The Firefox browser has been ported to the new Intel-based Mac OS X platform with the assistance of Apple. Firefox developer and Mozilla Foundation employee Josh Aas said the Mozilla team built on Apple’s preliminary development work in bringing the browser across to the platform, which is scheduled for rollout to consumers by mid-next year.
Heh. *I’m* still waiting to make it to Intel based Macs. I was never a fan of the idea, but I’m not too likely to buy one of the current PPC based ones now, despite the fact that software support is supposed to be around for them for a while. I just don’t see much point moving to a dying branch of a wonderful platform
So for now existing software is being ported from PPC to Intel… but what about when new software is written? Will companies port it over to the PPC hardware and not just Intel? How long do I have before there is no more software for my PPC Mac?
you do realize that IBM and apple still have a fiar ammount of time on their contract, and in addition to that, IBM plans on realeasing a dual core g5 soon so.. ppc still has a little life left in it and as long as ppc can do better on the high end, i think apple will milk it as long as they can….. at least for a while till intel catches up on the high end.
Is Darwin = MacOS for Intel?
Where to buy powerfull Mac “sunflower”?
I realize that PPC still has life left in it, but from what I’m seeing so far, PPC based Macs do not. Also IIRC, new software is supposed to be written for both platforms for the next few years at least, and it’s just my own personal opinion that’s driven me to this decision to not buy another Mac until they are Intel based.
I prefer PPC to x86 (though I’ve nothing bad to say about AMD’s 64 bit chips), and I am slightly worried that Intel based Macs might be more susceptible to things like buffer overflows with the move. I can only hope that the chips that Apple will be using will have something like AMD64’s NX bit to compensate for this.
darwin is the underlieing operating system, it has nothing to do with the UI, darwin is to OSX as dos is to windows or linux is to kde
Darwin is basically a BSD/Mach clone that OSX runs on top of
Lol. The lack of x86 drivers is the olny thing that’s kept me from running Darwin on my x86 boxes. That soon will change
Porting Firefox, that’s great. I just don’t see much point in it, since a) OS X already has Safari, b) Intel Macs are like a year away and c) hardly anyone uses Firefox on OS X.
What I’m more interested is an interview with Jobs about the switch. For 20 years he was convincing the world PPC is a superior platform…
In dog years? 🙂
Certain sites* won’t work with Safari/WebCore
*Most annoyingly, this includes the config pages for some US Robotics routers, which consequently can’t be set up without Firefox. This is particularly bad with the DSL routers, as you need to configure a web connection to get the browser that you need to configure the.. err.. web connection.
Got over Euro 500,- discount today when purchasing a brand new PB 15″ for the business here, including: Superdrive, 1.67 Ghz, 1.5ghz memory, radeon dual … all at a regular Apple dealer. They also got lovely iMacs for sale (starting at euro 999 for a EoL 17″).
Ever wanted a PPC? This is your chance!
If your mom wants a computer to mail you with, you could do far worse than get her a PPC iMac. It will be a long, long time before it’ll be obsolete as to be unusable (things like web browser plugins may be a problem after a few years, but firefox will probably always build on PPC. Email standards don’t change so Mail should be OK. The reliability is proven…
And no virus writer is going to target a shrinking-market section of the OSX userbase, so she’ll be safe.
Porting Firefox, that’s great. I just don’t see much point in it, since a) OS X already has Safari, b) Intel Macs are like a year away and c) hardly anyone uses Firefox on OS X.
Firefox keeps getting better and better. It’s a great addiction to using Safari.
Thank you Firefox Team!
Porting Firefox, that’s great. I just don’t see much point in it
The point is clear and simple, and was clearly stated in the article:
“Apple employees got Firefox running on an Intel Mac for the sake of using it as a demonstration of what it takes to port a complex application. After the demo, they sent me patches,” he wrote on his blog.”
Just read the actual article before commenting.
Firefox keeps getting better and better. It’s a great addiction to using Safari.
I was under the impression that Firefox isn’t well integrated into OS X and most people use Camino.
Just read the actual article before commenting.
What if I did? Let me extend my question – Porting Firefox, that’s great. I just don’t see much point in it. Why not port Camino?
> a) OS X already has Safari,
Great Logic – nobody needs Firefox since there is Safari! Just a small addition: There have been several Operating Systems for Intel CPUs before OS X – consequence?
> b) Intel Macs are like a year away
Apple did this as a demonstration how easy such a port can be.
> c) hardly anyone uses Firefox on OS X.
Yes, you’re right. Nobody uses Firefox on OS X because there is Safari. But wait – what about all these extensions, does really nobody use them?
> I just don’t see much point in it, […]
I noticed!
Porting Firefox, that’s great. I just don’t see much point in it, since a) OS X already has Safari, b) Intel Macs are like a year away and c) hardly anyone uses Firefox on OS X.
I think the point is that during the one year of development they would like to test and use Firefox. I think there are more people using Firefox then you think.
>>For 20 years he was convincing the world PPC is a superior platform…
Still is.
Great, now how about getting firefox to run worth a damn on the current line of macs? I prefer it to safari because of the extensions and tweakability but It does seem to lock up very often. Way more often than it does under linux and windows.
umm.. OK, I guess it needs to be slowed down for some of the readers?
Jobs make the point that the move was because Intel has the road map, IBM does not.
Business needs certainty and Intel provides this, IBM does not.
notice, If Jobs thought that PPC was crap the Top of the lines would not be getting refreshes and the role over would be all at once. Instead, he is starting with the Laptops and Low-end desktops and moving in to the high end workstations and servers in the 2nd year.
So for now existing software is being ported from PPC to Intel… but what about when new software is written? Will companies port it over to the PPC hardware and not just Intel? How long do I have before there is no more software for my PPC Mac?
In the case of Firefox (and all other free software), there will be a PowerPC version for as long as somebody is willing to maintain it. This could be a short time or a long time. You are free to try maintaining it yourself or paying somebody to. Or moving to a different product.
The precedent here is Mac OS 9. The Mozilla Foundation couldn’t find anybody to maintain the Mozilla suite (or port Firefox) for Mac OS 9, so now they do not offer Mac OS 9 support. They did ask for volunteers; nobody stepped up. If you want Mac OS X/PowerPC support to stay, make sure somebody maintains it.
(For non-free software, you’re at the mercy of the vendor.)
Read the rest of Josh’s blog at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/josh/ – he talks about how the Mozilla Foundation wants to make Firefox a “first-class” application for Mac OS X, getting the same amount of polish as Camino (as well as sharing a lot more code with it).
I wonder how much $$$ Intel paid/discounted Mac to use their chips.
I mean, really. Wouldn’t it have made a LOT more sense to use AMD infrastructure? They are – after all – superiour cpu’s, faster, lower voltage, etc, etc.
Maybe AMD needs to subpeona Apple/Jobs, etc…
Porting Firefox, that’s great. I just don’t see much point in it, since a) OS X already has Safari, b) Intel Macs are like a year away and c) hardly anyone uses Firefox on OS X.
What I’m more interested is an interview with Jobs about the switch. For 20 years he was convincing the world PPC is a superior platform…
There was once an article on some site (don’t think it was posted here) where a bunch of Mac-centric sites posted their stats, and Firefox was 3% behind Safari in usage. Camino didn’t even come close. That’s less of a gap then between IE and Firefox on Windows, so I guess it is time to drop Windows support in Firefox too, no?
darwin is to OSX as dos is to windows
It’s amazing that this comment didn’t immediately attract a wave of flames. Quite refreshing actually.
Oops! Did I bring that up?
Someone got Firefox to build on a X11 enabled POSIX Compliant UNIX varient. SIMPLY AMAZING.
two reasons.
Ability to supply the need and the fact that AMD and Intel go back and forth in performance and top marks.
Mac Firefox isn’t an X11 app.
5-8 years.
All of you are forgetting something. Software will come as universal binaries, which runs on BOTH. There’s also Rosetta which can do ppc <=> x86 <=> ppc emulation.
Even the _FIRST_ Intel based Mac is 2 years back, after 3 (!) years whole lineup is planned to be Intel based. So there’s no hurry, and PPC will live still very long.
You are kind of forgetting that there’s install base of 20 million users of PPC based Macs. Apple, nor anyone else, isn’t expecting them all to run to stores when x86 macs hit the shelves.
This is one of the many things I love about Mac OS X. Just think about how much more difficult it would be to pull this PPC to x86 move if Apple had chosen to (for example) go with ELF instead of Mach-O
Even more OT: Darwin releases used to be done this way; the whole fat/universal binary thing until the most recent release. I am still seriouly confused as to why there is now one CD image for each platform…
I’m amazed that the type of CPU used in the Macs are such a big deal. Most Mac users i know don’t even know what the CPU does. But switching to Intel? Whoa! Never!
It’s like people think Macs will go Windows-ish all of a sudden. No, Mac OS X won’t be based on DOS instead of Darwin all of a sudden. The trojans and crap that comes with Windows doesn’t automatically come with the Intel processor, it’s because of Windows. (Linux is considered safe, right? Runs on Intel too).
Anyway, cool that they got a free porting of Firefox. I work at a company that mainly uses Macs and most people here use Firefox. I have yet to come across someone who uses Camino, the occasional sentimental IE5-user exists though. Just thought i’d drop that little piece of information for those of you who were under the impression that this was an unneccessary porting.
What I’m more interested is an interview with Jobs about the switch. For 20 years he was convincing the world PPC is a superior platform…
Steve Jobs has only been back at Apple since 1997. He had nothing to do with the unnecessary decision (in hindsight anyway) to abandon the 68k and switch to PPC. He did his fair share of PPC hyping though.
There’s also Rosetta which can do ppc <=> x86 <=> ppc emulation.
It only does ppc => x86 emulation, not the other way around.
Hello…I guess GuestPC [http://www.lismoresystems.com/index.html] does that right now…ok I’, not completely familiar with it, but I guess since it can emulate Windows, it must be able to emulate X86 on PPC. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I guess that’s no big deal.
The real question is however: When will I (we) finally be able to see MacOSX-X86 running emulated on a vanilla Intel or AMD X86 machine? Why is no one working on either an emulation of the Apple X86-Hardware or trying to crack the copy protection on Mac OS X for Intel Developers (I’ve read it checks the hardware and says Darwin doesn’t support it, although the standard Darwin does) and ports drivers from BSD to Darwin?
Ok I know I’m demanding a lot, but it surely would be cool…
It only does ppc => x86 emulation, not the other way around.
It probably doesn’t do it right now, but technically it _can_ do it, and the product it’s based on, _does_ it.
On my iBook I use Firefox on OSX 10.3.x , for several reasons which make it better than Safari for me
1) AdBlock
2) Greasemonkey
3) Ability to share bookmarks more easily with my Win32 machines
However as recently announced the KHTML guys are trying to add XUL capabilities to their rendering engine. This could eventually (in a scale of years) lead to Safari being able to run Firefox extensions, at which time I expect I shall switch back.
I’ll probably be using an intel-based iBook by then, of course 🙂
It only does ppc => x86 emulation, not the other way around.
X86 instruction sets are a lot easier to emulate on a PPC than PPC is on a P4. It’ll probably happen – maybe even by third-party devs.
Ok I found this page today: http://www.osx86.classicbeta.com
Looks like some people are at least working on getting the Developer Preview to run on a normal hardware…but they are having problems with the graphic drivers, as the GUI doesnt start. They are also lacking the developer DVD, hope they get it soon…
“c) hardly anyone uses Firefox on OS X”
One notable exception to that rule (at least notable to me), would be my wife, who thinks Firefox on OS X PPC is the bomb. Adds stripped out via CSS, no pop-ups, tabbed browsing, fast engine, cross-platform, open source, what’s not to love?