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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 Mozilla foundation employee Josh Aas write on his blog that while the patches were out of date by the time Apple sent them to him, they were still useful.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."
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.
A large, but cross-platform program with lean (mostly) platform independant code has been ported to Yet Another Platform(tm)!
Anyway, cudos to Apple for pointing Josh into the right direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.