Back to the Fox
by
dr.dave
As Dr. Kaiser noted on the development blog, Tenfourfox 17.0.3 is out, and as always this Dr. downloads the latest release and gives it a spin. For me (and many others) Tenfourfox 8 was the high water mark for Tenfourfox, fast, stable, awesomely awesome stuff. Every version since has seemed subjectively a little slower, and I've moved away from using it as my primary browser. Admitedly I've never done any scientificaly based performance tests, but text fields seemed to hang, pages took longer to load and the greasemonkey script viewtube became unusable for watching youtube within a browser. Maybe on a faster PowerPC mac these things wouldn't be so obvious.
I've only spent just a little over 48 hrs with this Fox, but I am more than a little surprised at how speedy it seems. Pages load well, even with add-ons like Adblocker enabled. Viewtube is again usable, and playback compares well with Click to Plugin in Leopard webkit. Dr. Kaisers' QTE also seems to "see" more webvideo than it did in the past, or maybe its just that more sites are trying to offer up video to flash free devices. The New York Times front page videos as an example are now viewable via the QTE.
This Dr's Rx for this week is: download Tenfourfox 17.0.3, give it a whirl and comment on your personal findings below.
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The reason ViewTube is giving you problems is that Mozilla has disabled support for quickdraw based plugins in Firefox 18 and newer. Our old QuickTime plugin would crash the browser, so from TFF 19 and AuroraFox 18 plugins have been disabled for good. Plugin support has been restored in Seamonkey-ppc, so I suppose it should be possible to do this on TFF too, but I don't think that Cameron Kaiser would be interested. Plugins would still be a security concern, moreover future changes in Mozilla code could break support again. On the plus side, AuroraFox has gained support for h264, so it's possible to use that with html5 in ViewTube. In Aurora 20 I get decent but not spectacular performance on my 1.25 GHz eMac, but things seem to get a little better with each new release. This is an enhancement that may be extended to TFF in the future, perhaps after the difficult and time consuming work on the powerpc version of ion monkey will be completed.
ReplyDeleteThanks for clearing that up....I knew plugins were disabled in TFF 18 and above, but I thought if you went into the about:config and set them to true that bypassed it. Guess I need to pay a little more attention when reading the TFF development blog. What would be awesome would be the flashvideoreplacer like solution of launching video an external player....wait, that's what the QTE does.
ReplyDeleteAurora 20 crashes a lot on me. I am in love with ClicktoPlugin and ClicktoFlash in Leopardwebkit. It's amazing that we still have so many great options, going on seven years from Apple's switch to Intel.