Of course, someone could come along and pick up on TenFourFox code and decide to tweak and add new features on their own. He’s a brilliant and kind guy, and we owe him our immense gratitude.

It was awesome to thank him personally and find out how many other vintage projects he has going on. I had the privilege of meeting Cameron back at vintage computer conference near Sunnyvale, CA several years back. You can make workarounds to gracefully degrade where we have missing HTML or DOM features, but JavaScript is pretty much run or don’t, and more and more sites just plain collapse if any portion of it doesn’t. For better or for worse, web browsers’ primary role is no longer to view documents it is to view applications that, by sheer coincidence, sometimes resemble documents. However, JavaScript is what probably killed TenFourFox quickest. Writing and maintaining a browser engine is fricking hard and everything moves far too quickly for a single developer now. The modern web, even on a somewhat updated browser, will struggle on our older computers. The internet will continue to introduce new technologies and make life miserable. Plus, despite many PowerPC users upgrading to solid state drives, flashed graphics card, occasional CPU upgrades, and maxed out RAM, there isn’t any processing power to gain out of our aging and venerable Macs. There was always going to be an end to development for TenFourFox. There really are not any alternatives beyond jumping to Linux, which carries with it its own set of tradeoffs and challenges.

Cameron has performed coding miracles figuring out ways to add features, squeeze better performance, and generally give us a secure and somewhat modern option for PowerPC Macs running 10.4 and 10.5 in recent years. I was away enjoying the pristine beauty of western Maryland earlier this week when the news dropped from Cameron Kaiser that TenFourFox, the most important piece of software to keep our Power Mac G5s somewhat relevant in this modern era of complex interweb technology, is nearing the end of its active development.įirst, this should be no surprise.

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