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Firefox for Intel Macs Planned for March
daria42 writes "Although there are unofficial builds already available, Mozilla will release an official version of Firefox for Intel Mac OS X in March, developer Josh Aas says. There are only a couple of minor bugs to work through, such as Flash and Java support."
Camino is seriously a lot nicer gecko for mac than firefox. It actually integrates with OS X and it uses Cocoa. From a usability standpoint is much further ahead.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Why make a Mozilla for x86 Macintosh and a Mozilla for PowerPC Macintosh? Make a universal binary, that's what they are there for aren't they? I mean relying on rosetta for a few things like flash and java can't be that big of deal, it's not like the bottleneck in a browser is the browser itself, it's more commonly the pipe feeding the browser. Isn't the point of Rosetta that Mozilla Firefox as it stands now runs just fine on a MacBook or iMac regardless of the proc under the covers?
Also most of the user community doesn't care that at 10.4.4 there is a version that runs on an Intel processor and a PowerPC Processor, so when we download trying to decide between Mozilla Firefox for Macintosh OS X (PowerPC) and Macintosh OS X (Intel) isnt' something we should have to decide. The ability to make univseral binaries is there, why not take advantage of it? Why create yet another file the world has to mirror and worry about which is the right one?
Just a thought.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/new-for-you/t op-sellers/-/pc/all/pc/0/1/1/1/104-6461076-7991161
I believe the problem as for x86 is again third party software such as flash and Java. Historically neither have had 64bit binaries from their vendor.
:( Methinks they'll only make the effort when 64bit Vista arrives.
For Java, Sun has said, in the short term at least, they won't go to the trouble of releasing the necessary software for 64bit - Java Plugin and Java Web Start. IIRC, the method of installation for 64bit Solaris (SPARC) is to install the 32bit JRE (which has the plugin and web start) and then install the 64bit JRE over top.
This stifles usage of x86-64 with a 64bit OS if a 32bit compatibility module is needed. Too many hoops to jump through. AMD have had Athlon 64 for how many years now???
Flash and Java support are NOT minor bugs.
When a developer calls a bug minor, it doesn't necessarily mean the end user impact is minor, it often means the bug itself is minor, i.e. relatively simple to fix.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
and as the parent of young 'uns, I've (or rather my oldest son (7)) been discovering how much there is out there in terms of kids flash based games. and not just the old yahoo! type space invaders games of yore, full blown stuff a while back you would have had to pay for. one of my oldest's favorite site lately appears to be this: http://club.lego.com/eng/games/ , there many more (pbs kids, kids wb, tvo kids, etc...) mind you, I have noticed that flash on safari here (osx on a g4 with a gig of ram) really can bring the system to a crawl (haven't used firefox on osx much, though extensively on other platforms)
Had Apple released their hardware closer to when they said they were going to, we would probably have been ready immediately. That was the plan :)
That said, I'm happy to get off the Intel developer kit and onto production equipment and a solid OS release a few months early.
-Josh Aas