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PowerMac G5, Sorbet Leopard and AquaFox: A Winning Combo Summary: In previous posts, I have described the goodness to be found in each of Sorbet Leopard and Aquafox. This post describes a remarkable browsing experience had on my PowerMac G5 DP 2.3 GHz, where the combination of these three (PowerMac G5, Sorbet Leopard and AquaFox) accomplished something I never thought I would see again on a PPC Mac. Read on for all the details! Post Body: In a recent post, I introduced AquaFox, a revived TenFourFox-based PPC web browser. In my initial testing of it, AquaFox looked very promising indeed and so I decided to put it to the ultimate test – accessing a banking web site. This may sound like a very ordinary task, but banking web sites are so “heavy” that I have never been able to get one to render on my PowerMac G5 in less than minutes, and then only when I could get past the banking web site filters that insist on what they view as a modern browser. Getting past those filters is all by itself a challenging task! So, banking web sites are tough… really tough: usually no access at all, and even when you manage to get past that hurdle, no reasonable response time. This makes banking web sites the ultimate “torture test” for any PowerPC browser. Accordingly, a banking site is what I threw at AquaFox, running on my PowerMac G5 DP 2.3 GHz equipped with 4.5 GB RAM. I am delighted to report that it did a stellar job! Not only did my bank accept AquaFox as a modern browser, but AquaFox itself did an incredible job of cutting through the bank site’s bloat - it rendered the site in only 30 seconds or so, vs. the minutes the same task has taken on any other web browser I have tried this on to date. Now to be fair, AquaFox may not have accomplished this feat all on its own. It was running under Mac OS X 10.5.9, Sorbet Leopard. As previous posts have detailed, Sorbet Leopard is highly optimized, providing the look and feel of much faster application execution. My AquaFox banking experience may have benefited somewhat from this faster environment. Despite this, I am inclined to give most of the credit to AquaFox in this case, since it was already launched when it performed the magic of slicing through the bank site like a hot knife through butter (well a warm knife anyway!). No matter how the credit is best broken down, what I can say without hesitation is that the combination of a PowerMac G5 DP 2.3 GHz, Sorbet Leopard and AquaFox delivers the best browsing experience I have had on a PPC Mac in a very long time. This is a fabulous outcome, but there is more to it than just that. In my experience, just about the only thing a PowerMac G5 cannot do that I need it to do is support online banking. Now, with AquaFox, it can. This opens up the possibility of returning to the PowerMac G5 as my “daily driver”, a role it has not filled since 2008! I tried something similar a number of years ago (2011 I believe), using a PowerMac G5 Quad, but I ultimately had to abandon that effort due to … you guessed it … banking issues. I still have that Quad, and it still runs, but its cooling system is slowly failing and it runs quite hot now, resulting in a noisy working environment as the fans ramp up to deal with the rising temperature. So, if I do decide to take the leap and return to a PowerMac G5 as my daily driver, it will be the DP 2.3 GHz machine discussed above. That machine is an emotional favorite anyway, as it was my first personal Macintosh computer. I purchased it in 2006, replacing an aging 3 GHz Pentium IV Windows XP system, and I have been using Macs ever since. Coming back to AquaFox, it is a great piece of work. If you have a PowerMac G4 or G5, I would encourage you to give it a try. You will not regret it! Add Sorbet Leopard to the mix and you may just start thinking differently about the value and responsiveness of PowerMac G5 machines! Where can you get AquaFox? … and Sorbet Leopard? AquaFox can be downloaded from GitHub, at: AquaFox-1.0.0-beta1 Sorbet Leopard can be downloaded from Macintosh Garden, at: Sorbet Leopard R1.5 Both are also available right here at www.retro-computing.com, in the Sorbet Leopard archive. Enjoy!