Arctic Fox web browser for 10.6 (32 & 64-bit)

[XaPHER]

I've completed my (re)build. Here's a download link for an xz archive (~29MB) containing the executable and runtime dependencies for wicknix's ArcticFox rebrand of palemoon 27.9 on 32-bit powerpc linux:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12gGODehPn-TFQG0YTqg_Kho3pr1xyu1J/view

I can't predict what system config will work and what won't. That said, you should have gtk+2 libraries installed as a strict minimum from your package manager(AFAIK gtk+3 won't do). Debian still has a powerpc libgtk2 (2.24) package in jessie repo. This is built on a gentoo system. Keep the decompressed directory as-is. You'll need a G4 because of the compiler options.

NOTE: If it starts up, but then crashes while loading the home page, you should specify a page to load when starting it up

 ./arcticfox https://wwwhatever.your.page.is

then change the home page in preferences. The default home page is the only url that gave this result. You may also want to disallow sites to use their own fonts because non-latin scripts seem to render incorrectly otherwise. Those are the two only quirks I've seen so far.

 

[MacSoftware3]

Thanks for doing this, great for those people still on Snow Leopard (which I completely understand, it's an amazing OS). Is there any possibility to get this browser to run on 10.5.8 (Intel and/or PPC)?

 

[wicknix]

I would love to see it running on 10.4/10.5 PPC and x86 32bit 10.6. I've uploaded the source if anyone wants to take a stab at it. I just don't have the time. Between working on this for 10.6 (and XaPHER getting it to build and run on ppc linux), while focusing most my time on PM28 for mac, working full time, and keeping my wife happy, i'm tapped.

Cheers

 

[wicknix]

Uploaded another updated build. This will be my last update for at least a month while i focus on my other projects.

- Fixed the 2 about:home tabs opening at launch.
- Enabled the updater (work in progress for future updates)
- Added some more branding updates that i missed.
- Replaced default help -> feedback url to point to this thread rather than pm's forum.
- about: release notes now points to arctic fox's download url with the readme (changelog) instead of pm's release notes.
- Adjusted a few more default about:config preferences.

Cheers

 

[MacSoftware3]

I would love to see it running on 10.4/10.5 PPC and x86 32bit 10.6. I've uploaded the source if anyone wants to take a stab at it. I just don't have the time. Between working on this for 10.6 (and XaPHER getting it to build and run on ppc linux), while focusing most my time on PM28 for mac, working full time, and keeping my wife happy, i'm tapped.

Cheers

I would love to try, but I haven't got a lot of experience with building applications. I I want to try to get this running on 10.5, do I need to build it on 10.5 itself?

 

[swamprock]

I've completed my (re)build. Here's a download link for an xz archive (~29MB) containing the executable and runtime dependencies for wicknix's ArcticFox rebrand of palemoon 27.9 on 32-bit powerpc linux:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12gGODehPn-TFQG0YTqg_Kho3pr1xyu1J/view

I can't predict what system config will work and what won't. That said, you should have gtk+2 libraries installed as a strict minimum from your package manager(AFAIK gtk+3 won't do). Debian still has a powerpc libgtk2 (2.24) package in jessie repo. This is built on a gentoo system. Keep the decompressed directory as-is. You'll need a G4 because of the compiler options.

NOTE: If it starts up, but then crashes while loading the home page, you should specify a page to load when starting it up

 ./arcticfox https://wwwhatever.your.page.is

then change the home page in preferences. The default home page is the only url that gave this result. You may also want to disallow sites to use their own fonts because non-latin scripts seem to render incorrectly otherwise. Those are the two only quirks I've seen so far.

Thanks. I've gotten used to digging into oldstable repos to find library packages, that sid is missing, to build certain packages. I'll most likely unbox my iBook and give it a whirl tomorrow, since there's a minor delay in my relocation plans that came up...

EDIT: @XaPHER Gave it a try tonight. Works great right out of the box in sid. I need to play around a bit to see if there are any issues but I haven't come across anything bad so far. Fired up without crashing on the home page at all. YouTube actually streams videos in 360p without the blue hue issue that the other, older browsers have. All of the plugins that @wicknix archived also seem to work fine. I'll explore some more and report my findings, then perhaps we can discuss sharing the archive with others testing sid on PPC32 (such as the Debian Ports list)...? I'll leave that up to you and @wicknix , barring any issues that I may find in my testing.

Thanks for the archive!

Screenshots:

The "blue hue" in the screenshot below is from the lighting in the video and not any browser issue. In older browsers, it's much more pronounced, and definitely an endian issue with those browsers that (upon pondering it) I could probably have fixed if I could find the color bit order within the older browsers' code... maybe?

Testing archive.org's reader, which works perfectly:

So... one issue I ran across was the blue hue issue in some pictures. Here's a comparison of a page with the issue in Arctic Fox on my iBook G4 with the same page in Firefox on my Mac Pro. The picture on the far left stays static, while the text and images on the right scroll. The images within the article itself are of the correct color, with a couple of exceptions that I theorize is due to the way that they've been resized. I'm probably wrong and need to test this theory more throughly:

I haven't come across this issue on any other page as of yet.

Bookmarks within folders also do not show up in the bookmarks pull-down, the bookmarks toolbar, or the menu. IIRC, an old version of Iceweasel under Wheezy exhibited the same issue. Not a big deal, though.

 

[XaPHER]

@swamprock Really nice to learn it works without any major problem. For the arcade blog you mentioned, it seems like the WEBP implementation is at fault (if you compare these two screenshots in title bar):



Lucky WEBP isn't that much popular... Well not enough for me to notice before now

The bookmark subfolders seem to behave erratically here too. Not sure what's going on.

Hey, could you upload a screenshot of the video pane in preferences>content? Just to see if you have different available MSE options than me. Thanks!

 

[swamprock]

@swamprock Really nice to learn it works without any major problem. For the arcade blog you mentioned, it seems like the WEBP implementation is at fault (if you compare these two screenshots in title bar):

View attachment 793149 View attachment 793150

Lucky WEBP isn't that much popular... Well not enough for me to notice before now

The bookmark subfolders seem to behave erratically here too. Not sure what's going on.

Hey, could you upload a screenshot of the video pane in preferences>content? Just to see if you have different available MSE options than me. Thanks!

Sure will. Give me a few hours and watch this space...

EDIT: Here you go:

No MSE for webm.

There are a few other sites where I noticed the hue issue in sporadic images, such as arcadeheroes.com. I'm not up on current web standards, so I'm glad someone knows what they're talking about. The older browsers that I have on my iBook (Midori, Qupzilla, luakit) don't have that issue in images (but have it in streaming video), just so you're aware...

 

[XaPHER]

Sure will. Give me a few hours and watch this space...

There are a few other sites where I noticed the hue issue in sporadic images, such as arcadeheroes.com. I'm not up on current web standards, so I'm glad someone knows what they're talking about. The older browsers that I have on my iBook (Midori, Qupzilla, luakit) don't have that issue in images (but have it in streaming video), just so you're aware...

I can't say I'm any better at web standards, it's just that lately I've spent so many hours on building mozilla forks that I can't really help but become more aware of the internals.

Thinking about it a little bit, since WEBP support is not universal, nearly all sites should be able to replace it with a jpeg equivalent. So I just altered the image-accept part of the http header in about:config (pref name image.http.accept) from

image/webp,image/jxr,image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5

to

image/jxr,image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5

and arcadeblogger.com no longer serves WEBP. Should be the same for any "reasonable" server.

Probably the best 'immediate' way to solve this.

 

[swamprock]

I can't say I'm any better at web standards, it's just that lately I've spent so many hours on building mozilla forks that I can't really help but become more aware of the internals.

Thinking about it a little bit, since WEBP support is not universal, nearly all sites should be able to replace it with a jpeg equivalent. So I just altered the image-accept part of the http header in about:config (pref name image.http.accept) from

image/webp,image/jxr,image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5

to

image/jxr,image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5

and arcadeblogger.com no longer serves WEBP. Should be the same for any "reasonable" server.

View attachment 793230

Probably the best 'immediate' way to solve this.

Yep, that fixed it. Thanks.

I posted the screenshot you requested in the post above.

 

[wicknix]

Cool. I'll hardcode that into the next release so it won't have to be manually set.

Cheers

 

[XaPHER]

@swamprock thanks for the screenshot. Sadly there's nothing new. that was to expect.

Cool. I'll hardcode that into the next release so it won't have to be manually set.

I think you shouldn't. It works perferctly on snow leopard (because, x86-64 or x86) and allows better image compression. For now I'll check if linking against system libraries instead of building its own changes anything. If it's not possible to get it to work at all, deciding the pref at compile-time would be preferable.

By the way, do you plan on uploading the code to github?

 

[wicknix]

Sounds good. I'll leave it for now then. Yeah eventually I'll toss up a repo. Problem is if I fork pm27 on github I have to remember EVERY file I've modified or added and upload them to the fork. I'd like to find somewhere that I could just upload my current archive and decompress it there. Know of any such place offhand?

Cheers

 

[XaPHER]

Don't fork it. Forking it is mainly useful for pull requests and pulling, but since palemoon 27 has gone read-only, it's not so relevant anymore. Create a new empty repo (Arctic-Fox) and then git push your local tree to it. You still have the whole commit history on your tree, right? I can't check myself right now.

 

[wicknix]

@MacSoftware3 : In theory yes, you'd need to build on 10.5, or maybe cross compile it on 10.7 would be easier. Currently it wont build on mac with anything lower than 10.7. I'm building this on 10.7 with the 10.7sdk. The 10.6 and lower sdk's are missing too many frameworks it requires to build. However i'm sure it's possible with some tweaks as the TFF guys are doing it, but that's just too far out of my realm of knowledge. *IF* you have an Intel 10.5 machine, you could try the old firefox trick and edit the info.plist inside the arcticfox.app and lower the minimum version string to 10.5. I'd be curious if that would work with this.

@XaPHER : Right on. I'll look in to that. I'm not very well versed with command line git. Typically i just use the github website when i need to make PR's on a project.

Cheers

 

[wicknix]

Ok, so i lied. THIS will be my last update for awhile. Future releases will just be security and bug fixes.
I strongly urge anybody using older versions to update to this one.
Here's whats new in 27.9.11:

- Finalized rebranding, but left PM's add-ons tab untouched since we will be
using those add-ons and themes with Arctic Fox.
- Arctic Fox now uses it's own profile and directory now. It no longer uses
or shares it with PM. You can now run both at the same time if you wish.
On Mac the profile is now located in ~/Library/Application Support/Arctic Fox/
This means you WILL have to reinstall your add-ons and themes, and import your bookmarks
from a backup if you've installed a previous version of Arctic Fox. You'll only have to
do this once. All future releases will leave those intact.
- appName fixed to report Arctic Fox instead of PM.
- Added Arctic Fox github page in bookmarks.
- Fresh new icon for Mac users. My old one was too hard to see on transparent docks.

For anybody that wants to help out with this project, or just build it themselves for win7+, Mac 10.6+, or Linux/BSD etc, the source repository is located here: https://github.com/wicknix/Arctic-Fox

Cheers

 

[swamprock]

My compilation attempt on linux PPC32 barfs with an error:

configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C compiler cannot create executables.

I'm sure it's probably something really simple, but this is yet another different way of compiling something on linux for me, of the millions of ways to build an app on linux...

 

[XaPHER]

@swamprock what's in your .mozconfig?

and what does calling gcc -v say?

also, you should make sure you have libgtk2-dev(I don't know if this is the exact package name) installed via apt-get; if you don't disable things like dbus, pulseaudio and necko-wifi like I did in my mozconfig, you'll have to install their -dev equivalent too. IMO you probably don't want them, but well.

@wicknix you can compile the browser on 10.6 as long as you have the 10.7 SDK installed and use it with a newer compiler. I did so and succeeded with clang4.0 and pm28, but couldn't test the browser since of course my host OS was 10.6. I haven't tried but with a 27.x milestone source, you could build the same way and use it on 10.6. There are various github repos that have the 10.7 SDK.

 

[wicknix]

@XaPHER Interesting and good to know. I'm just building on 10.7 with 10.7sdk. Was easier just to have one build machine just for AF/PM27 and PM28. The 10.7sdk makes it possible to build for 10.6-10.14 without any compatability issues. I do have a 10.8 build machine I use sometimes to, which also uses 10.7sdk.

Cheers

 

[MacSoftware3]

@MacSoftware3 : In theory yes, you'd need to build on 10.5, or maybe cross compile it on 10.7 would be easier. Currently it wont build on mac with anything lower than 10.7. I'm building this on 10.7 with the 10.7sdk. The 10.6 and lower sdk's are missing too many frameworks it requires to build. However i'm sure it's possible with some tweaks as the TFF guys are doing it, but that's just too far out of my realm of knowledge. *IF* you have an Intel 10.5 machine, you could try the old firefox trick and edit the info.plist inside the arcticfox.app and lower the minimum version string to 10.5. I'd be curious if that would work with this.

@XaPHER : Right on. I'll look in to that. I'm not very well versed with command line git. Typically i just use the github website when i need to make PR's on a project.

Cheers

Thanks for the reply. I will try the Firefox trick as soon as I have some time to do it. Of course I will post the result. Does the 10.7 SDK support building applications for 10.5.x?

 

[swamprock]

@swamprock what's in your .mozconfig?

and what does calling gcc -v say?

also, you should make sure you have libgtk2-dev(I don't know if this is the exact package name) installed via apt-get; if you don't disable things like dbus, pulseaudio and necko-wifi like I did in my mozconfig, you'll have to install their -dev equivalent too. IMO you probably don't want them, but well.

gcc version 8.2.0 (Debian 8.2.0-7)

I removed 8.2.0 and installed gcc-6, but now it can't find gcc. *shrug* All other deps are installed.

I used the same mozconfig that you posted earlier.

 

[XaPHER]

gcc version 8.2.0 (Debian 8.2.0-7)

I removed 8.2.0 and installed gcc-6, but now it can't find gcc. *shrug* All other deps are installed.

I used the same mozconfig that you posted earlier.

Did aptitude say 8.2.0 and 6 were conflicting? You can keep both compilers if it doesn't.

That reminds me, debian distributes the c and c++ compilers in seperate packages; install g++-6 if you don't already have it.

Okay, so do a

ls /usr/bin/*gcc*

and look for something like gcc-6 or gcc-6.x.x and (in the .mozconfig) replace gcc-6.4.0 in the export CC= line with it, keeping the syntax as-is.Do the same for g++ in CXX=.

There are even more dependencies in fact:

apt-get libxt-dev libsqlite3-dev autoconf2.13 zip libbz2-dev libegl1-mesa-dev zlib1g-dev libasound2-dev libssl-dev

If you use my mozconfig it should be okay like this.

In terms of open-source projects, Mozilla and therefore palemoon are something relatively heavy to tackle and if you run into errors during the build I'm not sure how I can help, especially since I don't use debian and haven't for 3 years. Though I'm willing if I can.

http://developer.palemoon.org/Developer_Guide:Build_Instructions/Pale_Moon/Linux the build page for linux from palemoon has essential info on building, but it's not specific and doesn't satisfy every context.

 

[swamprock]

Okay, so do a

ls /usr/bin/*gcc*

and look for something like gcc-6 or gcc-6.x.x and (in the .mozconfig) replace gcc-6.4.0 in the export CC= line with it, keeping the syntax as-is.Do the same for g++ in CXX=.

I just changed the 6.4.0 to just 'gcc-6' and 'g++-6' and it's been grinding away for a few hours now. I knew it had to be something simple, but the beauty of linux is constantly learning something new.

I'll sleep while it builds and we'll see if it's successful in the morning. Thanks for the help.

EDIT: Stopped with:

/usr/bin/make[6]: Making `all' in `layoutex'
make[7]: Entering directory '/home/brian/Arctic-Fox/obj-ff-dbg/intl/icu/target/layoutex'.  Stop.
*** No rule to make target 'ParagraphLayout.o', needed by '../lib/libiculx.a'

There's nothing in the directory 'layoutex' except for a makefile. Could this be the problem?

 

[XaPHER]

There's nothing in the directory 'layoutex' except for a makefile. Could this be the problem?

No, it's supposed to be like this. What command did you exactly call to start the build? Else than that.. what's your python 2.x and gnu make version?

as an extra safety, remove the -j2 in

mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-s -j2"

if you have it in your mozconfig

it's not useful for uniprocessor machines and pressures memory more.

 

[MacSoftware3]

I just tried building Pale Moon with the 10.5 & 10.6 SDK on OS X 10.11, but I got this error message:

configure: error: /usr/bin/clang++ -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk -fno-exceptions -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-rtti failed to compile and link a simple C++ source.

So it indeed doesn't work. I don't know how to fix it. If anyone does know, please let me know.