TenFourFox

» see tenfourfox.blogspot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Mozilla dropped PowerPC support when Firefox 4 shipped, which left every PowerPC Mac in the world on a browser that would stop getting security fixes. Cameron Kaiser started porting anyway. The development blog opened on 11 November 2010, and TenFourFox 4.0 final was released on 20 March 2011, a couple of days ahead of the Firefox 4 it was built from.

For the first few years the job was tracking Mozilla's release trains and keeping a PowerPC JIT alive underneath them. Then Mozilla rewrote large parts of the engine in Rust for Quantum, and no Rust compiler existed for 32-bit PowerPC, so Kaiser forked off the last version he could build and started a series he called feature parity releases: hand-picked backports of whatever from newer Firefox could be made to compile. It was the first browser on PowerPC Mac OS X to speak TLS 1.3, and it finished the AppleScript support that mainline Firefox had been planning for years and never shipped.

None of my machines were ever Macs. Through the whole PowerPC decade I was on PCs assembled from parts, listing the hardware in a forum signature the way everyone on donanimhaber and frmtr did, and Apple gear in Turkey carried an import price that put it outside what a student or a junior engineer would consider. The people TenFourFox served had spent real money on that hardware once and were not going to spend it again.

~ the case file ~

~ what javascript did to it ~

Kaiser's own diagnosis was blunt: JavaScript is what probably killed TenFourFox quickest. Every year the language grew features that assumed a modern engine, and every year one person had to decide which of them could be implemented on a chip Apple had stopped shipping in 2006. The gap between what sites required and what a G5 could be made to do widened on its own, without anyone deciding anything.

The rest was arithmetic. He was doing long evenings of coding after a full-time job, and the build farm running in his house cost him around $600 a month. He announced the end in March 2021 and said he would ship a final release and keep patching for a while after.

~ hobby mode ~

FPR32 SPR5 went out on 3 October 2021, described in its own release post as the last official build. Kaiser disabled the version check in it, on the grounds that there would be no newer build for it to find. Security backports kept appearing on GitHub afterward with no schedule and no promises, and anyone who wanted them had to build the browser themselves.

~ the second funeral ~

He was running two of these at once. Classilla, a browser for Mac OS 9 and the classic Mac toolbox, wound down in the same stretch and for the same reasons, only worse: it was even further from anything the modern web would accept.

Both projects existed because someone decided that hardware being unsupported and hardware being useless are different conditions. For eleven years that distinction had one person holding it up.

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