tenfourfox/ReleaseNotes5Beta2.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 in the Lion Preview, 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.

Beta considerations

This version of TenFourFox is a beta. It is only mostly complete. In particular, there are some late breaking features planned for the final version which are not yet present in this beta (which approximately corresponds to Mozilla Firefox 5.0 beta 5), and there will be some final additional optimizations specific to 10.4Fx which will be made just prior to final release. You should know that you are using this software at your own risk. It may cause data loss, security breaches, system instability and crashes. If you are not comfortable with these (remote but possible) possibilities, do not use this beta release.

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.

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 in this beta

• The Bookmarks menu and widget controls were incorrectly sized or disappeared altogether on Leopard (issue 65). These constants were corrected. This issue did not affect Tiger or 4.0.2.

Known issues specific to the beta

• Certain sites cannot dynamically insert plugins into the page (issue 68) and may cause the browser to crash under particular circumstances. This issue does not affect 4.0.2.

Known issues specific to TenFourFox

• Plugins, although most will still work, are officially deprecated. This is due to security, performance and technical issues from plugins such as Flash and QuickTime which will soon be no longer updated for Power Macintoshes. These plugins represent a future potential means of compromising browser security, and they use older OS APIs that Mozilla will no longer support. While they will still continue to function throughout TenFourFox 5.x, only major bugs will be repaired, and it is possible there may be graphical glitches. Plugins will be turned off by default in the next major release, and support for them will be removed entirely in a subsequent version. For more about this, see this blog entry and issue 24.
• 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.