than 20s to display ("normal" pages load between 4s and 8s).
I've also applied the fonts advice on my Intel Macs with Waterfox and Firefox. ;-)
You can use it now without any adblocker, although you still have more precise filtering power with the usual extensions.
For the rest, it's FF45 with latest 52ESR fixes on PPC machines.
Then you have Leopard WebKit r171822 (10/08/2015) that you can find here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/leopard-webkit/files/537/%28Snow%29%20Leopard/
And finally Chromium 32 bits: https://sourceforge.net/projects/osxportableapps/files/Chromium/ChromiumOSX_38.0.2125.122.dmg/download that includes Flash15.0.0.223.
The last 32 bits build of Chromium is 41.0.2226.0 (19/08/2014) but has no codecs (you should find it, following indications there: https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium)
My advice: use Leopard WebKit as long as possible and Firefox when some website behaves weirdly — I haven't used much Chromium on that platform.
(if you're still interested...)
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/10/its-baaaaa-aaack-tenfourfox-intel.html
No, don't thank me. ;-)
I've got a Dell Mini 9 hackintoshed where I had to back down to Firefox ESR 31.8 because 45.x was putting it on its knees (that little beast gets paralyzed when it gets hot — and it gets hot easily...), I doubt that TFF would be better, but I'll definitely try it! :-)
Maybe yourself compared FF45 against TFF-Intel?
https://github.com/OlgaTPark/tenfourfox/releases/
I've just tested it on my 32 bit 10.6 and it works perfectly! — and hopefully might get more frequent updates than the one we mentioned last year.
Of course: it's based on Firefox 27 — and follows now its own road.
It's definitely the fastest I could find on a 32 bit Mac.
Of course, it's a nice move and it performs better than without any adblockers.
After many years with Ghostery and Adblock Plus, I abandoned them immediately after I've tried uBlock Origin, way much faster!
The right versions, if you want to try them:
- uBlock (1.13.8)
- uMatrix (1.0)
- Decentraleyes (1.3.10) : the last versions installs but doesn't work — you'll have also to add some rules to uMatrix for it to work (see Decentraleyes website).
"Fast and efficient" may be the case if you have a "fast and efficient" computer, say a multicore G5... :-D
It works kinda ok, though, with a clean basic profile with no extensions (21s to start, 29s to load a complex page) but updating my old profile with what I consider a basic set of extensions is way too much for a Mini G4 1.25 GHz with only 512Mb ram! (1'50" to start, 1'20" for the same complex page...)
I was hoping the new features could accelerate it in some way, but no way José.
Back to TFF 31.8. ;-)
In the meantime, I found that the best thing I can do to speed it up is removing AdBlock and Ghostery, they really eat too much cpu on the old G4, and use NoScript to filter out some useless crap on heavy pages.
That Mac Mini being used mainly with a bunch of trusted sites, there's not much to fear about security and the acceleration is noticeable, this way!
And sometimes even after having cleaned the cache!
My Mac Mini is 1.25 GHz/512Mb ram, so I can't believe TFF would be dead slow on a 1.42 GHz/1.5Gb ram as Snoebay pretended in his review — not to mention the Powerbook killer review. :-D