Firefox 4 for PowerPC Macs: TenFourFox
Mozilla hit me with a double whammy of “your hardware sucks” last week, when they released major new versions of Firefox 4 and mobile Firefox 4 for Android (the first!) … but left me out of both parties.
My Android phone, the LG Optimus S, is only a few months old, but its ARMv6 processor isn’t supported. There’s a faint glimmer of hope there, but with the ARMv6 test builds already pulled, I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, the stock Android browser and Opera Mobile are both great (Opera’s font rendering needs work in the hinting/character spacing department, but that’s it).
Meanwhile, my Powerbook G4 is still running happily along on OS X 10.4 Tiger, so I was happy to find the answer to my Firefox 4 woes in TenFourFox, a Firefox fork with builds optimized for various G5, G4 and G3 processors. Here’s a mini-review of my impressions after a week, and a look at what’s coming up in browser-land for those of us clinging proudly to the last generation of PowerPC Macintosh computers. more …