Thanks, I downloaded this but it's a .zip file and Aquafox sees it as corrupted (at least when I tried a few hours ago). Where can I find the .xpi file? I use Viewtube by Sebaro to watch Youtube it still works on other computers I use.
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Introducing Aquafox: A New Hope (TenFourFox fork)
- Thread starter thewireless
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The .xpi file is located inside the .zip file. However, I noticed that when extracting with BOMArchiveHelper, you end up with a bunch of separate files. I have attached the .xpi file to this reply; just remove the '.remove.extension.txt' part, and it will be ready to install.
Awesome! Thank you. Greasemonkey installed and Viewtube working so I can watch Youtube on a 2005 PowerBook. Super work here, very impressive.
Another option is Greasemonkey for Pale Moon, which is based on version 3.11 but appears to be slightly more up to date. I haven't looked into it too much myself, but I think it could be worth exploring. I plan to create a brief overview of recommended add-ons, but for that, I will need to know what kind of add-ons you all use and conduct some testing.
I'm happy to announce that Aquafox is now available on MacPorts!
ports.macports.org
Install aquafox on macOS with MacPorts
I'm new to the forum but a long time follower of TenFourFox. Great work on Aquafox, it's breathed new life back into my G4 Mac Mini👏🙂
I'm happy to announce that Aquafox is now available on MacPorts!
Install aquafox on macOS with MacPorts
[To everyone:] BTW, since we have no idea at the moment if everything works as expected on 10.4–10.5, please file bugs, if it does not. I tested the built on 10.6, with a caveat that all dependencies were already present. That worked fine and should be reproducible. Everything else is still unsure.
I've been using the browser for a few days and like it a lot. But if I understand correctly, the compatibility with newer webpages is not going to get better, we only get security patches, right? Also, is there any plan on releasing binaries compiled for x86? I have some first generation Intel Macs on which I like to run old Mac OS versions. It would be cool to be able to use Aquafox on them as well.
While I am definitely not against having Aquafox on i386, you may be better off with alternatives, since TFF, which Aquafox is based on, was developed specifically for ppc systems.
That is correct; for compatibility, we can only rely on userscripts. I do enjoy the idea of seeing Aquafox run on early Intel Macs, but it's certainly not a priority and is not planned for the time being—maybe in the future. (I also do not have any old Intel Macs.)
As for existing TenFourFox builds on Intel, some projects do exist, but keep in mind that they haven't been updated in a while.
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Just in case, I do have an i386 MacMini, so in principle can do testing or builds there, but not planning to fix anything or deal with development for i386.
I've been using Aquafox quite a bit on my Mac Mini (Powermac 10,1 512Mb Ram, Leopard 10.5.8), and it's working significantly better than any other browsers I'm using. It's quite a pleasure to use and news sites like BBC - usually quite media heavy, are loading pretty well 
Re @thewireless: "I'm happy to announce that Aquafox is now available on MacPorts"
... are there any performance differences between the "Mac-native" version and the MacPorts version? With a whole lot of underlying infrastructure being different between the two, perhaps performance is different?
I am always looking for further speed ups to keep AquaFox relevant for as long as possible - is this one of them?
... are there any performance differences between the "Mac-native" version and the MacPorts version? With a whole lot of underlying infrastructure being different between the two, perhaps performance is different?
I am always looking for further speed ups to keep AquaFox relevant for as long as possible - is this one of them?
Wait with MacPorts build, there are some issues with compiling it specifically on 10.5 at the moment. (10.6 ppc works but as I recall you are on 10.5.)
There should be no difference in performance between the version I build and the one you compile yourself using MacPorts. I typically use The Unofficial TenFourFox Development Toolkit to build Aquafox, which is based on MacPorts. One notable difference is that I enable Quartz 2D Extreme by default, while, to my knowledge, MacPorts does not.
As @barracuda156 pointed out, there is an issue with building Aquafox on Leopard using MacPorts, resulting in a build failure. I am currently investigating this.
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@thewireless Just a gentle reminder that while they are both the same technology, the Quartz "2D" Extreme terminology (the technology of which differs from "Quartz Extreme", further) applies to Tiger only, and the QuartzGL terminology is exclusive to Leopard. And both furthermore require Core Image-capable graphics cards in order to be properly utilized, otherwise at best case they will have no effect on performance, or at worst the system might try and emulate them in software (given that Leopard already emulates CI on incompatible GPUs). Granted I'm not 100% clear on that one, but certainly it won't yield the desired effect on less-capable systems.
At this point in time, I would probably also remove the contents of network.dns.localDomains by default. That preference is basically the browser's built-in hosts file, and it routes requests to the entered domains back to the localhost, from what I recall. I compiled that list from scratch by logging the most common ad / tracking networks actively being used by each of the top 100 most popular websites as of around mid 2020 back when the version of foxPEP it was introduced with was still in the R&D stage. Doing it this way instead of just using the more complete MVPS hosts file allowed one to benefit from most of the same performance improvements as the latter when accessing the current (at the time) web without delaying the DNS queries by making the browser parse through a gigantic file first, effectively using the best of both worlds.
Regardless, it's been over four years since then and I'm sure that the list is now out of date and needlessly adding slight latencies to DNS response times, and anyone browsing on a Sorbet install (and potentially Shuriken; I forget what it came with) already has those entries built into the system hosts file anyway, compounding query latency. Otherwise, most users should ideally be using addons like uMatrix for a more futureproof ad blocking solution overall.
All of that aside though, great initiative and stellar work on Aquafox. I gave it a brief try when I had one of the G4s out recently, and I don't recall anything based on TenFourFox in recent memory being so ridiculously performant straight out of the box on such constrained hardware (save perhaps for tweaked foxboxes). I remember speculating with other members years ago on what an all-in-one fully optimized TFF might look like after development ceased (which it inevitably did), and now it would appear that this project has become the ultimate culmination of all of our efforts to make web browsing on these systems a better experience for everyone.
Simply exquisite. Keep it up.
At this point in time, I would probably also remove the contents of network.dns.localDomains by default. That preference is basically the browser's built-in hosts file, and it routes requests to the entered domains back to the localhost, from what I recall. I compiled that list from scratch by logging the most common ad / tracking networks actively being used by each of the top 100 most popular websites as of around mid 2020 back when the version of foxPEP it was introduced with was still in the R&D stage. Doing it this way instead of just using the more complete MVPS hosts file allowed one to benefit from most of the same performance improvements as the latter when accessing the current (at the time) web without delaying the DNS queries by making the browser parse through a gigantic file first, effectively using the best of both worlds.
Regardless, it's been over four years since then and I'm sure that the list is now out of date and needlessly adding slight latencies to DNS response times, and anyone browsing on a Sorbet install (and potentially Shuriken; I forget what it came with) already has those entries built into the system hosts file anyway, compounding query latency. Otherwise, most users should ideally be using addons like uMatrix for a more futureproof ad blocking solution overall.
All of that aside though, great initiative and stellar work on Aquafox. I gave it a brief try when I had one of the G4s out recently, and I don't recall anything based on TenFourFox in recent memory being so ridiculously performant straight out of the box on such constrained hardware (save perhaps for tweaked foxboxes). I remember speculating with other members years ago on what an all-in-one fully optimized TFF might look like after development ceased (which it inevitably did), and now it would appear that this project has become the ultimate culmination of all of our efforts to make web browsing on these systems a better experience for everyone.
Simply exquisite. Keep it up.
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Thank you for your kind words! It appears the terminology is a bit confusing, and I'm certainly not the first to use "Quartz '2D' Extreme" and "Quartz Extreme" interchangeably. I figured that a system without Core Image-capable graphics would simply ignore the Quartz2DExtremeEnabled and QuartzGLEnable keys, though I haven't actually tested for adverse effects—only whether the browser would still run on these less-capable systems.@thewireless Just a gentle reminder that while they are both the same technology, the Quartz "2D" Extreme terminology (the technology of which differs from "Quartz Extreme", further) applies to Tiger only, and the QuartzGL terminology is exclusive to Leopard. And both furthermore require Core Image-capable graphics cards in order to be properly utilized, otherwise at best case they will have no effect on performance, or at worst the system might try and emulate them in software (given that Leopard already emulates CI on incompatible GPUs). Granted I'm not 100% clear on that one, but certainly it won't yield the desired effect on less-capable systems.
At this point in time, I would probably also remove the contents of network.dns.localDomains by default. That preference is basically the browser's built-in hosts file, and it routes requests to the entered domains back to the localhost, from what I recall. I compiled that list from scratch by logging the most common ad / tracking networks actively being used by each of the top 100 most popular websites as of around mid 2020 back when the version of foxPEP it was introduced with was still in the R&D stage. Doing it this way instead of just using the more complete MVPS hosts file allowed one to benefit from most of the same performance improvements as the latter when accessing the current (at the time) web without delaying the DNS queries by making the browser parse through a gigantic file first, effectively using the best of both worlds.
Regardless, it's been over four years since then and I'm sure that the list is now out of date and needlessly adding slight latencies to DNS response times, and anyone browsing on a Sorbet install (and potentially Shuriken; I forget what it came with) already has those entries built into the system hosts file anyway, compounding query latency. Otherwise, most users should ideally be using addons like uMatrix for a more futureproof ad blocking solution overall.
All of that aside though, great initiative and stellar work on Aquafox. I gave it a brief try when I had one of the G4s out recently, and I don't recall anything based on TenFourFox in recent memory being so ridiculously performant straight out of the box on such constrained hardware (save perhaps for tweaked foxboxes). I remember speculating with other members years ago on what an all-in-one fully optimized TFF might look like after development ceased (which it inevitably did), and now it would appear that this project has become the ultimate culmination of all of our efforts to make web browsing on these systems a better experience for everyone.
Simply exquisite. Keep it up.
I will remove the contents of network.dns.localDomains in the next version; ideally, people should run something like a Pi-hole on their network.
If you ever feel like contributing further, I'd be happy to have you!
Are xpi files plug-ins? We need one to support i2p (have you ever looked into that btw)?
See: https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox/issues/657#issuecomment-1319198176
And: https://github.com/PurpleI2P/i2pdbrowser/issues/47
I figured those would be add-ons, while plug-ins would include Flash, Java, and similar technologies.
QT or VLC plugin would be great to watch at least YT in the browser. Is the support completely removed from the source?
On a side note, we could probably have a much better experience with watching YT if browsing module is fixed in QMPlay2 player. (What is needed is to back port some fixes from the current to the Qt4-based version. YT playback itself works perfectly, only the search from within the app does not atm.)
Got a PPC Mac in the Closet? Check Out the Aquafox Browser for Tiger & Leopard
If you have an old PowerPC Mac laying around collecting dust in a closet somewhere, you might be able to get some use out of it today by installing a functional modern web browser, like Aquafox. Si…
osxdaily.com
Aquafox is now famous.