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Firefox Ported to Mac OS X for Intel

Posted by Hemos on from the already-underway dept.

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 Mozilla foundation employee Josh Aas write on his blog that while the patches were out of date by the time Apple sent them to him, they were still useful.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

3 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. c'mon, submitters...! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Firefox on Intel-Based Unix for quite some time by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Informative
    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)

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. Re:Cynical by 1110110001 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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