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Posted by thisislife2 2 days ago

PowerFox Browser(powerfox.jazzzny.me)
164 points | 48 comments
pndy 2 days ago|
There was a similar project called TenFourFox that was halted in 2022:

https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfo...

Some 12 years ago I had to order a new motherboard and at that time all I had at hand was some old eMac. I'm not sure if it had 512MB or 1GB of ram installed by previous owner but browsing the Internet was tiresome. Still, both that chunky white boy and TenFourFox managed to help me and I've purchased that mobo.

classichasclass 1 day ago|
(TenFourFox maintainer) Thanks, glad it was helpful to you. There is some TenFourFox code in this respin which is being used to support the widget code, and there is work in progress to forward-port its JIT. I'm not writing that code but I am advising on it as questions come up.
ndiddy 1 day ago|||
Thanks for keeping TenFourFox going for so long! It let me keep using a G4 iBook as a daily driver until ~2016 when the web got to be too much for it to handle.
classichasclass 1 day ago||
Yes, my poor 1.33GHz iBook G4 really drags in it now, but it suffices for simple things and grabbing files for the tasks it still does.
wolvoleo 23 hours ago||||
Thanks! I still have a g4 mini and a g4 imac for old times sake.

I moved off Mac these days but it reminds me of when they were still awe inspiring Unix machines. These days they're way too iOS for me to be interested.

geerlingguy 1 day ago||||
Thank you for your work on it! I love that I can browse most of the modern web on G4 and G5 Macs still.
classichasclass 1 day ago||
Thanks! I wish modern JavaScript were a little kinder to it, but I still use it myself for basic tasks.
pndy 1 day ago|||
I thought you’d be here - thank you!
ishanr 1 day ago||
Seeing that aqua scrollbar fills me with such joy. This is when tech was joyful and fun. I think what happened to the scrollbar is such a reflection of our industry as a whole. A microcosm.
JSR_FDED 1 day ago||
Well put. It’s why I’m so happy that the beta of MacOS Golden Gate shows proper designers who sweat the details are in charge again.
vages 1 day ago|||
Could you elaborate? I just looked at the screenshots on https://www.apple.com/os/macos/, but did not see anything too different from the previous version.
JSR_FDED 1 day ago||
This attention to detail is making me optimistic:

https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-golden-gate-i...

Im addition to the 263 small things that were on a single slide at WWDC 26

vintagedave 1 day ago|||
What's changed? I know there's a Liquid Glass slider, and unified toolbars, and corner radiuses are consistent, but that seems about it.

I hope there's more. There is a lot of room for improvement in macOS UI beyond those changes.

bjoli 1 day ago||
It is hidden by default and when you mouse over it it is so bland that it is hard to see where you are on the page.

I havent used Mac is in a while, so I am not sure about how it is today, but this seems to have been the development everywhere.

SmashDan 1 day ago||
I remember spending ages as a kid fine tuning my scrollbar css
userbinator 2 days ago||
One thing that seems to be common amongst many of these Firefox forks is they're very difficult to find which official version they're equivalent in functionality to. This one is no exception.
thisislife2 1 day ago||
This is actually based on the Goanna web engine (a fork of the Firefox / Gecko web engine) derived from the https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ . You can find out more here - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=69&p=275829#p2758... .
dblohm7 1 day ago|||
Ah, that explains why there is still NPAPI plugin support.
thisislife2 1 day ago||
Yup. The only browsers that still support Flash.
userbinator 1 day ago|||
The same complaint in my original comment applies - at what version was it forked from, what version of Firefox is it equivalent to?

https://www.basilisk-browser.org/features.html

Basilisk supports the technologies required for the modern web, while deliberately avoiding the rapid architectural and interface changes common in mainstream browsers.

Nothing but very vague and useless marketing-speak.

thisislife2 1 day ago|||
Lookup PaleMoon and Basilisk in Wikipedia. The codebase of Goanna has diverged from Firefox / Gecko a lot, so trying to compare by versions won't tell you much. PaleMoon Goanna is regularly updated and supports nearly all the feature sets of a modern browser rendering engine and is feature compatible with Firefox / Gecko though it doesn't support webRTC - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=28182, DRM and webExtensions ... https://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml
zamadatix 1 day ago|||
What you're looking for only makes sense for browser "forks" that just re-skin/layer on top of the latest releases of the main project. Basilisk is an actual fork which has lead development in it's own direction, i.e. they have features newer than the date/version of the fork but it's not because they rebased on the newer Firefox XYZ git and now have equivalence to that version.
spijdar 2 days ago|||
Probably because there often isn't a straight answer to that. I've no idea about the progeny of this browser, but I've seen several Firefox forks "interbreed", borrowing patches and feature backports from each other. So there might be a specific version of Firefox you can ultimately trace the repo to, it likely has code from newer versions spliced in. At least, that was my impression.
userbinator 1 day ago||
The closest they say is:

PowerFox is both standards compliant and feature-rich, supporting the latest web technologies to ensure compatibility with modern websites.

which means.. next to nothing. No "PowerFox version X has (at least) the same web standards support as Firefox Y".

it likely has code from newer versions spliced in

That's a good thing, but making it clearer what to expect will make it easier for potential users to decide whether to give it a try.

sdf4j 1 day ago||
> That's a good thing, but making it clearer what to expect will make it easier for potential users to decide whether to give it a try.

There are not that many options for the potential users.

prmoustache 1 day ago||
Is that a firefox fork? I don't even see mention about license in the website or github repo.
swiftcoder 1 day ago||
It was forked from Firefox a decade ago, so at this point there's not much relation between the PaleMoon/Basilisk lineage and modern Firefox
born-jre 1 day ago||
Bashed of comments here I checked https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ which is this bashed on looks great when you want lightweight browser to run on old laptops or whatever. Look like still some work being done looking at the repo (not a abandonware) I opened 20+ random tabs and ram usage still round gig, very nice I use old laptops to show some dashboards and stock ticker updates etc and I am fine with opening some trusted site or own designed dashboard in this thing even if underlying engine might not be secure ( worse case I mean I don’t know security/patches of underlying engine but it opened all random stuff I opened )
CursedSilicon 1 day ago||
Wonderful timing. I just set up an old Mac Pro with Snow Leopard and Vista [1] for retro software compatibility testing.

I might download and give this a shot

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiZR3UFaWuU

weisk 1 day ago|
yeah Allright! talk about timing, I've also recently been restoring a bunch of these iMacs, from the 2011-13 era. Such beautiful machines, and quite capable once configured! Obviously these are not workhorses, but for lightweight electronic appliances they are delicious: beautiful, stable, hackable and super accessible. Things like home accounting, basic office, photo and media libraries.... The only big issue I've crashed into is getting the modern web to work.. I've had very faint success using some specific older ArcticFox releases, but nothing solid... But I'd be super happy if this could play LowRes youtube.
herewulf 1 day ago||
I recently got an iMac from the same era up and running. First as a FOSS gaming machine for my kids, then as a gift for a friend who was lacking computing options. The secret (as you probably know) for installing a lot of FOSS software is MacPorts not Homebrew.

I thought my Firefox LTS was updating fine, but I could be wrong. I could certainly browse with it.

seabrookmx 2 days ago||
I used TenFourFox to extend the usefulness of my PowerMac G5 for many years, though I last used it about a decade ago. I'd imagine running the modern web on a machine that slow would be painful.

The G5 was actually the last Mac I owned until buying a Neo just for giggles.

gpvos 1 day ago||
How do I know it's secure against recent security breaches? Apparently the code base has diverged a lot from current Firefox and Gecko, so they can't just apply patches from there. Do they fuzz it, do static analysis, etc.? I guess the main security feature is that so few people use it that there are very few attacks on it.
thisislife2 1 day ago|
Don't know about Powerfox / Basilisk, but Palemoon developers have outlined How are security vulnerabilities handled? - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=23577 - in their FAQ. As both Palemoon and Basilisk do share codes from each other, as they started from a common codebase, I am guessing that most Palemoon fixes also apply to it.

(Then again, Powerfox is meant to run on OSes that have been EOLed for more than a decade now ... so I am not sure how secure a browser, any browser, will be running on it. :)

HerbManic 1 day ago||
I absolutely love that folks keep these old systems going with stuff like this.

But, I do wonder what the browsing experience is like. It was rough using Firefox back on Mac's in the mid 2000's and the internet has only gotten significantly more data heavy since.

Anything less than a G5 would be difficult to deal with.

treve 2 days ago||
I've been meaning to dust off my black plastic intel macbook and see if it's still usable as a workstation. Go back to Snow Leopard
zelphirkalt 1 day ago|
No mention of Firefox on the page? Is it not based on Firefox? Why the name then?
gpvos 1 day ago|
On the add-ons page there is "h264ify for Legacy Firefox", so I guess it is.
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