PowerFox Browser

54 points by thisislife2 3 hours ago | 16 comments

ishanr 23 minutes ago |

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.

SmashDan 5 minutes ago | |

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

CursedSilicon 13 minutes ago |

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

pndy 2 hours ago |

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.

userbinator 2 hours ago |

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.

thisislife2 1 hour ago | |

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... .

dblohm7 1 hour ago | | |

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

spijdar 2 hours ago | |

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.

seabrookmx 2 hours ago |

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.

treve 2 hours ago |

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

walrus01 2 hours ago |

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.

Dwedit 1 hour ago | |

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

hagbard_c 2 hours ago | |

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.

ndiddy 1 hour ago | | |

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.

walrus01 1 hour ago | | |

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.

franze 2 hours ago |

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

CursedSilicon 10 minutes ago | |

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