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Firefox Ported to Mac OS X for Intel
daria42 writes "Mozilla Firefox has been ported to Mac OS X for Intel, with the assistance of Apple who provided some preliminary patches. Mozilla foundation employee Josh Aas write on his blog that while the patches were out of date by the time Apple sent them to him, they were still useful. "The Apple patches were extremely valuable because they did a lot of work for us and at least pointed us right to many of the problem areas instead of us having to figure out what we need to do," he wrote."
Could we please stop linking to worthless ZDNet already?
Here's the original weblog post. Much more informative. And you don't need to worry about slashdotting it either, Mozillazine is quite used to us by now, what with an average of hitting the slashdot frontpage about once a week.
Some background on Josh, btw, while I'm waiting for my timeout to be able to post again to expire: he was hired by the Mozilla Foundation specifically to work on making Firefox better for the Mac.
Dammit, how long do I have to wait to post as AC three times in a row??? 17 minutes already. Geeze... It's easier to karma-whore than to just try and post some useful things.
Mac OS X != BSD.
Yes, it has bits of BSD under the hood, but it's not just another BSD.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Reading between the lines, I think the issue is actually that Firefox.app isn't, apparently, compiled within Apple's Xcode framework, instead being built using the same Makefiles etc as a Unix app. This means the build scripts and Makefiles would have needed to be adapted to cross-compile for the additional platform, presumably automatically (ie both platforms, OS X/PPC and OS X/ix86, would have had to be compiled for at once.) Josh says that an Intel Fink was essential to getting the project going, which is why I'm assuming this is the case.
That kind of modification isn't trivial. It's not a matter of just grepping for any gcc line with -mpowerpc (or whatever)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
He never said that. A few developers with extremely well-written apps have said that, but Steve Jobs pretty specifically stated that Java apps will require nothing, Cocoa apps will require a few days of work before full functionality, and most Carbon apps on Xcode will take up to a few weeks. This all assumes you're using Xcode; if you're using Codewarrior, you must migrate to Xcode before you can even start.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
You'll have fresh native copies of Firefox and [competing Mozilla-based Mac browser] Camino for your shiny new Intel Macs when or soon after they come out."
I wouldn't exactly call Camino "competing," unless you'd also say the same of the suite. They're both Mozilla projects; it's not like Camino is made by some competitor. Camino would have less of a reason to exist if Firefox behaved more natively, but, while it's improved, you can still tell that it's not quite there yet (e.g., buttons and other controls on Web page forms and probably even more things that I don't realize coming from a Windows background).
R.Mo
um, actually apple has released the darwin code - its fully open source - they didn't steal, they gave back
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Of course, it is about commerce. No reason to be cynical. It is not immoral to work in your own best interest.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Hmm. I am looking at the verbose text boot screen for OSX and it clearly says BSD and has the regents for University or Califronia text displayed .
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I guess it's because Safari is not that important. It's just a webbrowser. The important part is webkit. It can be used for more than just a browser. I.e. Dashboard or Editors or even the history of AdiumX.
And many webdevelopers have a Mac. With Firefox and Opera you've to important cross platform browser. They know how important choice is and they know every Mac user uses webkit - the don't have to use Safari.
b4n
The Apple open firmware is fully documented, as is the language it can execute (forth). Just do a google search. You'll even find games that you can execute and play from the OF. Try that with a IBM (clone) BIOS chip :P.
"do you have any idea how Aqua draws translucent windows or how their window manager works ?."
Why do you want to know, you can include all these effects in your app with XCode or whatever you use instead of having to write your own. Sure, it is closed source so you can't copy the code, is that your problem? And it isn't like you're limited to these effects.
It's not like "you don't want to know", no, it's "you don't need to know to do the same or more as on other platforms" which is very comfortable for users, pros and devs.
Sure, some hardware is closed, won't be easy to write drivers for another OS on that (e.g. Airport Extreme). If people still try while knowing that and then complain that isn't fair, well, then they're just idiot. Their choice, they shouldn't complain. That's way off topic though.
FireFox for MacIntel, nice. I think it will take long before I can try that one though, I'm not thinking of replacing my G4 for the coming 4 years, it's just 3 years old and still runs everything I want it to run. Hopefully they'll keep the PPC version up to date until I make the switch, they dropped OS 9 way too soon.
Firefox is simply fastest on Windows, period.
5 17
HOWEVER... the latest nightly builds (from the development branch that will eventually become Firefox 1.1) are much faster than the official 1.0.4 you are probably currently using. Also, if you have a newer G4 (PowerPC 744x/745x series... 1GHz or better "G4+") or a G5 you can grab an optimized build for even more performance.
Grab the G4 version here:
http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/
Grab the G5 version here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=256
As of this posting, the newest version for each is the 20050704 (July 4, 2005) build. I am posting this from the July 3 G4 version, it zooms compared to Safari here on OS X 10.4.1.
Metrowerks used to have an x86 compiler, but they sold all of the IP related to it a few months ago because they didn't think it was still a viable product.
So while Metrowerks could update their product so that devs don't have to abandon it for Xcode, it's unlikely that they will (as they'd either have to start from scratch again or rebuy their own IP, probably at a significant premium).
Try downloading the firefox installer from mozilla.org and using that version. The version in Ubuntu seems to have been screwed up somehow - I think it's the GNOME integration they added or something. The mozilla.org version is much faster on my system, and has much better font rendering.
No it won't. Microsoft dropped all IE development for the Mac when Safari came out.
That's not entirely true, they patched it through Puma, and EOLed it around Jaguar time I think, whenever Safari was released.
Mac OS X is the red-headed stepchild of Mozilla development. They know they have to take care of it, but it sometimes seems like they don't really want to.
For instance, Mozilla still uses QuickDraw for text rendering, which isn't accelerated by Quartz Extreme. There are bugs in the tab implementation which allow plugins to draw on the wrong tabs and steal keypresses from other pages. Finder comments and other features from Netscape Navigator 4 still haven't caught up. Etc. etc. etc.
This isn't to denigrate the "patches-welcome" approach, but to point out the focus of the Mozilla community, which isn't Mac OS X.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)