Not too long ago I mentioned TenFourFox, a port of FireFox 4 to the PowerPC. Last night I actually had time to load and try it out on my old PowerBook G4 and I must say I’m rather impressed.
Understand that the PowerPC G4 processor is pretty damned slow by today’s standard. Playing a Flash video while downloading e-mail generally turns the video into a slide show and makes any interaction with other processes a slow ordeal. Firefox 3 always ran a bit shitty on that system thus I wasn’t impressed. TenFourFox on the other hand ran pretty well for a modern piece of software ported to an ancient system. All my Firefox add-ons (NoScript, Certificate Patrol, LastPass, and Xmarks) work just find in TenFourFox and every webpage I visited appeared to render correctly. The browser’s performance wasn’t noticeably different than Safari’s which was a big plus. Overall I’m very impressed with what the team working on TenFourFox has managed to accomplish.
I’ll give it a try on my 450Hz G4 Cube. I’ve been looking for something stable that can also run add-ons. Camino is pretty good on it, but I still get regular crashes.