Saturday, June 22, 2019

TenFourFox FPR15b1 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 15 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes).

In honour of New Coke's temporary return to the market (by the way, I say it tastes like Pepsi and my father says it tastes like RC), I failed again with this release to get some sort of async/await support off the ground, and we are still plagued by issue 533. The second should be possible to fix, but I don't know exactly what's wrong. The first is not possible to fix without major changes because it reaches up into the browser event loop, but should be still able to get parsing and thus enable at least partial functionality from the sites that depend on it. That part didn't work either. A smaller hack, though, did make it into this release with test changes. Its semantics aren't quite right, but they're good enough for what requires it and does fix some parts of Github and other sites.

However, there are some other feature improvements, including expanded blocking of cryptominers when basic adblock is enabled (from the same list Mozilla uses for enhanced privacy in mainstream Firefox), and updated internationalization support with upgraded timezones and locales such as the new Japanese Reiwa era (for fun, look at Is it Reiwa yet? in FPR14.1 before you download FPR15b1). The usual maintenance and security fixes are (will be) also included (in final). In the meantime, I'm going to take a different pass at the async/await problem for FPR16. If even that doesn't work, we'll have to see where we're at then for parity purposes, since while the majority of websites still work well in TenFourFox's heavily patched-up engine there are an increasing number of major ones that don't. It's hard to maintain a browser engine on your own. :(

Meanwhile, if you'd like the next generation of PowerPC but couldn't afford a Talos II, maybe you can afford a Blackbird. Here's what I thought of it. (See also the followup.)

7 comments:

  1. Not sure what to say. Seems OK on my iMac G4.

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  2. I'd just like to thank you for your hard work on Ten Four Fox. It is much appreciated!

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  3. Cameron, I would like to second that thank you. Great work. I just added a SSD to my G5 1.8DP Mac in the hope of a sizable speed bump over the traditional HD. Didn't happen. Some speed improvement but not what I wanted or needed on the old G5. Question: are any of the TFF releases help in the speed department?

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    1. To be candid, probably not in a significant general sense. With the exception of the adblock updates, which probably are mostly for sketchy sites or ad networks that get pwned, most of this stuff is upgrades in functionality.

      I think the Samsung SSD I installed in my G5 definitely improved application starting speed, but not a lot else, though to be fair I wasn't expecting much in that regard.

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    2. As TFF is Firefox-based you can expand it with an enormous amount of addons - have a look at uMatrix, Bluhell Firewall and NoScript. Each of them blocks different parts of websites and together they make TFF pretty damn fast, even on G4s (typing this on a 1.33 iBook).
      Additionally you could have a look at ArcticFox, another Firefox based browser, aimed primarily at speed. I use both browsers for different websites, combine the two and I can do almost everything I want (including YouTube).

      For more information please see these two threads on Macrumors Forums:

      https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/my-tenfourfox-about-config-tweaks-and-my-addons.1838393/

      https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/so-this-finally-happened-sort-of.2172031/

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    3. Thank you for the info and links!

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  4. Mini G4 1st gen+SSD PATA: boot time, apps launch, multitasking, I noticed a neat improvement. Unfortunately, the aspect that least benefitted from it is web browsing... :-/ but a little improvement, still. Should definitely upgrade the 512Mb RAM. ;-)

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