2013 – A while back, I explained why TenFourFox is without a doubt the best browser option for anyone running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on a PowerPC Mac. Today I follow that up by looking at two contenders for the best browser on OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Leopard WebKit is a nightly channel build of WebKit for Macs running Mac OS X 10.5. It is the only PowerPC browser to fully support H.264 and Grooveshark Mobile. The Opera browser includes everything you need for private, safe, and efficient browsing, along with a variety of unique features to enhance your capabilities online. The Opera browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers maximizes your privacy, content enjoyment, and productivity.
Safari
Safari is a perfectly competent browser, and Leopard supports Safari 5.0.6, which is a step forward from version 4.1.3 on Tiger. And if you want a version of Safari that’s a bit more up-to-date, there’s the experimental Leopard WebKit project, which lets you run Safari with an updated version of WebKit (currently r134862, where it’s been for a long, long time).
Safari supports lots of other extensions, although for some reason Apple doesn’t let you search them.
Safari Extensions
Best of all, Safari on Leopard supports LastPass, a great free password manager for modern Macs and PC and Linux systems that also supports OS X 10.4 (but only with TenFourFox) and 10.5 (with both Safari/WebKit and TenFourFox/Aurorafox). There are also iOS and Android versions, although they are not free.
By downloading the AdBlock extension, you can get rid of a lot of the ads that clutter up pages and slow load time, although we should remind you that these ads are a big part of what keeps most of the Web free.
Another useful Safari extension is ClickToFlash, which prevents Flash content from loading, replacing it with a placeholder. If you click on the placeholder, you can access the Flash content, assuming it’s compatible with the version of Flash on your Leopard PPC Mac (The last supported version is Flash 10.1, although there is a workaround that sometimes does the job.)
Another one you might want to consider is JavaScript Blocker (under the Security heading), which prevents JavaScript from executing unless you tell it to.
TenFourFox and Aurorafox
These two browsers are brothers under the hood. TenFourFox is an adaptation of Firefox 17 for PowerPC Macs, with two different G4 versions (if you’re running Leopard on a G4, you’ll probably end up using the 7450/G4e version) and a G5 version, so any PPC Mac running Leopard can run it. The current version of TenFourFox is 17.0.7.
Aurorafox is based on the same code as TenFourFox 17.0.2, so it’s a bit older and a bit less secure, and it’s compiled specifically for OS X 10.5 Leopard, where TenFourFox will also run on OS X 10.4 Tiger. This gives Aurorafox some advantages, particularly in displaying text, as it can take advantage of improved graphics routines within Leopard.
Aurorafox is also available with an alpha build of Firefox 20, and TenFourFox currently has a development version of Firefox 22, but for stability, stick with the polished release version 17.
Mozilla Extensions
As offshoots of Firefox, TenFourFox and Aurorafox can use the same extensions. I have essentially the same capabilities as mentioned with Safari using LastPass, Adblock Plus, Flashbock, and NoScript.
Safari Takes Third Place
Safari for Leopard is very outdated in terms of features, speed, and security, while Firefox (and hence TenFourFox and Aurorafox) remain under development.
Further, Safari doesn’t support full page mode. That may not sound like much, since no software written in the Leopard era supports full page mode, but TenFourFox and Aurorafox are modern browsers that do support full page mode. On a big display, it’s not such an issue, but the smaller your screen, the more you’ll relish it. Browsing on a 12″ PowerBook G4 with its 1024 x 768 pixel display is much better in full page mode. Much, much better.
TenFourFox Takes Second Place
Browser Per Mac Ppc
Although the functionality is virtually identical between TenFourFox and Aurorafox, Aurorafox is optimized for OS X 10.5 Leopard and much less demanding of your old PPC Mac’s limited resources. It’s a perfectly good browser, but why not use the more efficient alternative?
Aurorafox Takes Top Honors
And so we crown Aurorafox as the best browser to use with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It does everything TenFourFox does, does some things better than TenFourFox, and is nearly as secure.
Honorable Mentions
The Camino browser, an early merging of the Mozilla/Firefox engine with Mac OS X graphics routines, remains eminently usable, although it hasn’t been updated in years and is probably the least secure browser you’re likely to consider. That said, it’s fast and efficient. It has taken a back seat in my daily use, but that’s only over the past year, and it continues to be very useful as one tool in our process of migrating old Low End Mac content to WordPress.
Opera remains in use by a small percentage of the market, showing up at about 1% in our site analytics, which gives it 5th place among desktop browser and 4th place on Macs. That’s about the same level as the Android browser found on smartphones and tablets, and a good 50% higher than Camino’s current share. Opera 10.63 is the last version compatible with OS X 10.5 and PowerPC Macs.
Conclusion
Just because something comes with your computer doesn’t mean it’s the best solution. Just as Internet Explorer became a malware magnet on older versions of Microsoft Windows, Safari for Leopard has fallen far behind in the security department. Nor does it have modern features such as full screen mode, which is wonderful on smaller displays.
In the end, there are lots of options, so try a few to see which fit your needs and style. And if Leopard on PowerPC still rocks your world, be sure Aurorafox is one browser you give a try.
Keywords: #tenfourfox #bestmacbrowser #aurorafox
Short link: http://goo.gl/3eBtpx
While researching Gopher clients for my last two posts, I accidentally stumbled across a web browser for PowerPC Macs that I had not previously been aware of: OmniWeb. Somehow, in the nearly nine years that I have been using Macs exclusively, this particular web browser has completely evaded my attention. Perhaps it did yours too, and so I am writing a brief post about it.
For some time now, the only game in town, where PowerPC Mac OS X web browsers are concerned, has been TenFourFox. TenFourFox, along with its email counterpart TenFourBird, are excellent offerings that together have kept my PowerPC based Macs completely relevant even in the incredibly feature laden world of today’s internet. Until my research on Gopher clients it had been my assumption that not only was TenFourFox the best choice for a PPC web browser capable of navigating today’s web, it was also the ONLY choice.
I was therefore more than just a little surprised when my search for Gopher clients turned up repeated references to a program called OmniWeb, a previously unknown (to me anyway!) web browser that still runs on PowerPC Macs and apparently still supports the Gopher protocol natively. OmniWeb, of course, turns out to be a surprisingly current web browser, and better than that, one that still runs well under both Tiger and Leopard on PowerPC Macs.
Those of us on PowerPC Macs running Tiger were stranded by Safari in 2010. Those on Leopard made it a little bit further – 2011. OmniWeb takes us all one year farther down the road, to 2012. The last stable version of OmniWeb, sporting version number 5.11.2, was released on July 23rd, 2012. This makes OmniWeb fairly current, but nonetheless still a little over 2 ½ years old as I write this post. As we all know, the web is evolving at light speed, and so how well does a 2 ½ year old web browser stand up to the rigors of today’s online world?
My response would be, in a word (well, in two words actually!) “very well”. OmniWeb has performed flawlessly on all of the web pages I have tried it on so far, and that has been no small number – I have tested it as my day to day browser for about a week now. This means that OmniWeb has been exposed to a good cross section of the web, and performed admirably for me to date.
OmniWeb compliments this surprising performance with … its surprising performance! OmniWeb is FAST! Even on my PowerMac G5 Quad, equipped with an SSD boot/applications drive, TenFourFox is still somewhat slow to launch, taking two or three Dock bounces to get going. By contrast, OmniWeb seems to just snap into being, and augments this impression of blazing speed with its rendering of web pages, which seem to appear at an equally good clip.
Open Firmware Mac Ppc Commands
As you can see below, in 2006 at least OmniWeb was the leading speed demon among Mac OS X web browsers:
Stumbling across a previously unknown, full featured and exceptionally fast web browser that still runs on PowerPC Macs seems almost too good to be true. My sense of wonder at this unexpected turn of events is expressed perfectly by John Siracusa, a technology journalist and critic for Ars Technica, who in reference to OmniWeb said, “Finding [this level of functionality] in a proper Mac OS X application from a respected developer with a proven track record is like finding a perfect 1/10,000th scale replica of the Eiffel Tower in a box of crackerjacks.”
“Respected Developer”? Did he say “Respected Developer”? Where did such a capable web browser come from, and how did it fly under my radar for so long? Well, it turns out that OmniWeb has had a long and eventful history. That I have missed it for this long is completely inexplicable. OmniWeb started life in 1995 as a NextStep browser. Courtesy of a corporate acquisition of its parent company, it then spent some time on Sun Solaris before ultimately settling into it current role as an exclusively Mac OS X offering (as of its version 4.0 and onwards).
OmniWeb is one of a family of programs offered by the Omni Group (www.omnigroup.com) and seems far from dead. The Omni Group web site indicates that test builds of OmniWeb for Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) are available now, and checking into this, I see that these are being updated almost daily. Active development is clearly taking place right now. Whether there will ever by another Tiger/Leopard compatible version remains to be seen, but it is clear that the Omni Group is continuing to work on the product.
So, there you have it, OmniWeb, a “new” web browser for PowerPC Macs. You can download OmniWeb directly from the Omni Group web site (www.omnigroup.com) or from:
Give it a whirl – I think you will like it!