Firefox 4 for PowerPC Macs

Although I have many complaints about Firefox 4 it is still my main browser because I can’t remain sane, online, and not have NoScript. Two weeks ago I tried running Chrome as my main browser again thinking I would give it a fair shake only to rediscover all the full page advertisements, popups, flash advertisements, and other annoying things that I forgot existed thanks to the wonderful little plugin that prevents all but authorized domains from running scripts.

I also have an old PowerBook that I still use once in a while and Firefox 4 doesn’t support it. It’s not the end of the world yet as Firefox 3.x is still being supported on the platform and with security updates but that will end some day. Thankfully somebody has seen my blight and has started a project to bring Firefox 4 to PowerPC Macintosh computers via the TenFourFox project. This is one huge advantage to open source software, when a vendor drops support for a platform others can swoop in and do the support themselves.

The group behind TenFourFox is also claiming that they’re making CPU specific optimizations which is pretty awesome. I’ll have to test this on my old PowerBook G4 and let you know how it runs.