TenFourFox Development
What's new in TenFourFox, the Mozilla browser for Power Macs.
Saturday, November 23, 2024
CHRP removal shouldn't affect Linux Power Macs
Monday, June 10, 2024
macOS Sequoia
Now that I've had my cup of snark, though, Intel Mac users beware: this one almost uniformly requires a T2 chip, the Apple A10 derivative used as a security controller in the last generation of Intel Macs, and even at least one Mac that does have one isn't supported (the 2018 MacBook Air, presumably because of its lower-powered CPU-GPU, which is likely why the more powerful 2019 iMac without one is supported, albeit incompletely). It would not be a stretch to conclude that this is the final macOS for Intel Macs, though Rosetta 2's integration to support x86_64 in VMs means Intel Mac software will likely stay supported on Apple silicon for awhile. But that shouldn't be particularly surprising. What I did find a little more ominous is that only the 2020 MacBook Air and up is supported in their price segment, and since those Macs are about four years old now, it's possible some M1 Macs might not make the jump to macOS 16 either — whatever Apple ends up calling it.
Monday, May 20, 2024
Donnie Darko uses OS X
All four are specific to the director's cut that premiered theatrically in May 2004. While APE was available at least as far back as Puma, i.e., OS X 10.1, Puma didn't come out until September 2001, months after the movie premiered in January of that year. In fact, the original movie is too early even for the release of Cheetah (10.0) in March. The first two images don't give an obvious version number but the second set shows a Darwin kernel version of 6.1, which corresponds to Jaguar 10.2.1 from September 2002. Although Panther 10.3 came out in October 2003, the recut movie would have moved to post-production (in its fashion) by then, and the shots may well have been done near the beginning of production when early versions of Jag remained current.
I'm waiting on the next Firefox ESR (128) in July, and there will be at least some maintenance updates then, so watch for that.
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
One less Un*xy option for 32-bit PowerPC
NetBSD has the widest support, continuing to run on most 68Ks and PCI Power Macs to this day (leaving out only the NuBus Power Macs which aren't really supported by much of anything anymore, sadly). However, OpenBSD works fine on New World Macs, and FreeBSD has a very mature 32-bit PowerPC port — or, should I say, soon will have had one, since starting in FreeBSD 15 (13.x is the current release), ARMv6, 32-bit Intel and 32-bit PowerPC support will likely be removed. No new 32-bit support will be added, including for RISC-V.
Even though I have a large number of NetBSD systems, I still like FreeBSD, and one of my remote "island" systems runs it. The differences between BSDs are more subtle than with Linux distributions, but you can still enjoy the different flavours that result, and I even ported a little FreeBSD code to the NetBSD kernel so I could support automatic restarts after a power failure on the G4 mini. The fact that the userland and kernel are better matched together probably makes the BSDs better desktop clients, too, especially since on big-endian we're already used to some packages just not building right, so we don't lose a whole lot by running it. (Usually those are the same packages that wouldn't build on anything but Linux anyway.)
This isn't the end for the G5, which should still be able to run the 64-bit version of FreeBSD, and OpenBSD hasn't voiced any firm plans to cut 32-bit loose. However, NetBSD supports the widest range of Macs, including Macs far older than any Power Mac, and frankly if you want to use a Un*x on a Power Mac and have reasonable confidence it will still be running on it for years to come, it's undeniably the one with the best track record.
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Google ending Basic HTML support for Gmail in 2024
There are also reports that you can't set Basic HTML mode now either. Most of you who want to use it probably already are, but if you're not, you can try this, this, this, this or even this to see if it gets around the front-end block.
Google can of course do whatever they want, and there are always maintenance costs to be had with keeping old stuff around — in this case, for users unlikely to be monetized in any meaningful fashion because you don't run all their crap. You are exactly the people Google wants to get rid of and doing so is by design. As such, it's effectively a giant "screw you," and will be a problem for those folks relying on this for a fast way to read Gmail with TenFourFox or any other limited system. (Hey, wanna buy a Pixel 8 to read Gmail?)
Speaking of "screw you," and with no small amount of irony given this is published on a Google platform, I certainly hope the antitrust case goes somewhere.
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
WebP chemspill patch on Github
Thursday, August 31, 2023
August patch set for TenFourFox
As this is a base pullup, building this time around will require a full clobber, so be sure to clear out everything before you begin.
For our next set, I'm thinking of an update to Reader Mode, since I firmly believe that's one of the most useful modes to run TenFourFox in on limited Power Mac hardware. That's why we made it sticky and provided a way to automatically open it by site (under Preferences, TenFourFox) — on resource-limited systems a resource-light view of a resource-heavy page is pretty much the way to go. And isn't everything resource-heavy to a Power Mac?