PowerFox Browser | Hacker News Reader

PowerFox Browser

powerfox.jazzzny.me

165 pointsthisislife249 comments

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.

(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.

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

Thanks! I wish modern JavaScript were a little kinder to it, but I still use it myself for basic tasks.

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.

Yes, my poor 1.33GHz iBook G4 really drags in it now, but it suffices for simple things and grabbing files for the tasks it still does.

I thought you’d be here - thank you!

Thanks! I still have a g4 mini and a g4 imac for old times sake.

I moved off Mac these days but it reminds me of when they were still awe inspiring Unix machines. These days they're way too iOS for me to be interested.

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.

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

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.

Could you elaborate? I just looked at the screenshots on https://www.apple.com/os/macos/, but did not see anything too different from the previous version.

This attention to detail is making me optimistic:

https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-golden-gate-i...

Im addition to the 263 small things that were on a single slide at WWDC 26

What's changed? I know there's a Liquid Glass slider, and unified toolbars, and corner radiuses are consistent, but that seems about it.

I hope there's more. There is a lot of room for improvement in macOS UI beyond those changes.

It is hidden by default and when you mouse over it it is so bland that it is hard to see where you are on the page.

I havent used Mac is in a while, so I am not sure about how it is today, but this seems to have been the development everywhere.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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... .

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

Yup. The only browsers that still support Flash.

*natively. You can run flash through ruffle in any of the modern browsers.

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.

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

What you're looking for only makes sense for browser "forks" that just re-skin/layer on top of the latest releases of the main project. Basilisk is an actual fork which has lead development in it's own direction, i.e. they have features newer than the date/version of the fork but it's not because they rebased on the newer Firefox XYZ git and now have equivalence to that version.

Is that a firefox fork? I don't even see mention about license in the website or github repo.

It was forked from Firefox a decade ago, so at this point there's not much relation between the PaleMoon/Basilisk lineage and modern Firefox

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.

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

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.

I recently got an iMac from the same era up and running. First as a FOSS gaming machine for my kids, then as a gift for a friend who was lacking computing options. The secret (as you probably know) for installing a lot of FOSS software is MacPorts not Homebrew.

I thought my Firefox LTS was updating fine, but I could be wrong. I could certainly browse with it.

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 )

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.

How do I know it's secure against recent security breaches? Apparently the code base has diverged a lot from current Firefox and Gecko, so they can't just apply patches from there. Do they fuzz it, do static analysis, etc.? I guess the main security feature is that so few people use it that there are very few attacks on it.

Don't know about Powerfox / Basilisk, but Palemoon developers have outlined How are security vulnerabilities handled? - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=23577 - in their FAQ. As both Palemoon and Basilisk do share codes from each other, as they started from a common codebase, I am guessing that most Palemoon fixes also apply to it.

(Then again, Powerfox is meant to run on OSes that have been EOLed for more than a decade now ... so I am not sure how secure a browser, any browser, will be running on it. :)

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.

I was just reminiscing on the Camino/Chimera browser earlier today and this looks fantastic.

I kinda wish there was a build for modern macOS on Apple Silicon to see how light and fast this little browser is.

Try PaleMoon - https://www.palemoon.org/download.shtml - it is the version meant for "modern" OSes. Powerfox shares a heritage with it as it is based on its rendering engine, Goanna (Palemoon -> Basilisk -> Powerfox).

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

No mention of Firefox on the page? Is it not based on Firefox? Why the name then?

On the add-ons page there is "h264ify for Legacy Firefox", so I guess it is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had Xubuntu, Lubuntu on mentioned above eMac and frankly, it was awful - only OSX and OS9 were making that machine somehow usable. I had fun running that computer during mid-pandemic with all sorts of gems found in macintosh garden.

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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