Wednesday, November 25, 2020

TenFourFox FPR30b1 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 30 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). I managed to make some good progress on backporting later improvements to the network and URL handling code, so there are no UI-facing features in this release, but the browser should use a bit less memory and run a little quicker especially on pages that reference a lot of resources (which, admittedly, is a lot of sites these days). There is also a minor update to the host database for basic adblock. Assuming all goes well, this release will come out parallel with Firefox 84 on or around December 15. I'll probably do an SPR-only build for the release immediately following to give myself a break; this will contain just needed security fixes, and there will most likely not be a beta.

A few people got bitten by not noticing the locale update, so let me remind everyone that FPR29 needs new locales if you are using a custom langpack. They're linked from the main TenFourFox page and all of them are on SourceForge except for the separately-maintained Japanese version, which I noticed has also been updated to FPR29. If you get a weird error starting TenFourFox and you have a langpack installed, quit the browser and run the new langpack installer and it should fix itself.

Finally, in case you missed it, with the right browser and a side-car TLS 1.2 proxy, you can get A/UX, Power MachTen (on any classic MacOS supporting it) and pre-Tiger Mac OS X able to access modern web pages again. The key advance here is that the same machine can also run the proxy all by itself: no cheating with a second system! Sadly, this does not work as-is with all browsers, including with Classilla, which is something I'll think about allowing as a down payment on proper in-browser support at some future date.

7 comments:

  1. As usual, thanks for your efforts!

    The link above goes to FPR29, and I don't see 30 available.

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  2. Still getting this message for TFF 30b1-

    "503 Service Unavailable
    No server is available to handle this request. "

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's SourceForge, unfortunately. I don't have any control over that.

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  3. No problem. I tried a few hours later and was able to download TFF. Thanks for all your efforts Cameron!

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  4. Hello, I'm looking for a CPU upgrade for a G4 and I was wondering for the purposes of running TFF which would give better results: a slower dual CPU or a faster single. For example, would you pick a dual 1GHz or a single 1.6GHz CPU? It looks like there are a lot of threads going, so my guess is that a dual would be better. What are your thoughts? How could I test this besides a "seat of the pants" approach?

    Thanks!

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    Replies
    1. Although the extra threads would benefit from the extra CPU, even with the JIT most of the runtime is due to JavaScript and this must run on the main thread. Myself I would probably pick the single 1.6GHz as I don't think you'd see enough benefit with the 1GHz part, even considering you have two cores to run things. Obviously YMMV depending on your typical workload and if you have other things running on that machine or multiple foxboxes this advice changes.

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