My Opera
PowerPC abandonment syndrome
Friday, February 3, 2012 2:10:43 AM
I have been bitching about Opera discontinuing their version for MacOS X / PowerPC before, especially since they didn't bother to keep it going until it reached a state of reasonable stability and functionality, instead they just dropped it in the middle of something that looked more like a public, unannounced beta phase. Ever since I've been looking for a suitable replacement since I'm not going to get rid of my PowerPC hardware any time soon.
Of course, in the original bitch&whine post I said I would drop MacOS X altogether ( and did so on some machines - they're NetBSD-only now ), I can't really do that on the G5 yet.
Of course there is Safari which, even though Apple abandoned the PowerPC version not long after Opera did, is in considerably better shape than Opera 10.63, especially the version that comes with OSX 10.5.
Finally there is - or rather, was - Firefox. I never liked the OSX version and now they stopped providing PowerPC-builds for everything newer than 3.6. Also in much better shape than the final Opera version but it lacks stuff like HTML5.
The solution I found is a branch of Firefox called TenFourFox. It's more or less current Firefox with PowerPC bits dusted off and optimized. As the name suggests it supports OSX 10.4, it works like a charm on my G5 and unlike the official Firefox I've been unable to crash it so far.
Of course, in the original bitch&whine post I said I would drop MacOS X altogether ( and did so on some machines - they're NetBSD-only now ), I can't really do that on the G5 yet.
Of course there is Safari which, even though Apple abandoned the PowerPC version not long after Opera did, is in considerably better shape than Opera 10.63, especially the version that comes with OSX 10.5.
Finally there is - or rather, was - Firefox. I never liked the OSX version and now they stopped providing PowerPC-builds for everything newer than 3.6. Also in much better shape than the final Opera version but it lacks stuff like HTML5.
The solution I found is a branch of Firefox called TenFourFox. It's more or less current Firefox with PowerPC bits dusted off and optimized. As the name suggests it supports OSX 10.4, it works like a charm on my G5 and unlike the official Firefox I've been unable to crash it so far.
