Friday, April 16, 2021

TenFourFox FPR32 available, plus a two-week reprieve

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 32 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). This adds an additional entry to the ATSUI font blocklist and completes the outstanding security patches. Assuming no issues, it will go live as the final FPR on or about April 19.

Mozilla is advancing Firefox 89 by two weeks to give them additional time to polish up the UI changes in that version. This will thus put all future release dates ahead by two weeks as well; the next ESR release and the first Security Parity Release parallel with it instead will be scheduled for June 1. Aligning with this, the testing version of FPR32 SPR1 will come out the weekend before June 1 and the final official build of TenFourFox will also move ahead two weeks, from September 7 to September 21. After that you'll have to DIY but fortunately it already looks like people are rising to the challenge of building the browser themselves: I have been pointed to an installer which neatly wraps up all the necessary build prerequisites, provides a guided Automator workflow and won't interfere with any existing installation of MacPorts. I don't have anything to do this with this effort and can't attest to or advise on its use, but it's nice to see it exists, so download it from Macintosh Garden if you want to try it out. Remember, compilation speed on G4 (and, shudder, G3) systems can be substantially slower than on a G5, and especially without multiple CPUs. Given this Quad G5 running full tilt (three cores dedicated to compiling) with a full 16GB of RAM takes about three and a half hours to kick out a single architecture build, you should plan accordingly for longer times on lesser systems.

I have already started clearing issues from Github I don't intend to address. The remaining issues may not necessarily be addressed either, and definitely won't be during the security parity period, but they are considerations for things I might need later. Don't add to this list: I will mark new issues without patches or PRs as invalid. I will also be working on revised documentation for Tenderapp and the main site so people are aware of the forthcoming plan; those changes will be posted sometime this coming week.

6 comments:

  1. [ChrisT] More than ever I'm toying with the idea of buying a used G5, put 10.4 on it (which is otherwise not my preferred OS; that would be 10.5) and use it as a build machine for TenFourFox. With this toolkit I think I will do it. Cameron, I uploaded a slightly corrected German langpack installer to issue 328 that clarifies what Auto Reader View actually does.

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  2. Can't you in theory use an Intel Mac to build everything? As long as you point it to an older Xcode toolchain and SDK (both with PPC support), it should be able to cross-compile everything.

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    1. Smashing idea. Try it and report back, and let me know your findings.

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  3. [ChrisT] I succeeded building TenFourFox with the toolbox you mentioned. The G3 version for 45.41.0 I built from the source is different in some parts from the build that can be downloaded from SF. Notably, in Contents/MacOS there are three libraries that have been swapped and labelled green (e.g. libatomic.1.dylib). Most components differ slightly in size, but that's probably because changes were made to the Main branch in-between and/or because I built on a G3 (yes, it can be done, and it only takes about 34 hours at 400MHz…). PdfStreamConverter.jsm.orig (in chrome/pdfjs/content) is not in the version I built. Does any of this have a meaning?

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    1. That is dedication, sir!

      The difference in the libraries is because of the architecture-specific optimized libraries introduced in FPR25: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/07/tenfourfox-fpr25b1-available.html You can simply copy those in if you want.

      The missing .orig file is not part of the tree, so you don't need to worry about it. That sounds like a patch that I corrected manually and failed to clean up after. I'll make sure this is purged.

      There are probably other minor differences in reproducibility, but I'm glad it built and I salute 34 hours of buildtime! Wow!

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  4. Thank you soo much for all of your hard work over the years!

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