Friday, April 26, 2019

Another interesting TenFourFox downstream

Because we're one of the few older forks of Firefox to still backport security updates, TenFourFox code turns up in surprising places sometimes. I've known about roytam's various Pale Moon and Mozilla builds; the patches are used in both the rebuilds of Pale Moon 27 and 28 and his own fork of 45ESR. Arctic Fox, which is a Pale Moon 27 (descended from Firefox 38, with patches) rebuild for Snow Leopard and PowerPC Linux, also uses TenFourFox security patches as well as some of our OS X platform code.

Recently I was also informed of a new place TenFourFox code has turned up: OS/2. There's no Rust for OS/2, so they're in the same boat that PowerPC OS X is, and it doesn't look like 52ESR was ever successfully ported to OS/2 either; indeed, the last "official" Firefox I can find from Bitwise is 45.9. Dave Yeo took that version (as well as Thunderbird 45.9 and SeaMonkey 2.42.9) and backported our accumulated security patches along with other fixes to yield updated "SUa1" Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey builds for OS/2. If you're curious, here are the prerequisites.

Frankly, I'm glad that we can give back to other orphaned platforms, and while I'm definitely not slow to ding Mozilla for eroding cross-platform support, they've still been the friendliest to portability even considering recent lapses. Even though we're not current on Firefox anymore other than the features I rewrite for TenFourFox, we're still part of the family and it's nice to see our work keeping other systems and niche userbases running.

An update for FPR14 final, which is still scheduled for mid-May, is a new localization for Simplified Chinese from a new contributor. Thanks, paizhang! Updated language packs will be made available with FPR14 for all languages except Japanese, which is still maintained separately.

2 comments:

  1. Sadly the TenFourFox downstream has not benefited the Intel Mac world.

    TenFourFox has successfully concealed the age of the PowerPC platform. I did not fully realize this until I was given a late 2006 Intel iMac for free with a Magic Mouse purchase. This beautiful machine has been wholly abandoned since 2016 with no current browser options.

    I am thankful my Powerbook G4 and dual and quad G5 machines are still viable. Kudos, Cam!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AFAIK, even the early 2006 iMac can run MacOS 10.6, so may be you've missed this: https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/03/another-choice-for-intel-tenfourfox.html
      Add to this a nice port of Arctic Fox for 10.6:
      https://github.com/wicknix/Arctic-Fox/wiki/Downloads
      (32 or 64 bits version)
      You might also want to try Pale Moon 27 (v28 requires 10.7 or higher).
      I have briefly tested TenSixFox and Arctic Fox on a 10.6.7 (32 bits) machine and was pleasantly surprised — I've cursed for not having them when I used that machine more, a few years ago! ;-)

      Delete

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