AquaWeb micro - A Stupidly Fast Minibrowser for PPC OS X

[z970]

Introducing AquaWeb micro, an all-in-one adaptation of TenFourFoxPEP built into a heavily modified TenFourFoxBox in order to bring extremely high performance browsing to Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, and Sorbet Leopard.

TenFourFox is required; Quartz Extreme graphics are recommended; Core Image graphics are suggested.

Usage Tips:

o Select Home under the Box menu within the Menu Bar to return to the home page.

o Press Command + Shift + U to copy the current page URL to the system clipboard.

o Press Command + R to reload the page, press Command + Left to go back a page, and press Command + Right to go forward a page.

o Because AquaWeb uses the DuckDuckGo search engine, utilizing "!bangs" to jump straight into a site instead of searching for it first can save time. Instead of searching for 'YouTube', simply preface a query with '!yt', followed by whatever phrase you wish to search for. The same applies to Yahoo! (!y), Bing (!b), Startpage (!sp), Wikipedia (!w), old reddit (!oldreddit), and so on.

o To finely scrub through videos in YouTube, double-click the left or right side of the video to reverse back ten seconds, or skip ahead ten seconds.

o In YouTube, click the gear icon in the top-right corner of the video, and set the video quality to 144p for the best playback performance. This setting will be saved, so it should only have to be done once.

o While streaming audio or music playlists via YouTube, click the yellow "-" button in the top-left corner of the browser window to minimize the video window into the Dock to reduce background resource usage.

o In lieu of full screen browsing, click the green "+" button in the top-left corner of the browser window to maximize the browser window. Note that this will reduce performance, but can be useful in websites that temporarily require a larger viewing area. Click it again to return to the prior state.

o In lieu of tabbed browsing, open a locally saved website link (webloc file, for example on the Desktop) while AquaWeb is active to open a new window. Opening certain links within certain webpages will also provide this result.

AquaWeb micro is available on Macintosh Garden:

AquaWeb / AquaVid - Macintosh Garden

AquaWeb and AquaVid are heavily modified foxboxes designed to bring maximum browsing speeds and efficiency to OS X Tiger / Leopard.

macintoshgarden.org

 

[z970]

Having just installed Leopard onto my MDD, I got the chance to casually compare the performance of both AquaWeb and Leopard WebKit ...

After visiting several websites, it seems that the latest incarnation of AquaWeb has surpassed Leopard WebKit in both site loading times and scrolling smoothness, the latter being by a large margin. The fact that AquaWeb blocks ads right out-of-the-box probably helps, too.

And surprisingly enough, Leopard WebKit's general performance is comparatively sluggish overall. It also exhibits a flickering issue when scrolling through the page (while this may be related to BeamSync being disabled, I don't recall this happening before), and that's to say nothing of its crash-prone nature either.

In other news, I also discovered that Leopard WebKit is no longer able to connect to Wikipedia.

Being basically just a giant encyclopedia that anyone can edit, you would think that their security standards wouldn't be as high as they are...

 

[looking4awayout]

Hello everybody, I am Looking4awayout of L4Soft, the creator of the UOC Patch.

I'm writing this post to make some clarification about the patch itself and its extension, the UOC Enforcer.
The UOC Patch and the Enforcer are two essential components that must be used together, in order to bring Mozilla-based browsers to the best performance they can achieve.

So, by using just the UOC Enforcer (aka the user.js file) in the profile folder, the browser won't be fully optimized.

You need both the UOC Patch (which must be put in the \defaults\pref directory of your Mozilla based browser) and the Enforcer (that you must put in your profile folder) in order to enjoy the fully optimized experience.

While I appreciate @z970mp 's to port it to the PowerPC, I have been investigating his prefs.js, and I noticed that he is using a very outdated version of the UOC Patch! 😛
I have rewritten the entire Patch + Enforcer file from scratch during this week, so please re-download it and test it with TenFourFox to see if it makes a difference and if so, please update accordingly!

I unfortunately do not have a Power Macintosh, so the Macintosh version of the UOC Patch has been developed on a "Macintel" Mac Mini 1.1 running System 10.6.8. @sparty411 seems that has either got only the UOC Enforcer or he has forgot to update. Considering what I have seen in z970mp's file, I think he might have even used the wrong version, the Windows one, since the Macintosh version of the UOC Patch has absolutely no reference to DirectX and the other Microsoft APIs. So please re-download the UOC Patch and the Enforcer, test it out on your PowerPC Macintoshes and if the patch does not optimize the system as it should (I do not have a Power Macintosh, so I need your help for that!), feel free to tweak it to suit your needs.

The Macintosh version of the UOC Patch only uses OpenGL. WebGL is not fully enabled by default, only some components are. But that's because on my Mac Mini, enabling those seem to speed up the browser, unlike enabling full fledged WebGL. On the other hand, full WebGL seems to bring benefits on a PC instead, at least on my Tualatin RDD.

The way I have made the UOC Patch is pretty much to tweak the browser to work as good as possible on a Pentium III system with at least a 128 bit graphics card and 768MB of memory, upwards. I do not know how it performs on a PowerPC Macintosh, but I would like to know, since I do not have beta testers for the Patch.

P.S. A prefs.js file for tweaks is not the ideal way to implement the tweaks. I have found that out in the alpha version of the UOC Patch: many of my entries simply would be ignored by the browser. So, I found out that the best way is to do it through a defaults replacement file, which is how the UOC Patch is structured. Even after doing that, there might be some "stubborn" entries that just get ignored by the browser, and in that case, in order to implement those, you will need to use a user.js file that must be put into the profile folder.

The user.js will take care of the stubborn entries, but in order to edit those, you will have to edit the user.js file itself.

 

[looking4awayout]

https://msfn.org/board/topic/178306...wsers-for-old-machines-now-for-macintosh-too/ This is where you can get the UOC Patch and the Enforcer.

You can get the Macintosh version here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/wf1qdc98fr6sk43/UOC_Patch_Mac_N2H.zip/file

And its Enforcer here:

UOC_Enforcer_38ESR_N2H

MediaFire is a simple to use free service that lets you put all your photos, documents, music, and video in a single place so you can access them anywhere and share them everywhere.

www.mediafire.com

Please remember that the Macintosh version has been conceived for Arctic Fox, as it is built on the codebase of Firefox 38 ESR. Only one person besides Sparty411 beta tested it on TenFourFox and on his machine, a Powerbook G4, seemed to perform well enough.

Installing the patch on the Macintosh is as simple as doing it on Windows. You just unzip the patch and put the UOC_Patch_Mac.js file into the following folder:

Applications\[Browser folder]\Contents\Resources\Defaults\Pref

The UOC Enforcer for 38 ESR browsers is the version that must be used with the Macintosh one. You can install the Enforcer on the Macintosh by putting the user.js file in the following directory:

Macintosh HDD\Users\[Username]\Library\Application Support\[Browser Name]\Profiles\[Profile Name]\

Make sure you back up your prefs.js file before installing the UOC Patch and the Enforcer.

I would be glad if someone further optimizes it to run on PowerPC Macintoshes, as the Windows version works well enough to optimize old hardware.

It is always recommended to start with a clean profile to avoid potential issues.

 

[z970]

The AquaWeb prefs have been adapted to a TenFourFox prefs.js file! Plus, it's universal, so it will work in both Mac, Windows, or Linux.

Just replace your current prefs.js and enjoy the speed.

 

[z970]

AquaWeb and AquaVid have been updated to version 1.2.

This release brings many improvements in speed, rendering times, and general usability. All existing users are recommended to upgrade at their earliest convenience.

 

[z970]

Good nooz everyone! Not only have AquaWeb and AquaVid been updated to version 2.1 in accordance with foxPEP 2.1 Humility, they have also, unsurprisingly, been modified to be better than they ever were!

AquaWeb has been updated to go to Searx.GNU.Style instead of DuckDuckGo for both faster search results, faster image rendering, and faster website loading, and AquaVid has been made to not suck anymore by redirecting video streams to QuickTime Player (which, unlike embedded HTML5 video, does not kill the CPU). Besides enabling G3 usage once again, this also makes it the most performant YouTube solution since TenFourTube, which was the original goal it set out to achieve in the first place.

So, I am now confident in declaring these to be one of the best (out of the few available) lightweight browser and YouTube applications available for Tiger, almost exactly as if TenFourKit and TenFourTube were fixed and given fresh coats of paint.

Get 'em while they're hot!

 

[z970]

AquaWeb has received another update in accordance with TenFourFoxPEP 2.2.2, and outside of several minor presentation adjustments, has also been reduced in default size from 800 x 600 to 640 x 480, substantially increasing performance in low-end environments (the maximize button can be temporarily used wherever a larger viewing area is required). The pre-existing (if any) AquaWeb profile folder within the user's Application Support directory will need to removed in advance in order to take advantage of this change, however.

And to those who prefer an all-in-one video solution, AquaVid YT plays 144p videos flawlessly right after starting the video on even a base 1.25 GHz configuration, as required by the TenFourFox MP4 Enabler.

As before, the new builds are available @ Macintosh Garden.

AquaWeb / AquaVid - Macintosh Garden

AquaWeb and AquaVid are heavily modified foxboxes designed to bring maximum browsing speeds and efficiency to OS X Tiger / Leopard.

macintoshgarden.org

 

[z970]

Good work; I haven't had a chance to try AquaVid yet, but AquaWeb works really well! Any chance you would be willing to share the prefs file you concocted?

It's available in the package contents. As mentioned above, it's all built-in.

I originally wanted to offer the prefs file as an optional add-in to TenFourFox, but getting the browser to acknowledge its validity (tried via multiple methods) was a nightmare. Ultimately, it's probably going to come down to manually translating everything to a user edit in about:config, but I just wanted to get this out at that point. However, it may be a future endeavor, potentially not even by me.

On AquaVid; at one point, my DC G5 was even comfortably streaming 1080p...though your mileage may vary...

 

[z970]

Public Service Announcement:

The Ultimate FF45 Prefs have been adjusted to fix an issue with image rendering on sites like eBay.

 

[z970]

Here's the working version of the PowerUOC patch, optimized for TenFourFox / Arctic Fox.

In my tests, it renders websites faster than UOC N2H (usually by several seconds), with the help of additional / modified parameters.

Have a go.

 

[z970]

@looking4awayout That seems to have done it.

 

[z970]

The prior-linked PowerUOC prefs have been updated to v4.

- Added a handful of beneficial media parameters relating to security / speed.

 

[z970]

AquaWebVid has been updated to version 1.8.1.

AquaVid has been reverted to youtube.com, due to the recent YouTube API change breaking all frontends. (R.I.P. key-less Tonvid.)

And thanks to the newest foxPEP framework, performance gains have been made in most all fronts.

Great browsers for sub-1 GHz Macs. Give them a try.

 

[z970]

Come to think of it, I think the easiest way to stream audio on a G3 machine would probably be to just use PPC Media Center 7.

Have a fast browser set to load YouTube at startup (like AquaVid or Camino), copy the URL of the video you want to stream, launch PPCMC, then choose what you want it to do. It can use QuickTime Player to stream video and audio in whatever quality you want. It can download videos, or just the audio file. It can convert and transcode things.

Rumor has it that it may or may not pay your HOA fees as well.

Compliments to @alex_free for such a great application, by the way...

 

[corneydj]

My internet connection is plenty fast - like I said before I can get videos to stream when initiated through PPCMC but not through AquaVid. And they download to completion fairly quick. Everything I’m using is up to date as well & I’ve tried this now on a 667 TiBook G4, a 600 iBook G3 & a 333 iBook G3 all of which are running 10.4.11. The last two aren’t really fast enough to play the videos at full frame rates, but they all three experience the exact same problem when attempting to play YouTube videos in QuickTime when initiated by AquaVid (but succeed when initiated through PPCMC)
[automerge]1599014195[/automerge]
Oh and I tried a bunch of different videos, here is one of them -

 

[z970]

I'd like to take a moment of appreciation here for just how seriously good these mini browsers are (and how great FoxBoxes are in general).

If you get into the right flow, using AquaWeb as opposed to full TenFourFox actually almost feels like driving a stick shift over an automatic, thanks to the increased usage of keyboard shortcuts and other manual workarounds for missing features like tabbed browsing (more detail in the new Usage Tips section at Macintosh Garden). To me, that's actually a lot more charming than the tired 'everything is a visible button' model.

There's only so much that foxPEP can do when the vanilla browser is far more bloated than it has any right to be considering its target market. So when you combine the vetted research of foxPEP with the ingenuity and raw power of TenFourFox's exhaustive CPU optimization without any bloat whatsoever, you get a far more desirable end result because of it. Case in point, from a performance standpoint, browsing the Internet via AquaWeb on a SP 1.25 MDD feels very similar to browsing the Internet on full TenFourFox on a DP 2.0 G5 - they're literally that close in page rendering time and element responsiveness.

But the way I see it, if you're going to take your vintage Corvette out to the modern highway, you may as well give it a fighting chance. Thankfully, the many ways of accomplishing this are in no shortage now!

 

[swamprock]

View attachment 950988

Speaking of Corvettes (to sway a tad off-topic), I like the boxy interior 1984-88 'vettes. They're cheap, and I've been wanting one since the 80s. Finding one in decent shape, though, is a challenge. Most are project cars these days...

 

[z970]

So, cool news. I did some experimenting around again, and I found that ultra small windows (480 x 320), while now stretching into novelty / gimmick territory due to their diminutive size, are regardless incredibly fast at loading pages, even on literally 20-year-old hardware.

So I figured that if said 20-year-old hardware can remarkably cruise around the modern Web mostly unhindered (think late G3s / early G4s), the trade off in viewing area is needless to say probably worth it in the end.

So, here's AquaWeb micro; packing several bug fixes, another snazzy new icon, and gimmicks performance to spare.

But that's not all, I also found out that TenFourFoxBoxes are one of the few applications to massively benefit from QuartzGL integration on 10.5.x systems, so now it comes with that built-in, too. So on top of having less pixel area to draw (thus placing less demand on the CPU), rendering performance has easily been doubled on compatible environments.

Give it a try!

AquaWeb / AquaVid - Macintosh Garden

AquaWeb and AquaVid are heavily modified foxboxes designed to bring maximum browsing speeds and efficiency to OS X Tiger / Leopard.

macintoshgarden.org

 

[sparty411]

Good work; I haven't had a chance to try AquaVid yet, but AquaWeb works really well! Any chance you would be willing to share the prefs file you concocted?

 

[sparty411]

On AquaVid; at one point, my DC G5 was even comfortably streaming 1080p...though your mileage may vary...

Based. That is impressive. I really love Tiger, and stuff like this makes it all that much more usable for me. I just wish it was possible to build a few newer GNU programs.. Anyway, would you mind testing my prefs file? I'm not quite done tweaking it yet, but I would like some input.

prefs.js

drive.google.com

 

[z970]

Why not try it and see? I haven't because I've done this before - hence switching to 3gp files on low end G4s and G3s.

I had a 3gp version going that used QuickTime to play video, but that was so consistently low quality you could count the individual pixels, and was prone to skipping. So I figured the quality-adjusting, setting-tweaking, video-buffering way would at least allow for finer control, and then AquaVid could at least be used for music / audio playback, which it does fine even on a G3 (that bodes well for the iMac / Power Mac G3's built-in speakers )

I don't know, I'm fine with the pause, tweak, play method. Doing all that puts slightly less demand on the CPU and allows the video to buffer at the same time, all the better if it's < 5 min.

If you all can find a way to make foxboxes effortlessly download 360p / 480p video, go for it. We've already got the ultimate prefs combination, a pretty icon, and altered branding, so we can release it as AquaVid 2.0 no problem. It can be another testament to the power of the community.

 

[Dronecatcher]

I had a 3gp version going that used QuickTime to play video, but that was so consistently low quality you could count the individual pixels, and was prone to skipping.

But with your method for G3 playback you have to drop down to 144P - lower than 3gp at 180P ?

Maybe it's a regional thing but buffering is a no go for me - I gave up waiting for a 4 minute clip to buffer, it got to about 40% - I clicked play and it was 85% CPU for a few seconds then back up to 92-100% with the fans blasting (Powerbook 1.33)
Since I started down this path around 3 years ago, I must've tried over 50 user agents - some worked effectively but the recent changes at Youtube have cancelled many out - and of course we've lost Safari, Omniweb and Camino as browsers that can work with Youtube. Tonvid still works but presents a delivery system that doesn't favour previously available options.
Because TFF only offers either HTML5 playback or 3gp passed to another application we're limited there too.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Hello everybody, I am Looking4awayout of L4Soft, the creator of the UOC Patch.

Thanks for highlighting some of the problems here - to avoid any confusion could you provide a link to the correct versions?
I tried this out when it was first referenced in the forum and the prefs file resulted is some bizarre behaviour for TenFourFox - I had to reinstall it to get things back to normal.

 

[Dronecatcher]

I would be glad if someone further optimizes it to run on PowerPC Macintoshes, as the Windows version works well enough to optimize old hardware.

Thanks. I did some benchmarking yesterday:

Low End Leopard Performance

Can you give examples of how you reach this conclusion - which sites perform better? I've done some benchmarks and the Ultimate prefs are slower than my own that are a modified version of the @eyoungren prefs? On latest TFF Powerbook 12" 1.33 Tiger (Time in seconds to load page - two sets)...

forums.macrumors.com

I'll install these prefs and compare.