I have an iPad 4 stuck on iOS 10, and tested running the Firefox Docker container on the Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 4. It does work, and quite fast considering this work around, though with some caveats as some widgets do not work.
I also written the detailed steps for installing it as it was not straightforward.
Install Portainer on Home Assistant, following its installation steps as described.
Open Portainer web interface. Click on “primary”, “Containers” and “Add container” button. Type in a name like “Firefox”. On Image field, paste “jlesage/firefox”. In Port Mapping, add mapping to 5800 to 5800 (tcp) and 5900 to 5900 (tcp and udp, i.e. three entries). Click on Deploy the container. Note that it is not ready yet.
Once it has started, click on the container you have created, i.e. Firefox. Click on Duplicate/Edit button. Scroll down to Advanced container settings. Click on Env tab. Change variables DISPLAY_WIDTH to “1024” and DISPLAY_HEIGHT to “768”. (That’s half of iPad 4 resolution, a bit blocky but good enough for it to be faster.) Then, scroll up, click on Deploy the container button and Replace on the modal that appears.
On iPad, open App Store, search for “Remote Ripple”. That is a VNC client that works on the iPad 4, so supports iOS 10, at least. Open the app, create a connection, connect to it, then click on the keyboard icon to enter the login and to send a F11 keypress for it to enter on full screen.
Apart from these widgets not loading, other constraint is that you cannot tap hold to change brightness.
(I had another gif to show that but apparently new users can’t post more then three items in a row.)
Finally, it didn’t affect much of the performance / load on the Raspberry Pi 4. Processor is on 4-5% and memory usage on 38%.
On the other hand, it seems that having Portainer installed on the HAOS blocks updates from installing, so I took it down after testing and making sure that it is indeed feasible, but it is probably easier to just get a new, cheap Android tablet to begin with. That might be easier - and you won’t have such restriction - if you manage the OS that Home Assistant is installed.
