PowerPC fork of Firefox that lasted for over a decade has reached the end of the road

Enlarge / An old PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Microsoft Word 2008, and the TenFourFox browser. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It has been well over a decade since PowerPC Macs roamed the earth—so long that the Intel Macs that replaced them are themselves being replaced by something else. But to this day, there’s a small community of people still developing software for PowerPC Macs and Mac OS 9.

One of those projects was TenFourFox, a fork of the Firefox browser for G3, G4, and G5-based PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. Maintained primarily by Cameron Kaiser, the TenFourFox project sprang up in late 2010 after Mozilla pulled PowerPC support from Firefox 4 during its development. And amazingly, the browser has continued to trundle on ever since.

But continuing to backport Firefox features to aging, stuck-in-time PowerPC processors only got more difficult as time went on. And in March of this year, Kaiser announced that TenFourFox updates would be ending after over a decade of development. The final planned release of TenFourFox was earlier this month.