I’ve been following a project on Reddit for a month by u/ButtonClean9403, in which they’re porting Chrome 117/Chromium over to PowerPC, and with a beta download link available a few days ago, I just stumbled into it this morning. It’s a dream becoming true. More than a compiled-for-PPC Chromium, this is a full port with all the features included.

 

Over the last 20 years since Macs switched to Intel, some Mac users like to take on this “PowerPC Challenge” from time to time (including myself!), where we use a PowerPC Mac as our daily-driver, the go-to computer for as many of our day to day computing & tech needs as possible. As official web browser support waned in the early 2010s for PowerPC Macs, several projects have popped up since then to remedy the pain, but today we have something which only existed on Intel Macs before: Google Chrome.

While still in beta right now as it is a work in progress, it’s showing glimmers of hope in being able to use a Power Mac G5 as a modern web-browsing Mac which also happens to have a ton of usable, productive apps from the 2000s – 2010s.

 

On Your Mac

• 1. Download Chrome 117 for Mac OS X Leopard + PowerPC G5 (204.8 MB, Low End Mac)
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• 2. Drag-n’drop into your applications folder.

 

(Above: My own Dual 2.0 ’03 Power Mac G5. Click here for article on specs, or above for screenshot.)

 

What you need to know

• This is currently a work in progress, and there are limitations as a result. This isn’t supposed to be daily driven but tested, but if you’re brave.. it can offer lots of insight & feedback for devs. Please test and share your experiences.
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• Requires a PowerPC G5 chip and Mac OS X 10.5.4 or later. Will not run in Sorbet Leopard without modifying a system file.
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• Recommended: 2 GB RAM or more, an SSD
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• I suggest: Radeon 9800 Pro or better.
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• The port covers everything – V8 with Maglev and TurboFan JIT tiers, Blink, Skia, ANGLE, WebAssembly, WebGL and more.
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• Some tools may have incorrect labels.
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• The Vertical Tabs port is incomplete and may display incorrectly.
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• Some extensions are CPU-intensive and may crash the browser.
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• WebGPU lacks a compute shader implementation; many applications and demos may fail.
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• WebGL 1/2 compliance gaps; many applications and demos may fail
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• Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 has performance and graphical glitches.

 

Sorbet Leopard workaround (what worked for me)

This assumes libsqlite3.0.dylib points to libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib, and only fixes a library-loading failure in Sorbet Leopard. If your error message looks like this, it should work. Keep in mind, you might need to reverse this if it breaks any functionality in Sorbet Leopard.

• 1. Download libsqlite3.0.dylib-LEOPARD.zip (1.1 MB, Low End Mac)
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• 2. Extract to downloads folder, and open terminal.
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• 3. Check the existing system file
  • ls -l /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0*.dylib
    .
• 4. Backup the Sorbet Leopard version of this file on your Mac, first:
  • sudo cp -p /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib \
    /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib.backup
    .
• 5. Then, clone what you just downloaded into that same folder. This is the 10.5.8 version going in to replace what was just backed up from Sorbet Leopard.
  • sudo cp -p /Users/myhomefolder/Downloads/libsqlite3.0.dylib \
    /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib
    .
• 6. Restore ownership and permissions
  • sudo chown root:wheel /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib
  • sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib
    .
• 7. Verify it says “ppc64” among the list of supported architectures:
  • lipo -info /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.dylib
    .

To undo in case of issues:

• 1. sudo cp -p /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib.backup \
  /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib
  .
• 2. Restore ownership and permissions
  • sudo chown root:wheel /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib
  • sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.8.6.dylib

 

A comment from u/ButtonClean9403: “Thanks for sharing, as well as documenting the Sorbet Leopard issue and subsequent fix! Unfortunately, Sorbet Leopard’s image strips out many ppc64 binaries that Chromium Aurora depends on. I am working on a solution for this and should have Sorbet compatibility working soon.”

 

My Configuration (a.k.a “Moonshadow”)

The performance of the browser reflected in this article is based on the following configuration:

 

Testing it out

Naturally, first place I went to was YouTube, to see how it would even handle streaming video. The site’s UI took a little bit to load, then all the button labels appeared at once and I could start typing. Once everything is loaded in UI, it’s fast enough to type in, scrolling is stuttery but usable. It takes 14 seconds for my G5 to launch the app and “New Tab” rendering to be done.

 

(Above: Streaming 1080p YouTube in Aurora Project on a Power Mac G5, in a small window)

 

(Above: Using multiple simultaneous tabs while streaming 360p YouTube on the left side)

The smaller a Chrome window is scaled when on YouTube, the higher up I’m able to select in video quality and play with little to no frame drops, as long as the UI is finished loading. Scale the window up to how you would normally use it across the screen, and suddenly it starts chugging even above 360p. I was able to get up to 1080p in a smaller window. When it’s scaled down to such a size, HD video is impractical even if it plays well enough to be watchable; but it shows the hardware is capable.

 

 

Tried having multiple windows open while it streamed 1080p, which made both the video and new web pages render slow. Then I experimented with a split screen view, 360p YouTube on the left, multiple tabs on the right. Video will chug when a new page is rendered, but speed back up when done. After letting a few tabs render and then returning to YouTube, cranking up the settings to 480p and even 720p remained playable if I wasn’t interacting with the other window.

FaceBook refuses connection to this browser, as does the mobile version of the site. BlueSky loads up, and mostly everything works including image file uploads, but file uploads don’t work on all websites.

 

When visiting a low-resource website such as the Garden, CPU temps drop significantly. To my surprise, Google Sheets loads up after a minute or two and can be interacted with.

 

Speedometer 3.1 ran and looked as though it was just taking an extended, slightly jittery but responsive test. Impractically too long to get a good score, I stopped the test when it got to 91/580.

 

 

Anytime I try to save the website as an HTML file or the complete page, not only is it unable to save, but this window can’t be exited out of. This forces you to quit the browser, and re-launch it.

 

 

I gave 1080p YouTube another go with stock GPU frequencies, and even tried a stable, slight overclock. Went from unplayable at this window size to… “playing”. It’ll freeze sometimes but not for long, audio plays continuously, and video is almost watchable – for brief moments it is. Dropping to 720p surprisingly made little to no difference.

 

 

After checking back on my reddit post, I was happy to see a comment from u/ButtonClean9403, which helped clear up some of what’s going on behind the scenes:

u/ButtonClean9403: “The YouTube video performance (and performance in general) does scale with the window size – this is an experimental attempt to work around a limitation with Apple’s old OpenGL drivers, and it’s not fully optimized yet. A lot of the slowdowns you see on the testing branch currently are window compositing issues, which I’m hoping to iron out one-by-one. It only gets better from here!”

SpeedTest.net loads without the ads, is able to perform its benchmark, though the site looks nothing like this.

 

Graphic Feature Status

Here’s what chrome://gpu shows for my system configuration. I’m using a PC ATI Radeon X850 Pro Platinum Edition, flashed to an X850 XT Mac Edition by dosdude1, and slightly underclocked for stability + longevity. This card has been in this G5 since 2018, was once serviced, and is super reliable.

• Download: Full Report copied to clipboard (14 KB, Low End Mac)

In Conclusion

Even in beta, it’s already significantly more responsive on my Dual 2.0 G5 versus PowerFox 26.4.0. Both browsers take roughly the same amount of time to launch, but you can’t even compere the two after the initial screen. The Aurora project takes this same exact set of hardware which PowerFox struggles with, and actually makes it usable – Multi-tasking, even.

 

(Compare: PowerFox 26.4.0 on YouTube, audio playing, but frozen. Menu bar is frozen too. 1 Window.)

 

Browsing the web on a PowerPC G5-equipped Mac at any point in time always felt like it was a few notches down from using a Core 2 Duo Mac – even in 2010 with Safari on Leopard versus Snow Leopard Safari on a MacBook Pro just 3 years newer than the G5. With Aurora, it’s halfway to knocking on the door of a 2007 iMac running OS X El Capitan off an SSD, and Momiji 156.0. It’s impressive.