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     AquaFox – A Great New G3, G4, G5 Web Browser

Summary: TenFourFox is a well known, well loved PPC build of Mozilla Firefox, the 45 ESR version. TenFourFox gave PPC Macs a lifeline to the web for many years. After TenFourFox finally ended its run, those Macs were left without a current web browser, pushing them ever further into the technical twilight. AquaFox returns PPC Macs to some degree of web relevance, delivering a "new" and current browser based on TenFourFox. Read on for all the details.

Post Body: In the 17 years since Apple stopped sales of the last PowerPC Macintoshes in favor of Intel equivalents, PowerMac enthusiasts have kept the platform alive with regular software updates, new apps and more.

PowerMac G5

A classic example of this was TenFourFox, a G4/G5-targeted version of Mozilla Firefox. Cameron Kaiser kept TenFourFox current for a great many years, before finally moving the project into what he termed “hobby mode” and ceasing production builds. This was a terrible blow to those of us who still love and use our old PPC Macs; the last “current” browser for the platform was no longer current, moving our beloved PowerMacs further and further into technical irrelevance.

Such was the state of affairs until recently, when an individual known only by the handle “thewireless” (at www.MacRumors.com) took it upon himself/herself to pick up the still-sputtering TenFourFox torch and run with it. The result is the new AquaFox PowerMac browser, an ongoing build of the TenFourFox code base, incorporating all the latest updates and fixes from Cameron Kaiser himself, blended liberally with a wide variety of other additions, subtractions and optimizations. The AquaFox release announcement at http://thewireless.neocities.org/aquafox_announcement has all the details.

About AquaFox
The goals are lofty and formidible. How did "thewireless" do against those goals? Really well, IMHO. AquaFox is good… very good, and it is fast… very fast. For the first time in years, I find myself able to productively cruise the web again on my PowerMac G5, without the ongoing stream of dreaded certificate warnings, or worse, the outright rejection from financial sites that insist on only allowing access from what they consider to be a modern browser.

To be fair, cruising the web on a PowerMac G5 with AquaFox does not deliver the same experience as you would have if you were to do the same thing on a modern Mac. It is observably slower, and not everything renders exactly the same, but the brilliant part is that it does work once more, which is simply excellent. It works well enough that this post was submitted to this site and tested all using AquaFox.

If you still have, love and use a PowerMac, G4 or G5, I would encourage you to pick up a copy of AquaFox and give it a try. I promise that you will not be disappointed.

You can download AquaFox for G3, G4 and G5 from Github, at:

AquaFox Releases

… and right here at Retro-Computing, in the Sorbet Leopard archive (http://retro-computing.com).

Enjoy!

… and thanks to “thewireless” for an outstanding job. On behalf of PowerMac users everywhere, thank you, and please keep up the great work.

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