Safari held its own for years, and Camino remains a very nice, speedy browser, but for OS X 10.4 Tiger users, Firefox had them both beat – and then the Firefox team stopped supporting Tiger and PowerPC Macs.

Safari ends at version 4.1.3 on Tiger (5.x on 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard, and 6.x for 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion, just to show how far behind the curve Safari for Tiger is), and Camino development stopped at version 2.1.2 over a year ago, and that’s probably the end of the trail for my former favorite browser that runs in all versions of OS X since Tiger.

There are a lot of very useful old G3, G4, and even some G5 Macs running Tiger, the last version of Mac OS X to support Classic Mode and the last version to run on most G3 Macs. (I’ve been using Tiger since 2005 and still have it running on a couple of my Macs today.) Firefox 3.6 was the last official version of Firefox for those Macs with Tiger, but there is an unofficial port of Firefox to PowerPC Macs called TenFourFox – and it is simply amazing.

No, you can’t run Flash content that requires the latest version of Flash on any PowerPC Mac, but as for the rest of the Interweb, TenFourFox is compatible, although its speed depends on your aging hardware. Lots of memory and a fast hard drive will help.

This is how Low End Mac looks in TenFourFox.

It’s also got some very nice up-to-date features, such as full screen mode – the kind of feature you may have thought of as reserved for OS X 10.7 Lion and later. There it is in its full glory, and it’s the kind of feature you’ll really appreciate on a G3 iMac, 15″ iMac G4, 12″ iBook, 13-14″ PowerBook, etc. You can finally get rid of the menubar, the dock, the link and search bars, and just view the page itself at 1024 x 768 pixels (or whatever your old Mac’s resolution is). It’s just one more way to get the most out of your old hardware.

Add-ons

TenFourFox takes Firefox plugins, so you can install Flash blocking, ad blocking, themes, and my current favorite, LastPass, a great password manager for modern Macs that only works with one browser that works with Tiger – TenFourFox.

My favorite theme is Mac OSX Light, which just feels a bit nicer than the default Firefox theme.

My essential add-ons are Adblock Plus, Flashblock (not that most Flash works on PowerPC Macs anyhow), NoScript, and LastPass.

• AdBlock Plus gets rid of those pesky ads that just slow things down on an old Mac.
• Flashblock prevents Flash content from loading unless you click the load button.
• NoScript gives you control over which scripts are allowed to run on your installation of Firefox or TenFourFox. (Please approve scripts from lowendmac.com, backbeatmedia.com, googlesyndication.com, and google-analytics.com)
• And LastPass is a password manager you can use with almost every browser with OS X 10.6 and newer, most browsers with 10.5 Leopard, but only TenFourFox on 10.4 Tiger – and sync IDs and passwords among multiple machines and/or users.

I won’t say that TenFourFox is going to set the world on fire, but it is the one browser that anyone still using OS X 10.4 Tiger on G3, G4, or G5 hardware should be using.

Further Reading

• Speed Up TenFourFox on Your PowerPC Mac shares techniques for squeezing the most out of TenFourFox.

Keywords: #tenfourfox #osxtiger #bestbrowser

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