tenfourfox/ReleaseNotes50.md

This document may be updated for late-breaking changes, so check back here if you are having difficulty.

System requirements

TenFourFox (hereafter "10.4Fx") requires a G3 Power Macintosh, Mac OS X 10.4.11, 100MB of free disk space and 256MB of RAM. 512MB of RAM and a G4 or G5 processor is recommended. Video playback is likely to be poor on systems slower than 1.25GHz; a G5 is recommended. Mac OS X 10.5.8 is supported.

Intel Macintoshes are not supported, but the G3 build is known to run under Rosetta in 10.5.8 and should run under Rosetta in Intel 10.4.11. It is not tested with Snow Leopard. 10.4Fx will not run under 10.7 Lion, as Lion does not support Rosetta and 10.4Fx is not a Universal binary.

Getting TenFourFox

Make sure you select the appropriate build for your Mac from the download page. The G3 version will run on any supported Macintosh, but it will not take advantage of the additional features of G4 or G5 processors. The G4 and G5 versions will not run correctly on a G3, and the G5 version will perform worse on non-G5 Macintoshes.

If you are using a G4, you should try to choose the correct version for your processor generation (7400 or 7450 "G4e") as performance may be impaired if you run the wrong one. If you don't know which G4 processor you have, the instructions in WhichVersion will tell you how to find out.

TenFourFox 5.0 is equivalent to Firefox 5.0

TenFourFox uses modified Firefox source code, rewritten to remain compatible with Mac OS X v10.4 and the Power Macintosh. It also contains specific optimizations and special features for PowerPC processors. For this reason, it is not exactly the same as Firefox. However, it is intended to be as compatible with it as possible, including most add-ons and most standard features. You can treat 10.4Fx as equivalent with Firefox 5.0 in most circumstances, with specific exceptions noted below.

Note that add-ons and plugins which require an Intel Macintosh will not work with TenFourFox, even if they are otherwise compatible with Firefox 5, and add-ons and plugins that require 10.5 Leopard may not be compatible with TenFourFox running on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, even if they are compatible with PowerPC.

TenFourFox 5 will be the final release to support plugins

Plugins on PowerPC are of special concern because Mozilla is making updates to their plugin architecture which may require the plugins themselves to be updated, and there are certain difficult-to-correct bugs with them already on Tiger. Most importantly, Adobe Flash for PowerPC is no longer maintained and has known security risks that can crash or leak data, and QuickTime for Leopard will lose its own support with the release of OS X Lion. In addition, Flash 10.1 is rapidly becoming unsupported by many applications.

Plugins will be maintained through the lifetime of 4.0 (which will end with 4.0.3) and 5.0 (which will end with 6.0). Only crash and stability bugs will be accepted. In TenFourFox 6.0, plugins will be turned off by default and no bug reports related to plugins will be accepted.

For Internet video, we strongly recommend the use of Perian and any of the available video download add-ons for Firefox.

For YouTube, we recommend MacTubes. If you have a high end G4 or G5, you can also use WebM for selected videos by visiting http://www.youtube.com/html5 and enabling HTML5 video. This will set a cookie enabling browser-based video without Flash. You do not need a YouTube account for this feature. Not all video is available in WebM.

New features specific to TenFourFox

• All new standard features of Firefox 5.0, including CSS animation, multiple bug fixes, improvements to canvas and graphic display, and a faster browser core.
• JavaScript acceleration is now enabled by default for the browser chrome (issue 27), improving overall interface performance.
• JavaScript typed arrays are now accelerated (issue 32), improving the speed of performance-critical applications and browser-generated audio.
• Media scaling is now AltiVec accelerated (issue 64).
• Fully compatible with the current Mozilla build system (issue 35).

Known issues fixed in this version of TenFourFox

• A crash bug in the JavaScript interpreter has been repaired (issue 63). This fix will also be in 4.0.3.
• Recursion limits on certain extremely long search expressions in the JavaScript regular expression parser were increased (issue 67), allowing extensions such as Ghostery to function correctly. Due to the unconventionality of this fix, it will not appear in 4.0.3, although it affects 4.0.2 also.

Known issues fixed between beta 2 and RC/final

• Certain sites may cause the browser to abnormally leak memory or crash using JavaScript (issue 68). This issue was repaired by Mozilla. This issue does not affect 4.0.2 or standard Firefox.

Known issues specific to TenFourFox

• Remember: Plugins, although most will still work, are officially deprecated. Plugins will be turned off by default in TenFourFox 6, and support for them will be removed entirely in a subsequent version.
• When 10.4Fx has no suggestions for the awesome bar, a blank box appears instead (issue 21). This is intentional.
• 10.4Fx does not currently support WebGL or out-of-process plugins, and Indic, Arabic and other scripts requiring glyph reordering or language-specific ligatures may not appear correctly. See TechnicalDifferences for the complete list of changes necessary for 10.4Fx. See issue 5 for notes specific to the font issue.
• Animation performance is currently poorer in Mozilla 2.0/Firefox 4.0 and later versions using software rendering, which includes 10.4Fx. Mozilla acknowledges this bug, but there is not yet an ETR. See issue 7.
• The titlebar does not always properly match the menu gradient (issue 16). This problem is also in the official release. Installing a Persona may fix this issue if you find it bothersome.
• Crash reporting is intentionally disabled to avoid polluting Mozilla's crash tracking system with our reports. Please use your system's crash logs if you are reporting a reproducible crash, or (if you are able) provide a gdb backtrace.
• Although 10.4Fx will tell you when an update is available, you must download updates manually at this time.

You are welcome to report other bugs that you find. However, please do not report Mozilla bugs to us. If the bug or crash occurs in both the official Mozilla Firefox 5 (3.6 doesn't count!) and in 10.4Fx, this is a Mozilla bug, and you should file it at Bugzilla. You must test your bug in both places -- bugs that are not confirmed to be part of 10.4Fx will be marked invalid so that we can keep our task list focused. This is the current list of known issues.