![]() Slack, Discord, and the OneNote Web App didn't exist when these machines were shipping. From a "vintage computing" standpoint, I'm not bothered by this. ![]() To your point about javascript behemoths - I don't think we can ever expect any PowerPC Mac (even a dual 2GHz PowerMac G4 with 2 gigs of RAM, or even The Quad with a fully kitted out 16 gigs) to do well with some aspects of the modern web. ![]() I don't agree with the way Cameron Kaiser framed both Classilla and TenFourFox, and some of the decisions he made such as explicitly excluding Intel users (even excluding Rosetta) but I get the idea and the intent: both in terms of extending the life of the machines and in terms of "make using the macgarden better" - which, tenfourfox in particular does do. And that's all on top of "web browsers can run individual tabs in their own threads on their own CPU cores, now" trick that started happening a couple years ago. 4x as fast as a thread of G4, absolute minimum, plus 64-bit, plus chromium having a couple efficiency/reliability things done that firefox didn't yet have at the time, etc etc. So, I 100% agree with your assessment that while the web is wild and it is a performance driver in the modern context, it's not quite as dire as some, even me in some contexts, make it out to be.īut, it's worth noting that even one thread of 65nm Core2Duo is like. If I had bothered to use native or non-electron solutions for all those things, it would have left more load available for casual web consumption, and the whole experience would have been that much more "fine". I ran a couple web apps (, word, onedrive) in Chredge, did my normal social media load on it, listened to spotify on their web site, watched a couple youtubes, used discord and visual studio code on it and it handled the load fine. ![]() It's possible I was giving it more benefit of the doubt because it's from 2007 and I'm generally super impressed with the way Windows 10 worked very well on extremely old hardware (it's not fundamentally any heavier than Vista is and the only reason it doesn't run on PIIIs is because Microsoft added some requirements for a couple CPU instructions). It didn't rocktane/shocktane set my world on fire but if I'd upgraded it to the platform-with-bios-updates max of 16 gigs of RAM and put a fresh video card in, it would have been able to substitute for my own daily driver, then an i5-2300/gtx750ti/16gb/ssd, just fine. (*base machine Dell Precision T3400, 2007). Core2Quad Q6600, 4GB DDR2, aforementioned GPU, SSD, 10, Chredge, uBO. Last year, before its "the quadro version of the GeForce 8400" died, I was playing around on a similar system. Additionally, XUL/XULRunner aren't exactly lightweight themselves, and not needing to drag all that around may help. I doubt that behemoth, JavaScript monster web apps like Google Docs or Slack will ever run well on a G3 or G4, but for the larger modern web I think tricks along the lines of Safari's compiled native code content blockers (which can block gobs of ad/tracker JS without the overhead of dynamically traversing the DOM and intercepting requests) and targeted optimizations could go a long way. TenFourFox and Classilla are great don't get me wrong, but they're likely carrying a number of assumptions and design decisions that make them run more badly on older machines than they necessarily have to just by virtue of sharing so much with modern browsers. Or, perhaps a fork of WebKit that's been stripped down and refitted for the task, given that project's huge flexibility. I may be wrong but I think the future of browsers on older platforms is probably going to look more like new web engines (and accompanying JS engines) written specifically for use on systems with limited resources, wrapped in native platform chrome.
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