Slashdot Mirror
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 Mozilla foundation employee Josh Aas write on his blog that while the patches were out of date by the time Apple sent them to him, they were still useful.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."
Maybe i'm being cynical but it seems very much in Apple's interests to ensure that a vast quantity of popular software will work on their OS on the Intel platform.
It says more about basic commerce than support for Open Source software or the Mozilla Foundation etc.
Well, this news is somewhat special since the creator of the proprietary operating system (who also make a competing browser (yesyes, I know they use OSS there as well)) contributed to the development process.
This is not only great news for Mozilla, but excellent news for Safari, which draws a lot of technology from Mozilla.
My personal preference is actually Safari. I've tried all of the browsers available for OS X, and found the features Safari has to be pretty compelling. The ability to toggle on secure browsing (no cookies, caching, etc) is nifty, and all the little hooks into other OS X software really adds to the usefulness of it all.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I wonder about these sort of posts.
The core of OS X is open sourced. You can download it and look through the code, if you like. If you want to know, you can.
The hardware is hardly anything magical, despite the advertising. It's just about all standard stuff - ATA, DDR RAM, HyperTransport, PCI, PCI Express, USB, FireWire and so on. If you want to know, it's pretty simple to find out.
But if you want to change these things, you're in the black box world. But that wasn't your complaint, and I don't see many people who care about hacking inside their computer. A few geeks maybe (and I'm one, to some degree) but most people want to sit down, turn it on and use the thing. They don't want to pull it apart, recompile the OS, overclock the CPU or any other arcane process.
Apple's philosophy would be better put as "We're making it easier for you" rather than "You don't need to know." As we all learned in computer programming, hiding complexity is a *good thing* as it simplifies the processes that build upon it. Apple hide complexity, and don't try to appeal to all people.
Want a truly free OS? Go Linux.
Want an OS that covers about 90% of the market? Go Windows.
Want an OS that looks cool and seems fairly easy to get to grips with? Go Mac OS X.
Want an OS that is all things to all people? There is no such beast. Apple gives it a shot with Darwin, OS X, Aqua, Java, Unix development and porting, OS X development, a slew of 'big' apps and even some games. But will it appeal to everyone, from Slashdot to grandmothers?
Never.
I have a 2.2 ghz AMD box on my desk, and a 2x2ghz G5. The AMD has a gig of ram and Win2k, the G5 has 2g ram and OS X 10.4.
Firefox HAULS ASS on the Win32 box. It's visibly slower on OS X - the UI is sluggish, and rendering isn't nearly as snappy, using current versions of both. But mostly, the UI is sluggish.
I'm no coder, but the hows and the whys of it are, I'm sure, fairly easy to explain. Here's hoping!
>Depends on what you call "core". Darwin is BSD. Apple didn't open-source it - they took opensource code and used it.
Not exactly. NextStep was based on BSD, but it was based on the Mach kernel, and they diverged from the BSDs in many significant ways as the OS moved forward from NextStep through OpenStep to Mac OS X Server 1.x. With OS X as they opened Darwin they did a lot of merging with Free/Open/NetBSD after that to get up to speed with current libraries and make things more standardized. But when they Open Sourced Darwin it was very much it's own OS unlike any other in many respects and (for better and for worse) and chock-full of proprietary bits (unique kernel interfaces, device drivers, filesystem drivers, et al.)
>Tell me - do you have any idea how Aqua draws translucent windows or how their window manager works ?
Actually Apple does cover a lot of info about how the window manager works, how it composites shadowing, how the back buffering works, etc. to the degree that a developer writing code that uses the WM would need to know to write an app correctly, and the Apple devs on the mailing lists have been pretty good about helping out in the less well documented areas (in my experience). If there is something in particular you are looking for that isn't documented there are channels you can turn to, some free (lists), some not (ADC).
>Have you any idea about what partition system an apple box would use (so that you can dual boot Linux) ?
man pdisk
OF is an open standard, and setting boot params is well documented. The move to Intel makes things more mysterious, but I am sure they they are not with their implementation so that side isn't documented yet, and we can only specualate where they are headed.
>You miss my point completely. My point was that Apple has always been about proprietary magic.
I think you overstate your case. I really think Apple is a conglomerate of different engineering teams with different technical and marketing decisions dictating how open they could be. At WWDC I have talked to a number of Apple engineers working on various parts of the system who would like to open that are currently closed, and they have given various accounts as to why they haven't, some technical, some marketing driven. Also, don't forget that Apple does license some hardware and software from other parties that make it impossible for them to be totally open even if they wanted to be.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
Beneath the appealing, easy-to-use interface of Mac OS X is a rock-solid, UNIX-based foundation called Darwin that is engineered for stability, reliability, and performance. Darwin integrates a number of technologies, most importantly Mach 3.0, operating-system services based on FreeBSD 5, high-performance networking facilities, and support for multiple, integrated file systems. Because the design of Darwin is highly modular, you can dynamically add such things as device drivers, networking extensions, and new file systems.
Join the Free Software Foundation