TenFourFox FPR17 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 17 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). Apologies for the delay, but I was visiting family and didn't return until a few hours ago so I could validate and perform the confidence testing on the builds. There are no other changes in this release other than a minor tweak to the ATSUI font blacklist and outstanding security patches. Assuming all is well, it will go live tomorrow evening Pacific time.

The FPR18 cycle is the first of the 4-week Mozilla development cycles. It isn't feasible for me to run multiple branches, so we'll see how much time this actually gives me for new work. As previously mentioned, FPR18 will be primarily about parity updates to Reader mode, which helps to shore up the browser's layout deficiencies and is faster to render as well. There will also be some other minor miscellaneous fixes.

And now for something completely different: An Outbound Notebook resurrected

It surprises people to know that there were authorized non-Apple Macintoshes, and not just the infamous Power Mac clones during the Spindler-Amelio years (or the notoriously overhyped NuTek machines, which tried to get around Apple by reverse-engineering the Mac OS, and not with much success). The most interesting of these were probably the early portables prior to the PowerBook 100, which was a true revolution and ended up eating everybody's lunch (and put most of these companies out of business). Until then these machines had the market all to themselves, even (or especially) when Apple brought out the 16-pound Macintosh Portable, which was big and dumb and today a collector's item but sprawled across most of a desk and gave people hernias just by looking at them.

The 68K laptop manufacturers got around Apple's (later well-founded) clone phobia by importing various components from functioning Macs sold at retail or licensing the chips; some required lobotomizing an otherwise functional machine for its ROMs or even its entire logic board, though at these machines' cheaper price point it was probably still worth it. The big three companies in this particular market were Colby, Dynamac and Outbound. Colby made the WalkMac, which was smaller than the Portable but not much lighter, and required either an SE or SE/30 motherboard. Still, it sold well enough for Sony to threaten to sue them over the Walkman trademark and for Chuck Colby to even develop a tablet version based on the Mac Classic. Dynamac's two models used Mac Plus motherboards (which Apple would only sell to them as entire units, requiring Dynamac to pay for and dispose of the screens and cases they never used), but the EL variant was especially noteworthy for its distinctive 9" amber electroluminescent display.

However, my personal favourite was Outbound. The sprightly kangaroo logo on the case and on the boot screen made people think it was an Australian company (they were actually headquartered in Colorado), including my subsequently disappointed Aussie wife when I landed one for my collection. Outbound distinguished themselves in this market by developing their own logic boards and hardware and only requiring the ROMs from a donor Mac (usually an SE or Plus). Their first was the 1989 Outbound Laptop, which was a briefcase portable not unlike the Compaq Portables of the time, and running at a then-impressive 15MHz. The keyboard connected by infrared, which causes a little PTSD in me because I remember how hideous the IBM PCjr's infrared keyboard was. However, the pointing device was a "trackbar" (trademarked as "Isopoint"), a unique rolling rod that rolled forward and back and side to side. You just put your finger on it and rolled or slid the rod to move the pointer. Besides the obvious space savings, using it was effortless and simple; even at its side extents the pointer would still move if you pushed the bar in the right direction. The Outbound Laptop also let you plug it back into the donor Mac to use that Mac with its ROMs in the Outbound, something they called "hive mode." Best of all, it ran on ordinary VHS camcorder batteries, which you can still find today, and although it was a bit bulky it was about half the weight of the Mac Portable. At a time when the Portable sold for around $6500 it was just $3995.

In 1991 Outbound negotiated a deal with Apple to actually get ROMs from them without having to sacrifice another Mac in the process. They used these to construct the Outbound Notebook, which of the two (today rather rare) Outbound machines is easily the more commonly found. The first model 2000 used the same 68000 as the Laptop, boosting it to 20MHz, but the 2030 series moved to the 68030 and ran up to 40MHz. These could even take a 68882 FPU, though they were still limited to 4MB RAM like the Laptop (anything more was turned into a "Silicon" RAM disk supported by an included CDEV). They featured a very nice keyboard and the same innovative trackbar, also took VHS camcorder batteries, and folded to a very trim letter size dimension (about 2" thick) weighing just over six pounds. Thanks to its modular construction it could even be upgraded: the RAM was ordinary 30-pin SIMMs attached to a removable CPU daughtercard where the ROMs, FPU and main CPU connected, and the 2.5" IDE hard drive could also be easily removed, though Outbound put a warranty sticker on it to discourage third-party replacements. For desktop use it had ADB and the $949 Outbound Outrigger monitor plugged into the SCSI port to provide an external display (yes, there were SCSI video devices).

Unlike the other Mac clones, the Outbound Notebook was a serious threat to Apple's portable line at the time. Even though the contemporary PowerBook 100 was rather cheaper ($2300 vs the 40MHz 2030V at $3500) and could take up to 8MB of RAM, it was still the 16MHz 68000 of the Portable era because it was, in fact, simply a miniaturized Mac Portable. Only the simultaneously-introduced PowerBook 170 was anywhere near the same performance ballpark (25MHz '030) as the Notebook, and it was $4600. Apple decided to adopt a contractual solution: while the agreement compelled Apple to still offer SE ROMs to Outbound, they were not similarly obligated to sell ROMs from any later model, and thus they refused and in doing so put an end to the development of a successor. Deprived of subsequent products, Outbound went out of business by the end of 1992, leaving the machines eternally stuck at 7.1.

A couple years ago I picked up a complete 33MHz '030 Outbound Notebook system from a sale, even coming with a small dot matrix printer and the official Outbound car charger (!). Some of you at the Vintage Computer Festival 2017 saw this machine as a terminal for my Apple Network Server 500. It was a bit yellowed and had been clearly heavily used, but worked pretty well right up until it didn't (eventually it went to a garbage screen and wouldn't enter POST). I put it back in the closet for a few months in Odinsleep until an "untested" unit showed up on eBay a couple weeks ago. Now, keep in mind that "untested" is eBay-speak for "it's not working but I'm going to pretend I don't know," so I was pretty sure it was defective, but the case was in nice condition and I figured I could probably pull a few parts off it to try. Indeed, although the kangaroo screen came up, the hard drive started making warbling noises and the machine froze before even getting to the Happy Mac. I put in the hard disk from my dead unit and it didn't do any better, so I swapped the CPU cards as well and ... it booted!

At 33MHz System 7.1 flies, and it has Connectix Compact Virtual (the direct ancestor of RAM Doubler), which at the cost of disabling the Silicon Disk gives me a 16MB addressing space. At some point I'll get around to configuring it for SCSI Ethernet, another fun thing you can do over SCSI that people have forgotten about.

Besides the case, floppy drive and trackbar, the keyboard was also in excellent condition. Let's compare it with what I think is the best keyboard on any Apple laptop past or present, the PowerBook 1400:

This is my personal PowerBook 1400 workhorse which still sees occasional use for classic software. The 1400 was my first Mac laptop, so I'm rather fond of them, and I have a stack of them for spare parts including my original 117cs. This one is almost maximally upgraded, too: it has a Sonnet 466MHz G3, 64MB of RAM, a 4GB IDE drive, Ethernet and modem PCMCIA cards and the Apple 8-bit video card. All it needs is a 16-bit video card and the solar cover (it just has the interchangeable inserts), and it would be the envy of all who behold it.

The 1400 has the keyboard against which all Mac laptops are measured because of its firmness, key travel and pre-scissor construction. It isn't quite as long travel as the IBM ThinkPads of the era, but it easily exceeds any other Apple laptop keyboard then or now, and is highly reliable and easily replaced if necessary (mine has never been necessary). The Outbound's keyboard is a bit stiff by comparison but has decent travel and is less mushy than my other 68K PowerBooks (or for that matter even my iBook G4). While the Portable's keyboard is nice and clicky, it's practically a desktop keyboard, so it's cheating. Score another one for the clone.

For that matter, the 1400 and the Outbound have another thing in common: surprising modularity. Like the Outbound, the 1400's CPU is on a removable daughtercard behind just a couple screws, and the hard disk and RAM can be upgraded easily (though the 1400's wonky stacked RAM system can sometimes be mechanically fraught with peril). It's just a shame it has a custom battery instead of an off-the-shelf one, but that's Apple for you. Neither of them have an easily accessed logic board but that's hardly unusual for laptops. I'm just glad the logic board on this unit was working, because it's nice to have the Outbound revived again for more good times. It's a great historical reminder that sometimes the best Macintoshes didn't come from Cupertino.

TenFourFox FPR17b1 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 17 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). SourceForge seems to have fixed whatever was making TenFourFox barf on its end which now might actually be an issue over key exchange. For a variety of reasons, but most importantly backwards compatibility, my preference has been to patch up the NSS security library in TenFourFox to support new crypto and ciphers rather than just drop in a later version. We will see if the issue recurs.

This release fixes the "infinite loop" issue on Github with a trivial "hack" mitigation. This mitigation makes JavaScript slightly faster as a side-effect but it's because it relaxes some syntax constraints in the runtime, so I don't consider this a win really. It also gets rid of some debug-specific functions that are web-observable and clashed on a few pages, an error Firefox corrected some time ago but missed my notice. Additionally, since 68ESR newly adds the ability to generate and click on links without embedding them in the DOM, I backported that patch so that we can do that now too (a 4-year-old bug only recently addressed in Firefox 70). Apparently this functionality is required for certain sites' download features and evidently this was important enough to merit putting in an extended support release, so we will follow suit.

I also did an update to cookie security, with more to come, and cleared my backlog of some old performance patches I had been meaning to backport. The most important of these substantially reduces the amount of junk strings JavaScript has hanging around, which in turn reduces memory pressure (important on our 32-bit systems) and garbage collection frequency. Another enables a fast path for layout frames with no properties so we don't have to check the hash tables as frequently.

By user request, this version of TenFourFox also restores the old general.useragent.override.* site-specific override pref feature. This was removed in bug 896114 for performance reasons and we certainly don't need anything that makes the browser any slower, so instead of just turning it back on I also took the incomplete patch in that bug as well and fixed and finished it. This means, in the default state with no site-specific overrides, there is no penalty. This is the only officially supported state. I do not have any plans to expose this feature to the UI because I think it will be troublesome to manage and the impact on loading can be up to 9-10%, so if you choose to use this, you do so at your own risk. I've intentionally declined to mention it in the release notes or to explain any further how this works since only the people who already know what it does and how it operates and most importantly why they need it should be using it. For everyone else, the only official support for changing the user agent remains the global selector in the TenFourFox preference pane (which I might add now allows you to select Firefox 68 if needed). Note that if you change the global setting and have site-specific overrides at the same time, the browser's behaviour becomes "officially undefined." Don't file any bug reports on that, please.

Finally, this release also updates the ATSUI font blacklist and basic adblock database, and has the usual security, certificate, pin, HSTS and TLD updates. Assuming no issues, it will go live on December 2nd or thereabouts.

For FPR18, one thing I would like to improve further is the built-in Reader mode to at least get it more consistent with current Firefox releases. Since layout is rapidly approaching its maximum evolution (as determined by the codebase, the level of work required and my rapidly dissipating free time), the Reader mode is probably the best means for dealing with the (fortunately relatively small) number of sites right now that lay out problematically. There are some other backlogged minor changes I would like to consider for that release as well. However, FPR18 will be parallel with the first of the 4-week cadence Firefox releases and as I have mentioned before I need to consider how sustainable that is with my other workloads, especially as most of the low-hanging fruit has long since been picked.

SourceForge download issues (and Github issues issues)

There are two high-priority problems currently affecting TenFourFox's download and development infrastructure. Please don't open any more Tenderapp tickets on these: I am painfully aware of them and am currently trying to devise workarounds, and the more tickets get opened the more time I spend redirecting people instead of actually working on fixes.

The first one is that the hack we use to relax JavaScript syntax to get Github working (somewhat) is now causing the browser to go into an infinite error loop on Github issue reports and certain other Github pages, presumably due to changes in code on their end. Unfortunately we use Github heavily for the wiki and issues tracker, so this is a major problem. The temporary workaround is, of course, a hack to relax JavaScript syntax even further. This hack is disgusting and breaks a lot of tests but is simple and does seem to work, so if I can't come up with something better it will be in FPR17. Most regular users won't be affected by this.

However, the one that is now starting to bite people is that SourceForge has upgraded its cipher suite to require a new cipher variant TenFourFox doesn't support. Unfortunately all that happens is links to download TenFourFox don't work; there is no error message, no warning and no explanation. That is a bug in and of itself but this leaves people dead in the water being pinged to install an update they can't access directly.

Naturally you can download the browser on another computer but this doesn't help users who only have a Power Mac. Fortunately, the good old TenFourFox Downloader works fine. As a temporary measure I have started offering the Downloader to all users from the TenFourFox main page, or you can get it from this Tenderapp issue. I will be restricting it to only Power Mac users regardless of browser very soon because it's not small and serves no purpose on Intel Macs (we don't support them) or other current browsers (they don't need it), but I want to test that the download gate works properly first and I'm not at my G5 right this second, so this will at least unblock people for the time being.

For regression and stability reasons I don't want to do a full NSPR/NSS update but I think I can hack this cipher in as we did with another one earlier. I will be speeding up my timetable for FPR17 so that people can test the changes (including some other site compatibility updates), but beta users are forewarned that you will need to use another computer to download the beta. Sorry about that.

TenFourFox FPR16 SPR1 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release "16.1" (SPR 1) is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). As noted, this is a pure security update and there are no user-facing changes; the big under-the-hood change of those is that we are now pulling entirely from 68ESR, including locale data, certificate roots and so forth. There is also a small update to the ATSUI font blacklist. Assuming no issues, it will go live Monday evening Pacific time as usual.

Chrome users gloriously freed from obviously treacherous and unsafe uBlock Origin

Thank you, O Great Chrome Web Store, for saving us from the clearly hazardous, manifestly unscrupulous, overtly duplicitous uBlock Origin. Because, doubtlessly, this open-source ad-block extension by its very existence and nature could never "have a single purpose that is clear to users." I mean, it's an ad-blocker. Those are bad.

Really, this is an incredible own goal on Google's part. Although I won't resist the opportunity to rag on them, I also grudgingly admit that this is probably incompetence rather than malice and likely yet another instance of something falling through the cracks in Google's all-powerful, rarely examined automatic algorithms (though there is circumstantial evidence to the contrary). Having a human examine these choices costs money in engineering time, and frankly when the automated systems are misjudging something that will probably cost Google's ad business money as well, there's just no incentive to do anything about it. But it's a bad look, especially with how two-faced the policy on Manifest V3 has turned out to be and its effect on ad-blocker options for Chrome.

UPDATE: I hate always being right. Peter Kasting, a big wheel and original member of the Chrome team, escalated the issue and the extension is back, but for how long? And will it happen again? And what if you're not a squeaky enough wheel to gain enough attention to your plight?

It is important to note that this block is for Chrome rather than Chromium-based browsers (like Edge, Opera, Brave, etc.). That said, Chrome is clearly the one-ton gorilla, and Google doesn't like you sideloading extensions either. While Mozilla reviews extensions too, and there have been controversial rejections on their part, speaking as an add-on author of over a decade there is at least a human on the other end even if once in a while the human is a butthead. (A volunteer butthead, to be sure, but still a butthead.) So far I think they've reached a reasonable compromise between safety and user choice even if sometimes the efforts don't scale. On the other hand, Google clearly hasn't by any metric.

This is a good time to remind people who may not know that TenFourFox has built-in basic adblock, targeted at the JavaScript-based nuisances that are most pernicious on our older systems. It's not only an integral part of the browser but it's also actually written in C++, so it's faster than a JavaScript-based add-on and works at a much lower level. It can also be combined with Private Browsing and other adblocker add-ons for even more comprehensive protection.

You may have suspected by the relative lack of activity on this blog and at Github that there aren't going to be any new features in the next TenFourFox release, and you'd be right. Between my wife and I actually being in the same hemisphere for a couple weeks, an incredible amount of work at the dayjob and work on the POWER9 side for mainline Firefox I've just been too short-handed to do much development this cycle. It will instead be numbered FPR16 SPR1 with security patches only and I'll use the opportunity to change our upstream certificate source to 68ESR. Watch for it sometime next week.

A quick note for 64-bit PowerPC Firefox builders

If you build Firefox on 64-bit Linux, *BSD, etc. for your G5, you may want to check out this Talospace article for an upcoming low-level fix especially as we need to ensure big-endian systems work fine with it. The problem never affected OS X Firefox for Power Macs because those builds were only ever 32-bit, and even TenFourFox is 32-bit through and through even on the G5 largely for reasons of Carbon compatibility which we need for some pieces of the widget code. Since this is syndicated on Planet Mozilla let me give a big thanks to Ted Campbell for figuring out the root cause, which turned out to be a long-standing problem I don't think anyone ever noticed before.

I have not decided what to land on TenFourFox FPR17 mostly because this fix took up a fair bit of time; it's possible FPR17 may be a security-only stopgap release. In a related vein, the recent shift to a 4-week cadence for future Firefox releases starting in January will unfortunately increase my workload and may change how I choose to roll out additional features generally. Build day on the G5 is, in fact, literally a day or sometimes close to two (with the G5 in Reduced performance to cut down on fan noise and power consumption it takes about 20 hours to generate all four CPU-optimized releases, plus another 6 hours to regenerate the debug build for development testing; if there are JavaScript changes, I usually kick off a round each on the debug, G4/7450 and G5 builds through the 20,000+ item test suite and this adds another ten hours). Although the build and test process is about 2/3rds automated, it still needs intervention if it goes awry; plus, uploading to SourceForge is currently a manual process, and of course the documentation doesn't write itself. I don't have any easy means of cross-building TenFourFox on the Talos II (which, by the way, with dual 4-core CPUs for 32 threads builds Firefox in about half an hour), so I need to figure out how to balance this additional time requirement with the time I personally have available. While I do intend to continue supporting TenFourFox for those occasions I need to use a Power Mac, this Talos II is undeniably my daily driver, and fixing bugs in the mainline Firefox build I use every day is unavoidably a higher priority.