
TenFourFox 38.7.0 available – thanks, Mozilla, for making the web little-endian - bobajeff
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2016/03/3870-available-plus-thanks-mozilla-for.html?m=1
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gsnedders
With regards to endianness of the web: this goes back to the original Khronos
spec for typed arrays where the _only_ view was _machine endianness_. At least
now there are both machine, big and little endian views…

Exposing machine endianness was largely criticised by Mozilla and Opera people
(AFAIK, only the latter were still really shipping on big-endian platforms).
It was largely motivated by a desire to ensure WebGL could have good
performance when copying data on all machines. Of course, plenty of us saw how
that would end: everyone testing only on their hardware (which would
inevitably be little-endian), and nothing working on big-endian hardware.

Sadly, the majority of the WG didn't really care, given the only big-endian
stuff they cared about was things like TVs where they only cared about (web-
platform based) widgets, and they only cared about the WebGL case, and didn't
believe anyone would use them for anything else…

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fsiefken
I installed TenFourFox on a friend's powerpc 2 months ago. The older browsers
gave issues with certain sites. It's great people put effort in maintaining a
crucial piece of software on older hardware which is still capable enough.

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brudgers
TenFourFox homepage:
[http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/](http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/)

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mwcampbell
Why does anyone find it worthwhile to put this much effort into supporting
this dead platform (PowerPC-based Mac)? Why not just let it go, acknowledge
that the world has gone all little-endian, and buy a newer (but not
necessarily new) computer?

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fractallyte
My mom has an old PPC iBook (from 2003!). It's still working perfectly. It
looks clean and white. She can edit documents and spreadsheets, check email,
peruse photos. I've even fitted an IDE SSD. Why dump it for a newer 'better'
model?

TenFourFox was the crucial factor - by providing a connection to modern
internet - in our decision to maintain this old machine. My mom's happy, I'm
happy! (And sincere thanks to "Contributors to TenFourFox.")

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gsnedders
> Why dump it for a newer 'better' model?

Because no PPC release of OS X receives security fixes.

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pdkl95
That's why software needs to become public domain if it's abandoned. We
already do this for everything else - if you abandon land, you can lose it
through "adverse possession". If you abandon your car, someone else can claim
title.

When you abandon your stuff, society will eventually let someone else clean up
the mess you left.

