Other Web browsers for early Intel Macs

[B S Magnet]

The issue is that SeaMonkey never had as big of a following as Firefox, and thus didn’t have as many extension developers. On top of that most FF extensions never included the required navigator overlay needed to display/work properly on SeaMonkey. Basically the user interface is much different than that of FF's and needs extensions written for it. Since spiderweb/sealion/snowlion are all using the seamonkey UI most FF extensions wont work properly, if at all without some tweaks. That’s why i tend to include or link to popular extensions that have been modified to work.

Cheers

Thank you for that explanation.

The missing detail I lacked previously is SnowLion is a fork of SeaMonkey, not a fork of Firefox.

Although I sometimes forget about the way Mozilla dropped the Communicator-descended applications suite in favour of stand-alone clients (FF, Thunderbird, etc.), your reply clarifies a great deal.

 

[Jazzzny]

Well this is exciting...
After a few hours of work, I've managed to build a copy of Roytam1's Serpent (Based on FireFox 55 + Moebius/UXP) for 10.6. It still needs some work, but I'm hoping to get a usable build out by today. Source code will follow, and if anyone is interested, I'm hoping to get some volunteers to possibly help rebrand the browser, sync the codebase, and compile new builds, as I may not have the time in the future.

Jazzzny

 

[Jazzzny]

Alright, well here it is, uploaded from 10.6.This browser scores 488 on html5test.co, 38% (excluding CSS2.2) on css3test.com, and has a JavaScript engine modern enough to load stock Discord.
Quite a few issues currently, but I hope to sort them out shortly.

Please test and see how well it works

Serpent 2

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

Jazzzny

 

[B S Magnet]

View attachment 2342373


Alright, well here it is, uploaded from 10.6.This browser scores 488 on html5test.co, 38% (excluding CSS2.2) on css3test.com, and has a JavaScript engine modern enough to load stock Discord.
Quite a few issues currently, but I hope to sort them out shortly.

Please test and see how well it works

Serpent 2

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

Jazzzny

Fantastic, and thank you for bringing this to our attention! I look forward to giving this a go on one of my three SL boxes.

 

[wicknix]

Buggy for sure, but a great start! Ya know... i never thought to try Roy's winxp forks on 10.6. Might have made my attempts to get UXP running on 10.6 easier. Doh!

Can i ask what your build environment is, and what SDK is being used?

I could lend a hand at branding, since i'm quite familiar with where the files reside.

Cheers

 

[Jazzzny]

Buggy for sure, but a great start! Ya know... i never thought to try Roy's winxp forks on 10.6. Might have made my attempts to get UXP running on 10.6 easier. Doh!

Can i ask what your build environment is, and what SDK is being used?

I could lend a hand at branding, since i'm quite familiar with where the files reside.

Cheers

I’m building on 10.11 using the 10.11 SDK with Clang-11 from MacPorts (Emulated TLS).

 

[mrkapqa]

SeaLion is one very comfortable browser, thank you so much wicknix.

 

[Sean.R]

Most people know this already, but here's another way to have up to date browsers on our dated OS X's.
VirtualBox is free, and so is Linux. The lighter weight, the better. I chose Q4OS with Trinity desktop.
Works great for those occasional stubborn websites (or security for banking, ebay, etc without rebooting).

I'm using version 4.3.40 r110317, and i made a 4gb drive only because i also installed ThunderBird and a few other things.

Is there a tutorial or youtube video instructions for how to upload the iso into VirtualBox and get it working? I can't seem to figure it out. Also why did you choose version 4.3.40? Did you stay with Q4OS or Slax?

 

[wicknix]

AFAIK 4.3.40 was the last version to support Snow Leopard. Currently i have no VM’s running on 10.6 as the browser situation has gotten better for 10.6 since 2021, and because i don’t use those older machines much these days.

Youtube has tons of tutorials if you aren't familiar with VirtualBox.

Cheers

 

[Sean.R]

AFAIK 4.3.40 was the last version to support Snow Leopard. Currently i have no VM’s running on 10.6 as the browser situation has gotten better for 10.6 since 2021, and because i don’t use those older machines much these days.

Youtube has tons of tutorials if you aren't familiar with VirtualBox.

Cheers

Can any of the 10.6 browsers have an ad blocker extension? Sorry if that question has been covered already.
What distro worked better for you in VirtualBox, Slax or Q4OS?

 

[wicknix]

Interweb download includes ublock origin legacy.
Slax worked better if you just wanted a browser with some basics. Q4os was more a full blown distro. Both worked well.

 

[B S Magnet]

Can any of the 10.6 browsers have an ad blocker extension? Sorry if that question has been covered already.
What distro worked better for you in VirtualBox, Slax or Q4OS?

I am using Nightly55 on Snow Leopard. I use uBlock Origin and uMatrix without issue:

If, however, you want to use these, then you will need to install uBlock Origin 1.16.4.30 (but no later), and uMatrix 1.1.4 (but no later).

 

[f54da]

I recently found out LadyBird has a native AppKit backend. Now unfortunately the AppKit backend uses the native tabs introduced on 10.10(?) but actually the amount of code needed here is not that much, it should be possible for a mortal to instead make it use https://github.com/rsms/chromium-tabs instead which supports down to 10.5. The fact that LadyBird is also meant to be a browser that can be hacked on by mortals should mean that it's easier to develop for than Firefox/Chromium.

I guess the rough plan of steps to experiment with this would be:
* Set up a modern toolchain (it needs c++20 or something)
* Remove all the native tab stuff, just have a simple single page NSWindow
* Verify that the build works on older os versions
* Reimplement tab support using the above chromium tab library
* Profit.

CC @Wowfunhappy since I think we discussed ladybird before and the Qt6 dep was one of the blockers; seems it is now no longer the case.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

I recently found out LadyBird has a native AppKit backend. Now unfortunately the AppKit backend uses the native tabs introduced on 10.10(?) but actually the amount of code needed here is not that much, it should be possible for a mortal to instead make it use https://github.com/rsms/chromium-tabs instead which supports down to 10.5. The fact that LadyBird is also meant to be a browser that can be hacked on by mortals should mean that it's easier to develop for than Firefox/Chromium.

I guess the rough plan of steps to experiment with this would be:
* Set up a modern toolchain (it needs c++20 or something)
* Remove all the native tab stuff, just have a simple single page NSWindow
* Verify that the build works on older os versions
* Reimplement tab support using the above chromium tab library
* Profit.

CC @Wowfunhappy since I think we discussed ladybird before and the Qt6 dep was one of the blockers; seems it is now no longer the case.

Thanks! I'm probably not going to look into this as long as we have Chromium Legacy (and until LadyBird is able to render more websites), but it's really great that there could be another option if we need it!

Edit: Why would you recommend the Chromium tab library instead of getting native tabs working? 10.9 does have native tabs, doesn't it? Finder and Terminal use them for example. Is it a private API?

Edit2: As a note, LadyBird apparently requires C++23. That is going to be a problem, because the macports-libcxx library only supports C++20. I don't know how to get a newer toolchain working.

There is also a new developer working on porting a major web browser to legacy OS X, they emailed me for help with testing.

 

[f54da]

Oh yeah didn't expect anyone to actually work on it, just pointing out that it is technically an option if someone wanted to play around with something as a summer project or whatever.

>Chromium tab library instead of getting native tabs working
10.9 does not support native tabs in AppKit, each app is responsible for its own implementation and drawing. Terminal actually changed the implementation from its own to the AppKit tabs when appKit tabs became available. Finder likewise probably rolls its own (or so I suspect. Haven't verified but almost surely it's not a private appkit api just because nothing else has tabs).

Missed the C++23 req, I guess we'll also have to wait for macports to catch up there (I'm sure it should be possible, it's just a matter of someone actually doing the thing).


>New developer working on porting a major web browser to legacy OS X

Ooh exciting. I'm guessing it's either firefox or webkit(safari), since those are literally the only other major browsers that seem to exist. Webkit would be really interesting, I don't think anyone even has proper windows builds for that outside of some clunky test setups...

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Haven't verified but almost surely it's not a private appkit api just because nothing else has tabs.

Well, Safari and Xcode would be the others.

I'm surprised they don't share an API! Apple did a really good job getting a consistent look and feel for the tabs across these apps. Things like the little animation when you pull a tab off the tab bar or put it back.

Edit: Actually, that animation and some others are consistent across Safari, Finder, and XCode, but not Terminal...

Missed the C++23 req, I guess we'll also have to wait for macports to catch up there (I'm sure it should be possible, it's just a matter of someone actually doing the thing).

The only thing is I don't know that kenchu is going to do it, at least until it becomes a significant problem for MacPorts as a whole. When he made macports-libcxx, he said something like "this is a one-time thing I'm making because it seems to work with these specific versions, and I don't plan to keep it updated."

 

[f54da]

>Well, Safari and Xcode would be the others.
I just checked and they don't share any common classes for the tab view, so they all reimplement it separately. It's possibly they may have copied the code for animation or something, but it's not a shared api and the class names also differ so it's not like they had some internal drop-in library for this.

 

[f54da]

Actually @Wowfunhappy I'm not sure I understand why macports libcxx is needed? Why can't we just use upstream libc++, as I think Bluebox does for chromium builds? Looking at the patches macports makes for libcxx it seems those are for < snow leopard / ppc stuff. If you limit to targeting lion and above, there shouldn't be many patches needed (since evidently the libcxx bluebox uses works fine, and that tracks close to upstream)