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

[Jeroen Diederen]

@wicknix Thank you so much, AF 27.9.19 works well within MintPPC on my G4 PowerBook. Could you please publish the debian folder you created? I would like to learn from your experience.

The version for ppc64 also works well, thank you.

 

[Jeroen Diederen]

Please do:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

in both MintPPC for G3,G4 and G5
You will get a new version of Arctic Fox

Oops, should have been posted in the MintPPC thread.

 

[wicknix]

Here's my premade directory structure to repack AF archives as .deb. Just extract it anywhere, copy the uncompressed AF archive in to /arcticfox-27.9.19/usr/lib/, edit the /arcticfox-27.9.19/DEBIAN/control file if needed. Then just type: dpkg-deb --build arcticfox-27.9.19 to create the .deb. Now rename arcticfox-27.9.19.deb to arcticfox-27.9.19.linux-powerpc.deb and you're done.

Cheers

 

[verdantppc]

@wicknix et al.

Many thanks for all your continuing efforts with Arctic Fox for OS X Snow Leopard and Linux for powerpc (including helping Jeroen Diederen and hence MintPPC). We communicated first on the Palemoon forum when you first started your generous work to look after us OS X Snow Leopard users!

BTW has there been any progress on resolving Arctic Fox 27.9.19 repeatedly crashing on OS X 10.6.8 for some (many?) users including myself (still forced to use 27.9.18 unfortunately)..?

 

[wicknix]

Thanks. 27.9.19 on OSX is still an issue. It works without issue for some, others need to reset their profile prefs for it to work, and others it just crashes. It's being looked in to, but so far we can't pinpoint it, or why it only has issues on 10.6. It works flawlessly on my 10.7 install as well as Linux/*BSD/Win32.

Cheers

 

[z970]

@wicknix This might be a stretch, but you don't think it could have anything to do with 32-bit and 64-bit installs of Snow Leopard, do you? That's the only thing that really comes to mind about what could differ between experiences (and machines) with the same browser and OS version.

 

[RobJos]

@wicknix This might be a stretch, but you don't think it could have anything to do with 32-bit and 64-bit installs of Snow Leopard, do you? That's the only thing that really comes to mind about what could differ between experiences (and machines) with the same browser and OS version.

In which case it would be 64-bit (2x here)

 

[wicknix]

No, probably not. We have separate 32/64bit versions built, but it also was never an issue until this last release. I personally use the 32bit version on my 64bit snow leopard because it can load and use all those older plugins that are 32bit only, which the 64bit version can't use.

 

[wicknix]

Not powerpc or snow leopard related, but i fired up my old asus eeepc 900a to test out AF 27.9.19 on winxp. Runs like a champ.

Cheers

 

[RobJos]

Something related to Privacy, not to the difficulties with v.19. I discovered a bit by accident that the addon RefControl 0.8.17.1 wasn't doing what it was supposed to. The way to "Disable referer" I got here, and it works. So far no apparent issues, except possibly a few sites reacting a bit slower. Any comments?

While on that site, I came across the good Mitch Bartlett's 8 About:config Tricks You’re Missing Out On in Firefox. I've been wondering if point 3., Lessen the Session History Cache in particular could be useful. @wicknix?

Digging a but further I also discovered about:memory (to be entered in the URL bar, apparently no danger). Sometimes towards the end of a day's work, with a whole bunch of tabs making it unconvenient to quit and relaunch AF, it feels like it could be useful to "Minimise memory usage". I haven't tried it yet. @wicknix: are there any risks (or is there a point) in doing so? And, just to confirm, it's only for the current session, not a permanent setting, correct?

 

[dbdjre0143]

Not powerpc or snow leopard related, but i fired up my old asus eeepc 900a to test out AF 27.9.19 on winxp. Runs like a champ.

@wicknix Out of curiousity, do you know if it would be possible to build a version that would work with Windows 98 and KernelEx? I tried the XP version and it would not launch (can't remember the error that was reported atm). Currently the browser state on 98 is pretty rough, with a version of K-Meleon being the most up to date, but (in my experience at least) unstable to the point of being unusable, so having AF available on that platform would be amazing!

 

[z970]

Something related to Privacy, not to the difficulties with v.19. I discovered a bit by accident that the addon RefControl 0.8.17.1 wasn't doing what it was supposed to. The way to "Disable referer" I got here, and it works. So far no apparent issues, except possibly a few sites reacting a bit slower. Any comments?

The current development version of PowerUOC used to have a referrer disabler built-in for that specific purpose of enhanced user privacy. Unfortunately, it ended up being removed because I eventually traced an issue where most search engine images would fail to load after entering a criteria back to it. I'm sure there were a bunch of additional problems I didn't see while testing.

On DuckDuckGo, try searching something like "powerpc 970" or "powerpc 7400" (really, anything you haven't searched for before) and then load the images tab. Is this issue still present when an addon is enforcing it?

While on that site, I came across the good Mitch Bartlett's 8 About:config Tricks You’re Missing Out On in Firefox. I've been wondering if point 3., Lessen the Session History Cache in particular could be useful.

I know you didn't ask me, but PowerUOC already includes that OOB. Set to 0.

 

[RobJos]

The current development version of PowerUOC used to have a referrer disabler built-in for that specific purpose of enhanced user privacy. Unfortunately, it ended up being removed because I eventually traced an issue where most search engine images would fail to load after entering a criteria back to it. I'm sure there were a bunch of additional problems I didn't see while testing.

Not sure what PowerUOC is, seems like a browser too, but I was refering to ArcticFox.

On DuckDuckGo, try searching something like "powerpc 970" or "powerpc 7400" (really, anything you haven't searched for before) and then load the images tab. Is this issue still present when an addon is enforcing it?

I tried that, and got hundreds of pictures of, yes, a bunch of neat antique Macs that I hadn't seen since mine got evicted. But I don't quite understand what issue you're asking about: I now have the RefControl addon disabled and the “network.http.sendRefererHeader” set to 0.

 

[z970]

Not sure what PowerUOC is, seems like a browser too, but I was refering to ArcticFox.

It's a downloadable parameters patch, available for most Firefox-based browsers, like Arctic Fox. It makes browsing faster.

Its thread is stickied to the top of the forum.

I tried that, and got hundreds of pictures of, yes, a bunch of neat antique Macs that I hadn't seen since mine got evicted. But I don't quite understand what issue you're asking about: I now have the RefControl addon disabled and the “network.http.sendRefererHeader” set to 0.

I just wanted to see if your addon would get the same problem I had when referrals are disabled. Maybe it only raises issues on the FF45 codebase...

I meant that PowerUOC automatically sets "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers" to 0... not that you needed to go in and change something.

Also, "Minimize memory usage" seems to be a sort of session-specific purger of RAM usage, with no risks present the last several times I've tried it.

But I digress. You were in the middle of a conversation...

 

[wicknix]

@dbdjre0143 : My guess would be it crashed due to sse2. Give this build of palemoon a try. Roy imports AF patches in to it, so it's very similar. If these dont work, then i don't know what will. 98 is pretty archaic.

http://o.rths.ml/gpc/files1.rt/K-Meleon1.5.4en-US.tls12.7z

https://github.com/rn10950/RetroZilla/releases/download/2.2/retrozilla-2.2.en-US.win32.installer.exe

https://o.rths.ml/palemoon/palemoon-27.9.7.win32-git-20200104-fa517dfc6-xpmod-ia32.7z

@RobJos : I don't really mess around in about:config or about:memory. There's way to many settings to know what they all do. If you find some info on the web that's useful for your use, great. We pretty much left pale moons already modified config pretty much stock with a minor tweak here and there.

Cheers

 

[RobJos]

It's a downloadable parameters patch, available for most Firefox-based browsers, like Arctic Fox. It makes browsing faster.

Its thread is stickied to the top of the forum.



I just wanted to see if your addon would get the same problem I had when referrals are disabled. Maybe it only raises issues on the FF45 codebase...

I meant that PowerUOC automatically sets "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers" to 0... not that you needed to go in and change something.

Also, "Minimize memory usage" seems to be a sort of session-specific purger of RAM usage, with no risks present the last several times I've tried it.

But I digress. You were in the middle of a conversation...

Not a problem, forums are made for just that: cross-conversations. Thanks for all the information. However… “Its [PowerUOC] thread is stickied to the top of the forum.”, you wrote — I may be blind, but where's that?
[automerge]1578564985[/automerge]

@RobJos : I don't really mess around in about:config or about:memory. There's way to many settings to know what they all do. If you find some info on the web that's useful for your use, great. We pretty much left pale moons already modified config pretty much stock with a minor tweak here and there.

Thanks, wicknix, puts things into a perspective. Tweaks or no tweaks, I should maybe state once again that AF is my main browser and that I'm quite happy with the way it is running.

[Added 12.01.2020]
- about:config — referrer disabled (=0) mucked up one particular site (admittedly a quirky one to begin with) that I use regularly. So for now I'll try setting it to =1
- about:memory — as far as I could judge from the Activity Monitor, “Minimize memory usage” did strictly nothing, whereas quitting and relaunching AF, only a few seconds more, immediataly reduced memory usage by two-thirds.

[Update 16.01.2020]
Neat little addon, allows for changing referer on the fly: Change Referer Button 0.5.

 

[z970]

However… “Its [PowerUOC] thread is stickied to the top of the forum.”, you wrote — I may be blind, but where's that?

foxPEP and TenFourFoxPEP - For A Faster Firefox / TenFourFox

The Firefox Partitioned Engine Patch, officially abbreviated as foxPEP, is a finely tuned all-in-one preferences patch designed exclusively for Firefox-based browsers that automatically applies a number of advanced under-the-hood configurations to achieve a superior Web browsing experience on...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[RobJos]

foxPEP and TenFourFoxPEP - For A Faster Firefox / TenFourFox

The Firefox Partitioned Engine Patch, officially abbreviated as foxPEP, is a finely tuned all-in-one preferences patch designed exclusively for Firefox-based browsers that automatically applies a number of advanced under-the-hood configurations to achieve a superior Web browsing experience on...

forums.macrumors.com

Thx, will take a look!

12.01.2020, @z970mp. I have now given your PowerUOC prefs.js a try, briefly, replacing the file (after following your instructions) inside my current profile.

On the positive side: the Title Bar showed up right away, meaning that the problem described here, pt. 1 and here, pt. 1 was gone. And a couple of sites that had rendering problems also loaded properly.

Speed: neutral. Yes, loading pages seemed a bit faster, but on my machine it's not like I've got any complaints about AF's speed (the difference between 50µs and 100µs, or whatever.)

On the negative side… : it made a huge mess of the current setup, even treating several addons as first-time installs. It would take hours, if not days, to restore everything from scrap — at least as much time as when I first moved from Firefox to AF. My current prefs.js is 1460+ lines long, yours 360+. I don't understand what most of them actually mean, so even editing the entries manually on the basis of your file doesn't seem realistic.

That's why I said briefly. But all in all I probably would recommend your PowerUOC project to someone making a fresh start with AF.

 

[RobJos]

Checking back on a login site that used not to react in AF (but works fine in current versions of Opera and Firefox): now it gives a blank page of sorts that says "Cannot POST / login". Sounds a bit familiar, but what is it? POST vs. GET — some setting in AF's prefs?

 

[wicknix]

It probably has to do with Riccardo slowly updating the JS backend. It will never be FF52.9 or better in that aspect, but there are a few things he's adding that can help out a little bit here and there. For example, look at https://userstyles.org/ in a 52.9 or better (pale moon 28, FF 52.9+, etc) and it shows fine. It doesn't show anything in AF or PM27 or FF48. All the browsers based on at least 52.9esr or better all support full ECMAscript 6 and 7. AF is only partial 6, and no 7 at all. So, you basically found a site that shows some of his JS patching is indeed working, but again, AF will never work with sites requiring Async, Await, etc found in newer browsers JS backends. If said site has a mobile version, it will probably work flawlessly in AF, but other than that, said site will probably never work in AF.

Cheers

 

[RobJos]

It probably has to do with Riccardo slowly updating the JS backend. It will never be FF52.9 or better in that aspect, but there are a few things he's adding that can help out a little bit here and there. For example, look at https://userstyles.org/ in a 52.9 or better (pale moon 28, FF 52.9+, etc) and it shows fine. It doesn't show anything in AF or PM27 or FF48. All the browsers based on at least 52.9esr or better all support full ECMAscript 6 and 7. AF is only partial 6, and no 7 at all. So, you basically found a site that shows some of his JS patching is indeed working, but again, AF will never work with sites requiring Async, Await, etc found in newer browsers JS backends. If said site has a mobile version, it will probably work flawlessly in AF, but other than that, said site will probably never work in AF.

Excellent, thanks! I think I'm getting the idea. Your reply is very useful, for the future: a. if it's not a site's “fault” (as I used to think up to now), I'll stop trying to see if its programmers have improved anything; and b. in such cases I'll look for the site's mobile version, if any — which is I suppose is why a while back you had recommended using a mobile UA, but I hadn't understood the rationale at the time (correct me if I'm wrong.)

[Later] No luck with that particular site using the [Arcticfox/27.9.17 (X11; Linux ppc64; Mobile)/Mozilla/Netscape/5.0 (Macintosh)/] UA, nor one of User Agent Switcher's defaults [iPhone OS 10.2.1/Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.4.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14D27 Safari/602.1/Version/10.0 Mobile/14D27]. If they have a specific mobile interface besides their own app from Apple or Google I wouldn't know how to call it.

 

[z970]

Is anyone aware of any x86 .debs of Arctic Fox without SSE2?

In Debian 10, every time I try to build AF .19, I get:

0:20.54 checking whether the C compiler (gcc-6.5.0 ) works
0:20.54 configure:3301: gcc-6.5.0 -o conftest conftest.c 1>&5
0:20.54 /home/noah/Arctic-Fox-master-good/configure: 1: eval: gcc-6.5.0: not found
0:20.54 configure: failed program was:
0:20.54
0:20.55 #line 3296 "configure"
0:20.55 #include "confdefs.h"
0:20.55
0:20.55 main(){return(0);}
0:20.55 configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C compiler cannot create executables.
0:20.55 *** Fix above errors and then restart with\
0:20.55 "/usr/bin/make -f client.mk build"
0:20.55 make[2]: *** [/home/noah/Arctic-Fox-master-good/client.mk:364: configure] Error 1
0:20.56 make[1]: *** [/home/noah/Arctic-Fox-master-good/client.mk:376: /home/noah/Arctic-Fox-master-good/obj-i686-pc-linux-gnu/Makefile] Error 2
0:20.56 make: *** [client.mk:171: build] Error 2
0:20.57 0 compiler warnings present.
0:20.60 Failed to parse ccache stats output: cache hit rate 0.00 %

And here's the .mozconfig:

# This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
# License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
# file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.

export CC="gcc-6.5.0"
export CXX="g++-6.5.0"

mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-s -j2"

ac_add_options --disable-crashreporter
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-updater
ac_add_options --disable-mozril-geoloc
ac_add_options --disable-webrtc
ac_add_options --disable-safe-browsing
ac_add_options --disable-parental-controls
ac_add_options --enable-release
ac_add_options --disable-necko-wifi
ac_add_options --disable-eme
ac_add_options --disable-gamepad
ac_add_options --disable-dbus
ac_add_options --disable-gio
ac_add_options --disable-pulseaudio
ac_add_options --enable-strip
ac_add_options --enable-install-strip
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --with-branding=browser/branding/arcticfox
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O2 -march=pentium-m"

GCC 6.5.0-1 is installed, and ./mach build is done as root.

 

[sparty411]

Is anyone aware of any x86 .debs of Arctic Fox without SSE2?

In Debian 10, every time I try to build AF .19, I get:

0:20.54 checking whether the C compiler (gcc-6.5.0 ) works
0:20.54 configure:3301: gcc-6.5.0 -o conftest conftest.c 1>&5
0:20.54 /home/noah/Arctic-Fox-master-good/configure: 1: eval: gcc-6.5.0: not found
0:20.54 configure: failed program was:
0:20.54
0:20.55 #line 3296 "configure"
0:20.55 #include "confdefs.h"
0:20.55
0:20.55 main(){return(0);}
0:20.55 configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C compiler cannot create executables.
0:20.55 *** Fix above errors and then restart with\
0:20.55 "/usr/bin/make -f client.mk build"
0:20.55 make[2]: *** [/home/noah/Arctic-Fox-master-good/client.mk:364: configure] Error 1
0:20.56 make[1]: *** [/home/noah/Arctic-Fox-master-good/client.mk:376: /home/noah/Arctic-Fox-master-good/obj-i686-pc-linux-gnu/Makefile] Error 2
0:20.56 make: *** [client.mk:171: build] Error 2
0:20.57 0 compiler warnings present.
0:20.60 Failed to parse ccache stats output: cache hit rate 0.00 %

And here's the .mozconfig:

# This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
# License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
# file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.

export CC="gcc-6.5.0"
export CXX="g++-6.5.0"

mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-s -j2"

ac_add_options --disable-crashreporter
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-updater
ac_add_options --disable-mozril-geoloc
ac_add_options --disable-webrtc
ac_add_options --disable-safe-browsing
ac_add_options --disable-parental-controls
ac_add_options --enable-release
ac_add_options --disable-necko-wifi
ac_add_options --disable-eme
ac_add_options --disable-gamepad
ac_add_options --disable-dbus
ac_add_options --disable-gio
ac_add_options --disable-pulseaudio
ac_add_options --enable-strip
ac_add_options --enable-install-strip
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --with-branding=browser/branding/arcticfox
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O2 -march=pentium-m"

GCC 6.5.0-1 is installed, and ./mach build is done as root.

I've done succesful arctic fox builds for SSE only processors, but it crashed often. I've had better luck just cloning the UXP github repo, and building Palemoon or Basilisk. I think I have a few builds from back in the summer, if you'd like me to share them. They worked fine for me on my Pentium 3's, and Athlon XP's.

By the way, you're using the wrong compiler options if you want to build without SSE2. You need to specify -mno-sse2 and -march=i686 , and remove the pentium-m bit. It should look like this:

export CC="gcc-6.5.0"
export CXX="g++-6.5.0"


mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-s -j2"



ac_add_options --disable-crashreporter

ac_add_options --disable-tests

ac_add_options --disable-debug

ac_add_options --disable-updater

ac_add_options --disable-mozril-geoloc

ac_add_options --disable-webrtc

ac_add_options --disable-safe-browsing

ac_add_options --disable-parental-controls

ac_add_options --enable-release

ac_add_options --disable-necko-wifi

ac_add_options --disable-eme

ac_add_options --disable-gamepad

ac_add_options --disable-dbus

ac_add_options --disable-gio

ac_add_options --disable-pulseaudio

ac_add_options --enable-strip

ac_add_options --enable-install-strip

ac_add_options --enable-application=browser

ac_add_options --with-branding=browser/branding/arcticfox

ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O3 -march=i686 -mno-sse2"

 

[sparty411]

Here is a link to the google drive folder containing my no SSE2 builds of Palemoon, and Basilisk.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mwThnEfhDkR12k1JAoUG9XtfMsfJvhUF

 

[z970]

@sparty411 Thanks for the help, buddy.