WebGL on older Mac OS X versions (say 10.4)

Question

Not really a programming related question but...

I'd like very much to experiment with WebGL on my spare time. My current 'spare time' machine is a MacBook running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.xx) and I'm unable to find a new browser supporting this OS. Firefox dropped support, Chrome too, and Safari idem.

I read somewhere that this is due to a Quicktime bug that Apple won't fix.

Does anyone have more information on this issue ?

Does anyone have a clue or track to find a running implementation of WebGL on Mac OS X 10.4 ?

Cheers,

Answer 1

I know a fellow who is maintaining a Firefox 4 port to OS X 10.4.
Check out http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

Edit: Unfortunately I've just found out that this doesn't quite fulfil your main reason for wanting Firefox 4.
From the dev's site:

OpenGL support is presently disabled in 10.4Fx. This is Apple's fault, as Mozilla requires non-power-of-two texture sizes, which require OpenGL 2. Unfortunately, PPC Tiger does not support OpenGL 2 at all, and only a subset of cards support it in PPC Leopard (the really irritating part is that Intel Tiger does have OpenGL 2, and OpenGL 2 came out in 2004!). It may be enabled in the future for those handful of configurations on Leopard, but this won't benefit the majority of users. Note that many graphics features will work just fine; they just won't be hardware-accelerated.

Answer 2

If you can get a build of Firefox which has WebGL to run, but don't have a GPU that supports OpenGL ES 2.0, you might want to try setting the "webgl.osmesalib" about:config option. Even simple programs will probably run at a flip-book frame rate however.