This document may be updated for late-breaking changes, so check back here if you are having difficulty.

System requirements

TenFourFox (hereafter "10.4Fx") requires a G3 Power Macintosh, Mac OS X 10.4.11, 100MB of free disk space and 512MB of RAM. 1GB of RAM and a G4 or G5 processor is recommended. Video playback is likely to be poor on systems slower than 1.25GHz; a G5 is recommended. Mac OS X 10.5.8 is supported.

Intel Macintoshes are not supported, but the G3 build is known to run under Rosetta in 10.5.8 and should run under Rosetta in Intel 10.4.11. It is not tested with Snow Leopard. 10.4Fx will not run under 10.7 Lion, as Lion does not support Rosetta and 10.4Fx is not a Universal binary.

Getting TenFourFox

Make sure you select the appropriate build for your Mac from the download page. The G3 version will run on any supported Macintosh, but it will not take advantage of the additional features of G4 or G5 processors. The G4 and G5 versions will not run correctly on a G3, and the G5 version will perform worse on non-G5 Macintoshes.

If you are using a G4, you should try to choose the correct version for your processor generation (7400 or 7450 "G4e") as performance may be impaired if you run the wrong one. If you don't know which G4 processor you have, the instructions in WhichVersion will tell you how to find out.

Beta considerations

This version of TenFourFox is a beta. It is only mostly complete. In particular, there may be some late breaking features planned for the final version which are not yet present in this beta (which is approximately equivalent to Mozilla Firefox 9.0 beta 3), and there may be some final additional optimizations specific to 10.4Fx which will be made just prior to final release. You should know that you are using this software at your own risk. It may cause data loss, security breaches, system instability and crashes. If you are not comfortable with these (remote but possible) possibilities, do not use this beta release.

TenFourFox 9.0 is equivalent to Firefox 9.0

TenFourFox uses modified Firefox source code, rewritten to remain compatible with Mac OS X v10.4 and the Power Macintosh. It also contains specific optimizations and special features for PowerPC processors. For this reason, it is not exactly the same as Firefox. However, it is intended to be as compatible with it as possible, including most add-ons and most standard features. You can treat 10.4Fx as equivalent with Firefox 9.0 in most circumstances, with specific exceptions noted below.

Note that add-ons which require an Intel Macintosh will not work with TenFourFox, even if they are otherwise compatible with Firefox 9, and add-ons that require 10.5 Leopard may not be compatible with TenFourFox running on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, even if they are compatible with PowerPC.

TenFourFox no longer supports plugins or Flash

Plugins on PowerPC are of special concern because Mozilla is making updates to their plugin architecture which may require the plugins themselves to be updated, and there are certain difficult-to-correct bugs with them already on Tiger. Most importantly, Adobe Flash for PowerPC is no longer maintained and has known security risks that can crash or leak data, and QuickTime for Leopard will lose its own support with the release of OS X Lion. In addition, Flash 10.1 is rapidly becoming unsupported by many applications.

As of TenFourFox 6.0, for these and other reasons (for details, see PluginsNoLongerSupported), plugin support ships disabled. Plugins will not operate by default, and bug reports will no longer be accepted. Sites will now act as if no plugins were installed at all.

For Internet video, we strongly recommend the use of Perian and any of the available video download add-ons for Firefox.

For YouTube, we recommend MacTubes. If you have a high end G4 or G5, you can also use WebM for selected videos by visiting http://www.youtube.com/html5 and enabling HTML5 video. This will set a temporary cookie enabling browser-based video without Flash. You do not need a YouTube account for this feature, but you may need to periodically renew the cookie setting. Not all video is available in WebM.

For a more in-depth explanation of this policy and other workarounds, see PluginsNoLongerSupported.

New features specific to TenFourFox

• All new standard features of Firefox 9.0, including interface improvements, enhancements to Do-Not-Track and faster dynamic web page performance (chunked XHR).
• JavaScript regular expression compilation, significantly accelerating certain common script operations ( issue 101 ). This is enabled on all architectures, including G3.
• Faster AltiVec-accelerated text conversion ( issue 75 ).
• Improved AltiVec-accelerated WebM scaling and display ( issue 64 ).
• Accelerated AltiVec colour management ( issue 87 ).

Known issues fixed in this version of TenFourFox

• An issue where malformed JPEG images could crash the browser has been repaired ( issue 108 ). This does not affect the G3 version. This does not affect versions prior to 10.4Fx 8.0.
• An issue where JPEG decoding performance degraded in 8.0 has been mitigated ( issue 112 ). This affects G3 worst, but affects all versions. This is not related to AltiVec-accelerated JPEG decoding. This does not affect versions prior to 10.4Fx 8.0.
• An issue where extremely complex JavaScript could crash the browser has been mitigated ( issue 113 ). This affects all prior versions of 10.4Fx.

Known issues specific to TenFourFox

• Remember: Plugins are turned off by default, and code for them will fail to function entirely in a subsequent version. See PluginsNoLongerSupported for an explanation and suggested workarounds.
• As of TenFourFox 8, TenFourFox uses a lighter chrome for windows and dialogue boxes than prior versions or the official Mac Firefox. This is intentional.
• When 10.4Fx has no suggestions for the awesome bar, a blank box appears instead ( issue 21 ). This is intentional.
• 10.4Fx does not currently support WebGL or out-of-process plugins, and Indic, Arabic and other scripts requiring glyph reordering or language-specific ligatures may not appear correctly. See TechnicalDifferences for the complete list of changes necessary for 10.4Fx. See  issue 5  for notes specific to the font issue.
• Animation performance is currently poorer in Mozilla 2.0/Firefox 4.0 and later versions using software rendering, which includes 10.4Fx. Mozilla acknowledges this bug, but there is not yet an ETR. See  issue 7 .
• The titlebar does not always properly match the menu gradient (issue 16). This problem is also in the official release. Installing a Persona may fix this issue if you find it bothersome.
• Crash reporting is intentionally disabled to avoid polluting Mozilla's crash tracking system with our reports. Please use your system's crash logs if you are reporting a reproducible crash, or (if you are able) provide a gdb backtrace.
• Although 10.4Fx will tell you when an update is available, you must download updates manually at this time.

You are welcome to report other bugs that you find. However, please do not report Mozilla bugs to us. If the bug or crash occurs in both the official Mozilla Firefox 9 (3.6 doesn't count!) and in 10.4Fx, this is a Mozilla bug, and you should file it at Bugzilla. You must test your bug in both places -- bugs that are not confirmed to be part of 10.4Fx will be marked invalid so that we can keep our task list focused. This is the current list of known issues.