FIREFOX 4 10.5.8 MAC USERS THE

Firefox 4 10.5.8 Mac Users The

Especially for Tiger Holdouts (and PowerPC Leopard Users, Too)As an OS X 10.4 holdout myself вЂ“ my two beloved 10-year-old Pismo PowerBooks still average about four hours of production use daily вЂ“ IвЂ™m obliged to concede that Apple itself has been giving us Power Mac users the proverbial middle digit since 2006. A quad 2.5 GHz G5 isnвЂ™t worth using to surf the Web? Really? And you guys still support Windows XP?вЂќWell, it might be about Windows XP still running on 59% of personal computers ( HitsLink, October 2010). But we were horrified when Mozilla delivered the one-two punch of dropping both support for Tiger and our beloved Power Macs from Firefox 4. We think Mozilla 2 has every possibility of kicking WebKit back into the margins where it belongs. We love Firefox and Camino,* they continue.

They observe that if thereвЂ™s one thing theyвЂ™ve learned from years of using Macs, itвЂ™s that they outlast anything else out there: вЂњWhy shouldnвЂ™t an iBook be able to look at embarrassing pictures on Facebook, or Twitter about our lunch break? These are our computers, dang it. Firefox 4 requires OS X 10.5 and later, and Beta 3 was the last version to support PowerPC Macs.This doesnвЂ™t set well with the TenFourFox developers, who are also behind Classilla, an adaptation of Mozilla for the Classic Mac OS. Fewer and fewer software developers are choosing to continue supporting OS X 10.4, and it appears that browser support may well turn out to be the tipping point that makes our old PowerPC Macs functionally obsolete.The latest Tiger browser casualty is MozillaвЂ™s Firefox, for which, as noted above, OSВ X 10.4 support was terminated after version 3.6. Classic Mode in Tiger does the job for me.In most respects, Tiger is still a more than satisfactory operating system, but one area where itвЂ™s been suffering is Internet application support, especially browsers and email clients.

It also comes in tuned builds for G3,В G4, and G5 systems, something Mozilla never offered.Nevertheless, itвЂ™s almost all the same code as Firefox 4 and has nearly all the same features, including claimed dramatically faster JavaScript, WebM video, and HTML 5 and CSS 3 support. It uses PowerPC code tuned for OS X 10.4 (and compatible with 10.5) and adds вЂњthe glueвЂќ necessary to get most of Firefox 4вЂ™s advanced features working on our older computers. Tuned for Your Operating System and ProcessorWhy is this called TenFourFox and not Firefox? Because, the developers explain, even though it uses the Firefox code base, itвЂ™s not Firefox. The result is TenFourFox.вЂќIn addition to supporting OS X 10.4 Tiger, TenFourFox also lets Leopard users run Beta 7 on their G4 and G5 Macs. So if you want something done, you do it yourself, and we did. ThereвЂ™s no technical reason they canвЂ™t do everything that a MacBook can.

Performance seems to be pretty much on par with the latest builds of the Camino and SeaMonkey Mozilla Gecko variants, which still support PowerPC Macs and OSВ X 10.4, although users of faster hardware than my 550 MHz G4 machines may see more advantage from the more advanced coding in the Firefox 4 engine.However, that вЂњMinefieldвЂќ warning proved appropriate, and I found TenFourFox somewhat buggy and managed to crash it вЂ“ something that rarely happens with OSВ X browsers these days. Using TenFourFoxI downloaded a copy of the G4/G5 version to try out on the Pismo and used it for a couple of days. It will appear in your Dock as TenFourFox. However, the code is substantially the same. For this reason, the application will appear as Minefield, which is the Mozilla codename for a nightly build. When Firefox 4 goes full-release, so will TenFourFox.The beta is based on the nightly build after the beta 7 code freeze.

The G4/G5 version will not run correctly on a G3 Mac.Update: There are now four versions of TenFourFox вЂ“ one for G3, one for G5, and two for G4 depending on which version of the CPU your Mac has. For some reason, Mac-only Camino, which IвЂ™ve tried hard to like, has never really clicked with me.Anyway, as noted, there are two versions of Mac-only TenFourFox:The G3 version will run on any supported Macintosh, but it will not take advantage of the additional features of G4 or G5 processors, especially the AltiVec velocity engine. The Camino development team released Camino 2.0.6 on November 16, and I checked it out for a couple of days but found it still doesnвЂ™t match SeaMonkey for speed and tractability on the Pismos. For some reason, and I suspect it could have something to do with that browserвЂ™s relatively simple user interface, it seems to be the best performer among the several Gecko alternatives for my old G4 machines.

This will be fixed in the next beta. Right-clicking them for the menu is safe. Repeatedly trying to open the click-hold menu on the back and forward buttons may cause TenFourFoxВ to crash.

Firefox 4 For Mac 10.5.8