Other InterWeb (née Nightly55) Web Browser for Mac OS X 10.6

[wicknix]

I did try earlier today, but no luck. The created "app" fails to find application.ini even though it's there. Running it from command line and telling it where that file is also fails (foxbox -app /path/to/application.ini). I think i figured out why it doesn't work though. UXP broke/removed/stubbed xulrunner years back for some reason. AFAIK this box "hack" requires xulrunner, but i could be wrong. I'll keep poking at it.

Cheers

 

[Eccofonic]

Finally tried this today on Snow Lepoard and when I went to preferences, the advanced tab wouldn't display?!?

 

[Dronecatcher]

Finally tried this today on Snow Lepoard and when I went to preferences, the advanced tab wouldn't display?!?

You can make fine adjustments in about:config or directly edit the pref.js file in TextEdit.

 

[Jazzzny]

This will be fixed in the next release of Nightly55 - I plan to ship the binaries today.

 

[B S Magnet]

This will be fixed in the next release of Nightly55 - I plan to ship the binaries today.

I might be able to speak for at least a couple of people around here when I say this community is deeply grateful to you and to folks like wicknix, for picking up where Cameron Kaiser left off and donating your time and knowledge to continued support for browser-based projects able to run on Snow Leopard. <3

 

[wicknix]

@Dronecatcher @Jazzzny Well this is odd. Been pulling my hair out trying to get foxbox/inthebox to work with Nightly55 with no luck. Decided to build a new InterWeb with N55's code for gits and shiggles. Guess what? InTheBox works without any modifications. So that means it'll work and doesn't require xulrunner. The question now is what did Dronecatcher and i miss when we modified it for N55 with no luck? It's been driving me nuts. I even have a new icon and name for it. (see attached)

Now, before i upload it (as i don't want to step on this project by any means), what are your thoughts @Jazzzny ? It is a very useful app to make custom "web apps". If i upload the new InterWeb it will allow InTheBox to work as intended, but now with better modern web compatability. It would just be a stop gap "fix" until i can figure out the issues with "Box55" for N55. I wouldn't keep making new InterWeb builds. It would just be a 1 and done kind of thing.

Cheers

 

[B S Magnet]

@Dronecatcher @Jazzzny Well this is odd. Been pulling my hair out trying to get foxbox/inthebox to work with Nightly55 with no luck. Decided to build a new InterWeb with N55's code for gits and shiggles. Guess what? InTheBox works without any modifications. So that means it'll work and doesn't require xulrunner. The question now is what did Dronecatcher and i miss when we modified it for N55 with no luck? It's been driving me nuts. I even have a new icon and name for it. (see attached)

View attachment 2356360

Now, before i upload it (as i don't want to step on this project by any means), what are your thoughts @Jazzzny ? It is a very useful app to make custom "web apps". If i upload the new InterWeb it will allow InTheBox to work as intended, but now with better modern web compatability. It would just be a stop gap "fix" until i can figure out the issues with "Box55" for N55. I wouldn't keep making new InterWeb builds. It would just be a 1 and done kind of thing.

Cheers

I’d be five-by-five with Box55.

 

[barracuda156]

View attachment 2342713

Hello everyone,
I'm proud to announce a new web browser for 10.6 which I am tentatively naming "Nightly55" (will probably change once I settle on a name I like.)
It's based on upstream code from Roytam1's Basilisk 55, which itself is based on Firefox 55/Moebius/UXP. The codebase is quite modern, with a Javascript engine new enough to run stock Discord (see screenshots).

Download a copy from here and let me know how it goes!

Release InterWeb Web Browser Release 2024-03-14 · Jazzzny/basilisk55-snowleopard

In collaboration with wicknix, I'm proud to announce that Nightly55 is rebranding to InterWeb, to continue the lineage of a modern browser for older versions of macOS. This has been the biggest rel...

github.com

Source code: https://github.com/Jazzzny/basilisk55-snowleopard

Has anyone tried to build this for PowerPC?

 

[barracuda156]

If you have MacPorts installed, run `port install libcxx`. If you don't, unzip and copy the attached files to `/usr/lib/`.

Does it not build against `libstdc++` instead?

 

[Jazzzny]

Has anyone tried to build this for PowerPC?

I briefly tried to build for 10.5 but I realized that I would need to port over all of Pale Moon's 10.5 changes by hand because of conflicts.

Does it not build against `libstdc++` instead?

All of my builds have been done with libc++. I haven't tried the other options yet

 

[Jazzzny]

what are your thoughts @Jazzzny ?

Wicknix and I have discussed some items privately, and I think it will be good news for everyone. I'll announce what we've come up with with the next release.

 

[barracuda156]

I briefly tried to build for 10.5 but I realized that I would need to port over all of Pale Moon's 10.5 changes by hand because of conflicts.

Just in case, PaleMoon-for-PowerPC-related WIP:

Building for macOS PowerPC · Issue #2 · dbsoft/White-Star

@dbsoft Hi, Brian! @wicknix referred me to your discussion on PaleMoon board, and I am interested to join into the project :) What is the current status of the build? P. S. There is also a relevant...

github.com

Mac 10.5 and PowerPC support · Issue #140 · rmottola/Arctic-Fox

@rmottola From a quick look into the code it seems nothing much is gonna break PowerPC build – my concern was assembler in JIT, but apparently it is not implemented for PPC at all: https://github.c...

github.com

Both build (at the moment against 10.5 SDK, since 10.6 requires quite a bit more work), but both need some extra fix-ups to work.

 

[Jazzzny]

InterWeb Web Browser Release 2024-03-14 is out! Yes, InterWeb.
In collaboration with wicknix, I'm proud to announce that Nightly55 is rebranding to InterWeb, to continue the lineage of a modern browser for older versions of macOS.

This has been the most substantial update yet, and it features a ton of changes that should make web browsing a much better experience.

Notably, I've managed to enable out of the box color emoji support, meaning that you'll be able to see any emoji on any website without any extra fonts installed.

I hope everyone enjoys the new release, and be sure to let me know if you run into any issues.

As per usual, new downloads are posted to the GitHub:

Release InterWeb Web Browser Release 2024-03-14 · Jazzzny/basilisk55-snowleopard

In collaboration with wicknix, I'm proud to announce that Nightly55 is rebranding to InterWeb, to continue the lineage of a modern browser for older versions of macOS. This has been the biggest rel...

github.com

 

[B S Magnet]

InterWeb Web Browser Release 2024-03-14 is out! Yes, InterWeb.
In collaboration with wicknix, I'm proud to announce that Nightly55 is rebranding to InterWeb, to continue the lineage of a modern browser for older versions of macOS.

This has been the most substantial update yet, and it features a ton of changes that should make web browsing a much better experience.

Notably, I've managed to enable out of the box color emoji support, meaning that you'll be able to see any emoji on any website without any extra fonts installed.

View attachment 2359174

I hope everyone enjoys the new release, and be sure to let me know if you run into any issues.

As per usual, new downloads are posted to the GitHub:

Release InterWeb Web Browser Release 2024-03-14 · Jazzzny/basilisk55-snowleopard

In collaboration with wicknix, I'm proud to announce that Nightly55 is rebranding to InterWeb, to continue the lineage of a modern browser for older versions of macOS. This has been the biggest rel...

github.com

Oh, how this brings me joy. Thank you both. ❤️

 

[barracuda156]

InterWeb Web Browser Release 2024-03-14 is out! Yes, InterWeb.
In collaboration with wicknix, I'm proud to announce that Nightly55 is rebranding to InterWeb, to continue the lineage of a modern browser for older versions of macOS.

This has been the most substantial update yet, and it features a ton of changes that should make web browsing a much better experience.

Notably, I've managed to enable out of the box color emoji support, meaning that you'll be able to see any emoji on any website without any extra fonts installed.

View attachment 2359174

I hope everyone enjoys the new release, and be sure to let me know if you run into any issues.

As per usual, new downloads are posted to the GitHub:

Release InterWeb Web Browser Release 2024-03-14 · Jazzzny/basilisk55-snowleopard

In collaboration with wicknix, I'm proud to announce that Nightly55 is rebranding to InterWeb, to continue the lineage of a modern browser for older versions of macOS. This has been the biggest rel...

github.com

Guys, do you consider supporting PowerPC then?

 

[SnowLeoMac]

Thanks a lot for your work, this is such a wonderful piece of software! And this isn't just a great browser for Snow Leopard, but also for newer systems like El Capitan, which doesn't have new browsers apart from Chromium Legacy, which is fine but heavier than Interweb.

As far as I can tell, it works mostly fine. I've found that Language Packs doesn't work: the browser recognizes them as installed but nothing changes. And it would be nice if the Firefox Account sync worked, but I think it should be a bit tricky now that Mozilla is changing the login method.

Again, thanks a lot!

 

[wicknix]

And this isn't just a great browser for Snow Leopard, but also for newer systems like El Capitan, which doesn't have new browsers apart from Chromium Legacy

Just an FYI. There are plenty of browsers for 10.7 and above. Most use the same UXP back end, but the choices of user interface is what makes them different.

Cheers

 

[wicknix]

Guys, do you consider supporting PowerPC then?

Not me, no.

 

[SnowLeoMac]

Just an FYI. There are plenty of browsers for 10.7 and above. Most use the same UXP back end, but the choices of user interface is what makes them different.

Cheers

Yes, I've also used some of them and I'm very grateful for the effort their developers have put into these projects. Specially for your releases of Interweb, thanks a lot @wicknix!

 

[snowy moon]

Thank you guys, @Jazzzny & @wicknix ! New InterWeb works great! Even with last Nightly55 version, there were no crashes and freezes anymore. And now we have about_:_preferences#advanced back, really nice!

Though, yesterday I found a reproducible crash, whenever one tries to open a gitlab projects page
i.e. https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient browser crashes immediately.

Something that changed between N55 and new IW: vimeo videos, at least loaded as embedded video, do play in N55 but not in IW. Anyway, vimeo GUI is so slow/unusable, that I would rather download videos.

And finally, SnowLion is not obsolet Facebook pages do work in SnowLion, they do not load properly in N55/IW.

 

[Jazzzny]

Though, yesterday I found a reproducible crash, whenever one tries to open a gitlab projects page
i.e. https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient browser crashes immediately.

I was not able to reproduce this on my machine, however the 10.6 font renderer does not seem to like the default font (bunch of glyphs of missing). I'll see if I can implement something similar to TFF's font blacklist.

Something that changed between N55 and new IW: vimeo videos, at least loaded as embedded video, do play in N55 but not in IW. Anyway, vimeo GUI is so slow/unusable, that I would rather download videos.

I was not able to reproduce this either, however I noticed that the audio backend upgrade made the audio stuttering much worse with certain codecs. It'll be reverted in the next release.

And finally, SnowLion is not obsolet Facebook pages do work in SnowLion, they do not load properly in N55/IW.

I was able to reproduce this, overriding the useragent to that of Firefox 52 fixes it. I'll add this override in the next release.

 

[B S Magnet]

Notably, I've managed to enable out of the box color emoji support, meaning that you'll be able to see any emoji on any website without any extra fonts installed.

View attachment 2359174

I am sort of dying to know how you figured out colour emoji rendering, in browser, even when one runs “Interweb Nightly” (how I named it in my /Applications, to distinguish it from Interweb and Nightly), even when running the browser in Snow Leopard. 🧐

(Yes, I see the inverse square letter glyphs in my signature didn’t render, but nevertheless impressed the monocle one did, and in colour.)

 

[Jazzzny]

I am sort of dying to know how you figured out colour emoji rendering, in browser, even when one runs “Interweb Nightly” (how I named it in my /Applications, to distinguish it from Interweb and Nightly), even when running the browser in Snow Leopard. 🧐

Many years ago, Mozilla implemented some color font rendering workarounds for Windows XP-7 as those operating systems don't support color glyphs either. However, it seems like they forgot about 10.6, likely because of the much smaller userbase. After poking around the codebase, I found that all of the features that are used to support the workaround rendering were present in the macOS port, so I was able to enable the color rendering workaround without much difficulty.

Add support for color emoji on 10.6 · Jazzzny/basilisk55-snowleopard@09595ca

InterWeb - UXP Web Browser for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. - Add support for color emoji on 10.6 · Jazzzny/basilisk55-snowleopard@09595ca

github.com

 

[B S Magnet]

Many years ago, Mozilla implemented some color font rendering workarounds for Windows XP-7 as those operating systems don't support color glyphs either. However, it seems like they forgot about 10.6, likely because of the much smaller userbase. After poking around the codebase, I found that all of the features that are used to support the workaround rendering were present in the macOS port, so I was able to enable the color rendering workaround without much difficulty.

Add support for color emoji on 10.6 · Jazzzny/basilisk55-snowleopard@09595ca

InterWeb - UXP Web Browser for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. - Add support for color emoji on 10.6 · Jazzzny/basilisk55-snowleopard@09595ca

github.com

Thank you for the rundown!

I’m still kind of impressed they manage to make it work at all.

An inspection of the nested 'Twemojimozilla.ttf' in the application directory, when added as a system font, offers font alternatives in the system character menu (see attached), but each of the glyphs are visually blank (alongside several other system fonts which, for the most common of emojis, render them as monochrome glyphs). This also includes the use of Quivira and/or Symbola, which are monochrome fonts purpose-designed to render emojis on pre-Lion Macs.

I’m guessing there must be a library within the mozilla source code which works in tandem with twemojimozilla.ttf to synthesize the rendering of emoji glyphs (and in colour) — with the changes in code you linked to being the call-outs to activate those.

 

[Eccofonic]

Before I try using it, does the new Interweb take over the old Interweb profile folder or does it create a new one?