Is this project dead?

[alexsch01]

No description provided.

[maximilianschmid]

Is there a way to sponsor this project? It really keeps a lot of old Mac usable - good for environment and users.

[Wowfunhappy]

Bluebox does accept sponsors at https://github.com/sponsors/blueboxd and it would be great if more people contributed! However, it won't necessarily make development go faster.

[donluca]

I'm a bit worried as well.

Looking at previous releases, those were all pretty bang on every two months or so.

Latest stable release was 124 on 15th of May and newest release was on 29th of May.

I'm still on High Sierra and can't update because I still have 32-bit apps and hardware with 32-bit drivers only, so Chromium Legacy has been really a godsend and I'd hate after all this time to have to switch to a Firefox equivalent.

[nodarkthings]

I'm still on High Sierra and can't update because I still have 32-bit apps and hardware with 32-bit drivers only, so Chromium Legacy has been really a godsend and I'd hate after all this time to have to switch to a Firefox equivalent.

Firefox ESR 115.x will be updated at least until march 2025 for 10.12+ and it works perfectly. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/115.18.0/system-requirements/
I still use chromium-legacy for speed but I rely on Firefox for security and stability.
There's another option that I'm currently considering: using browsers in a virtual machine while staying with your current MacOS; you can install any recent MacOS in the VM, but I think Debian is a better choice for longevity, as MacOS is deprecated after 3 years. It's a bit boring to install and customize apps on Linux, but in my experiments it's working very well, including sound and video. I'm using Parallels Desktop 18, but if you want a free solution you'll have to find an old VirtualBox version (I guess v6.x — 6.1.26 should work).

[donluca]

With all due respect, that's honestly a non-solution.
At best a worse alternative if Chromium Legacy won't be updated anymore.

I've tried Firefox several times and it has always proved troublesome with some websites not working or rendering correctly, not to mention that, in my experience, it has been consistently slower than Chromium.

Using a VM is even worse and, if I really had to, I'd probably go for a minimal Alpine Linux installation with a simple Window Manager and Chromium as Alpine would provide a very low overhead (a hundred of MB of RAM, give or take).
But the main issue with a VM is that RAM is not allocated dynamically and modern websites are a huge resource hog so I don't even know how I'd juggle that.

The "best" solution would be trying to run a modern Chromium browser for Windows in a Wine bottle, although that would come with its own host of issues and a noticeable performance hit.

In other words: I really hope blueboxd comes back and keeps updating this project as many people rely on it.

[ljmac]

On Mojave or later there is another option going forward: Orion. It's basically an up to date Safari with built in ad blocking and - incredibly - support for Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions! They don't all work, but most do. Sadly though it is still in beta and is quite buggy, plus it still has problems with several sites, although most of these can be mitigated with its compatibility mode and ability to assign different browser signatures to individual sites. It is also completely missing any kind of forms autofill, and on Mojave it has an annoying text editing bug. But all these problems should be rectified going forward. And it's probably the fastest browser on the planet. https://kagi.com/orion/