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 Mozilla foundation employee Josh Aas write on his blog that while the patches were out of date by the time Apple sent them to him, they were still useful.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

Firefox on Intel-Based Unix for quite some time

[hubertf]

After Firefox runs on Intel-based BSD-systems (NetBSD, ...) for quite a while, I wonder what the big obstacles were that prevented FF from working. Or was this GUI-only?

- Hubert

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

[Uncle Asad]

Most of what was posted/discussed publicly in Bugzilla and Bonsaiseemed to be some endian issues in old Mac-specific code (that evolved from the Classic-era codebase) and updating the build system to use the latest version of Xcode. Whether there were more issues not discussed publicly, I don't know.

Microsoft and Firefox ..

[Gopal.V]

Even Microsoft wants FireFox to run well on Longhorn . Is it any surprise that everyone wants their latest hyped product to run FireFox ?.

This is like the age old - does it play ogg yet ? check in that feature check list. Apple is really more interested in supporting what feeds the Apple is Cool vibe.

Behind all the cool design and fancy colors, Apple is still an opaque black box. Their essential motto could be termed as you don't need to know - which is very attractive to the layman user , but abhorrent to a true computer engineer.

Re:Microsoft and Firefox ..

[Gopal.V]

> The core of OS X is open sourced. You can download it and look through the code, if you like.

Depends on what you call "core". Darwin is BSD. Apple didn't open-source it - they took opensource code and used it. Not that there's anything wrong with it - but to say Apple opensourced Darwin is just not fair. I'd suggest you look before OS X to get an idea of how apple deals with tech docs about their products. Tell me - do you have any idea how Aqua draws translucent windows or how their window manager works ?.

> 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.

These are *interfaces* - these are not what I'm talking about. Have a look at the apple's firmware. Have you any idea about what partition system an apple box would use (so that you can dual boot Linux) ?. They just mention that it is different - that's all.

> But if you want to change these things, you're in the black box world.

You miss my point completely. My point was that Apple has always been about proprietary magic. Ever since they got bitten by Bill G and friends , they seem almost too paranoid to release proper documentation about what goes on inside. They seem to be under the illusion that they will lose their market the way IBM lost theirs (by making clone computer market possible).

Re:Cynical

[cowscows]

Double interesting because Apple also makes their own browser. Safari is free as well, but still, FireFox is a direct competitor to one of Apple's own applications. Yet Apple still sees the value in helping them out.

Re:Patches???

[rufo]

True. Essentially what Apple is saying that you need to be on GCC.

Technically speaking, Metrowerks could incorporate an x86 compiler into Codewarrior... however, seeing as how they sold off all their x86 compiler IP, that seems very unlikely, and Codewarrior has been slowly transitioning from *the* way to code Mac OS apps to more of an embedded/console development platform anyway, that is, when they haven't been running the company into the ground...

This MacSlash thread goes into some rather sobering details.

Re:Is it faster?!

[ciroknight]

It's a fair comparison, but at the same time it also really isn't. Lemme explain what I mean.

Mac OS X is a BSD-variant, making it technically a UNIX-compatible OS. While people argue that this makes it better for porting Apps from Linux to Mac OS X, it's not always the case.

It's especially not the case with the Mozilla toolkit. For some reason, I've found that *all* XUL toolkit-based programs run like molassas on Mac OS X. There's still a lot of work to be done in this area especially.

A more fair comparison would have been Camino to Firefox. While technically not the same code, the Windows version of Firefox has been highly tuned for Windows. The unix/Mac OS X version of Firefox seems to lack this tuning all together (probably because in the end there are seventy bajillion different ways to draw something on a UNIX, and only one in Windows). Camino at least is optimized and built from the ground up with Cocoa instead of Firefox's Carbon interface. Million little inconsitances like this, but the point remains.

Camino is functionally identical to Firefox, it's just written to be platform compatible. Give it a shot.

Re:Cynical

[bursch-X]

It was in Panther, but when I did a clean install with Tiger it was gone.

This is a Good Thing(TM), IE Mac was neat at the time (it was much more standard compliant than its Windows counterpart), but now it has grown dusty and is causing too much trouble with CSS and it's too much hassle to support anyway.