TenFourFox FPR9b2 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 9 beta 2 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). This version tightens up the geometry on the date/time pickers a little, adds some more hosts to basic adblock, fixes a rare but easily wallpapered crash bug and further tunes up hash tables using a small patch from Firefox 63 (!). I am looking at a new JavaScript issue which does not appear to be a regression, but I'd like to fix it anyway since it may affect other sites. However, I'm not sure if this is going to make FPR9 final, which is still scheduled on or about September 4 due to the American Labor Day holiday on the usual Monday.

The WiFi fix in beta 1 was actually to improve HTML5 geolocation accuracy, and Chris T has confirmed that it does, so that's been updated in the release notes. Don't worry, you are always asked before your location is sent to a site.

On the Talos II side, I've written an enhancement to KVMPPC allowing it to actually monkeypatch Mac OS X with an optimized bcopy in the commpage. By avoiding the overhead of emulating dcbz's behaviour on 32-bit PPC, this hack improves the T2's Geekbench score by almost 200 points in Tiger. Combined with another small routine to turn dcba hints into nops so they don't cause instruction faults, this greatly reduces stalls and watchdog tickles when running Mac apps in QEMU. I'll have a formal article on that with source code for the grubby proletariat shortly, plus a big surprise launch of something I've been working on very soon. Watch this space.