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Comment by dasmoth | Hacker News Reader

I don’t have any PowerPC machines going any more. But for those who do, it seems that a modern web browser might still be an option: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

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TenFourFox is one of the more impressive pieces of software I've seen. It has its own JIT and accelerated codecs and recently, a toolbox of handy features beyond what Firefox ESR provides as well. It's able to run modern JavaScript applications, very slowly, on my original 300Mhz iBook G3, a computer that's nineteen (!) years old. I hope it sticks around a bit longer yet.

I admire your fortitude. The slowest system I routinely use is a 1GHz iMac G4 (TenFourFox is the browser, natch). Now, that is a lovely machine. The form factor has never been equaled, and the springs in the arm are still going great.

The JIT does work on G3, but unfortunately you won't get much benefit from the accelerated codecs as there's no AltiVec. But, at least the G3 version has compiler tuning.

Just watch out for the creator, he's a bit of a jerk.

We were still running tenfourfox a few years ago, but modern (i.e. complex) web pages became just too hungry for this CPU. Facebook was getting fairly painful to use on there.

Try loading the mobile versions of web pages. Facebook for example has a super-low-end non-JS version of the site at https://m.facebook.com/

Kind of depressing what the web has become in recent years when you think about it.

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