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 Mozilla foundation employee Josh Aas write on his blog that while the patches were out of date by the time Apple sent them to him, they were still useful.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."

Comments

c'mon, submitters...!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

in a nutshell

[byolinux]

Mac OS X != BSD.

Yes, it has bits of BSD under the hood, but it's not just another BSD.

Re:Firefox on Intel-Based Unix for quite some time

[squiggleslash]

Mac OS X may have some BSD roots, but it resembles a BSD as much as GNU/Linux does. No, it resembles BSD less than GNU/Linux, at least for desktop apps. Desktop apps are bundled within a set of directories called a .app, the root of which is entirely relocatable, and the whole of which contains binaries for each platform (I assume, I'm guessing "Universal Binaries" are done the same way as they were for NEXTSTEP), metadata, resources, etc.

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)

Re:Patches???

[rufo]

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.

Ah, gotta love ZDNet commentrary...

[R.Mo_Robert]

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).

Re:Microsoft and Firefox ..

[mattkime]

um, actually apple has released the darwin code - its fully open source - they didn't steal, they gave back

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/

Re:Cynical

[1110110001]

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

Re:Is it faster?!

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.