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  • Hacker News
  • No mention of Firefox on the page? Is it not based on Firefox? Why the name then?
    by zelphirkalt
  • On the add-ons page there is "h264ify for Legacy Firefox", so I guess it is.
    by gpvos
  • I've been meaning to dust off my black plastic intel macbook and see if it's still usable as a workstation. Go back to Snow Leopard
    by treve
  • I was just reminiscing on the Camino/Chimera browser earlier today and this looks fantastic.

    I kinda wish there was a build for modern macOS on Apple Silicon to see how light and fast this little browser is.

    by SG-
  • Try PaleMoon - https://www.palemoon.org/download.shtml - it is the version meant for "modern" OSes. Powerfox shares a heritage with it as it is based on its rendering engine, Goanna (Palemoon -> Basilisk -> Powerfox).
    by thisislife2
  • I absolutely love that folks keep these old systems going with stuff like this.

    But, I do wonder what the browsing experience is like. It was rough using Firefox back on Mac's in the mid 2000's and the internet has only gotten significantly more data heavy since.

    Anything less than a G5 would be difficult to deal with.

    by HerbManic
  • How do I know it's secure against recent security breaches? Apparently the code base has diverged a lot from current Firefox and Gecko, so they can't just apply patches from there. Do they fuzz it, do static analysis, etc.? I guess the main security feature is that so few people use it that there are very few attacks on it.
    by gpvos
  • Don't know about Powerfox / Basilisk, but Palemoon developers have outlined How are security vulnerabilities handled? - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=23577 - in their FAQ. As both Palemoon and Basilisk do share codes from each other, as they started from a common codebase, I am guessing that most Palemoon fixes also apply to it.

    (Then again, Powerfox is meant to run on OSes that have been EOLed for more than a decade now ... so I am not sure how secure a browser, any browser, will be running on it. :)

    by thisislife2
  • I used TenFourFox to extend the usefulness of my PowerMac G5 for many years, though I last used it about a decade ago. I'd imagine running the modern web on a machine that slow would be painful.

    The G5 was actually the last Mac I owned until buying a Neo just for giggles.

    by seabrookmx
  • Bashed of comments here I checked https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ which is this bashed on looks great when you want lightweight browser to run on old laptops or whatever. Look like still some work being done looking at the repo (not a abandonware) I opened 20+ random tabs and ram usage still round gig, very nice I use old laptops to show some dashboards and stock ticker updates etc and I am fine with opening some trusted site or own designed dashboard in this thing even if underlying engine might not be secure ( worse case I mean I don’t know security/patches of underlying engine but it opened all random stuff I opened )
    by born-jre
  • Wonderful timing. I just set up an old Mac Pro with Snow Leopard and Vista [1] for retro software compatibility testing.

    I might download and give this a shot

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiZR3UFaWuU

    by CursedSilicon
  • yeah Allright! talk about timing, I've also recently been restoring a bunch of these iMacs, from the 2011-13 era. Such beautiful machines, and quite capable once configured! Obviously these are not workhorses, but for lightweight electronic appliances they are delicious: beautiful, stable, hackable and super accessible. Things like home accounting, basic office, photo and media libraries.... The only big issue I've crashed into is getting the modern web to work.. I've had very faint success using some specific older ArcticFox releases, but nothing solid... But I'd be super happy if this could play LowRes youtube.
    by weisk
  • So grateful for all of the dedicated coders and hackers in this space to keep our old Macs relevant and useable.

    PowerFox has tweaks especially for Leopard and Snow Leopard and Mac-quality of life features. You can also try Basilisk, which is the upstream version without those tweaks.

    Momiji is another variant targeting Mac OS Mavericks and other targets with ESR Firefox fixes. Works pretty well!

    Finally, there is work being done to revive Safari for Mavericks and work to bring Netsurf to MacOS 9.

    by system7rocks
  • One thing that seems to be common amongst many of these Firefox forks is they're very difficult to find which official version they're equivalent in functionality to. This one is no exception.
    by userbinator
  • Is that a firefox fork? I don't even see mention about license in the website or github repo.
    by prmoustache
  • Probably because there often isn't a straight answer to that. I've no idea about the progeny of this browser, but I've seen several Firefox forks "interbreed", borrowing patches and feature backports from each other. So there might be a specific version of Firefox you can ultimately trace the repo to, it likely has code from newer versions spliced in. At least, that was my impression.
    by spijdar
  • This is actually based on the Goanna web engine (a fork of the Firefox / Gecko web engine) derived from the https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ . You can find out more here - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=69&p=275829#p2758... .
    by thisislife2
  • Seeing that aqua scrollbar fills me with such joy. This is when tech was joyful and fun. I think what happened to the scrollbar is such a reflection of our industry as a whole. A microcosm.
    by ishanr
  • I remember spending ages as a kid fine tuning my scrollbar css
    by SmashDan
  • Well put. It’s why I’m so happy that the beta of MacOS Golden Gate shows proper designers who sweat the details are in charge again.
    by JSR_FDED
  • There was a similar project called TenFourFox that was halted in 2022:

    https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

    https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfo...

    Some 12 years ago I had to order a new motherboard and at that time all I had at hand was some old eMac. I'm not sure if it had 512MB or 1GB of ram installed by previous owner but browsing the Internet was tiresome. Still, both that chunky white boy and TenFourFox managed to help me and I've purchased that mobo.

    by pndy
  • (TenFourFox maintainer) Thanks, glad it was helpful to you. There is some TenFourFox code in this respin which is being used to support the widget code, and there is work in progress to forward-port its JIT. I'm not writing that code but I am advising on it as questions come up.
    by classichasclass