Friday, February 11, 2011

Coke is it. I mean, beta 12

Beta 12 is going to be the last Firefox 4 beta, so it will be the last TenFourFox beta too. There will be a couple extra 10.4Fx specific fixes, hopefully.

It's unclear when Fx4/Gecko 2 will get its own hg branch. Once it does, this will start the countdown to see if we jump to Firefox 5 with them on mozilla-central. Remember, it's not guaranteed that we will retain compatibility, and there is always the risk they could require a 10.5-only feature at any time, though a serious widget library incompatibility isn't likely to happen until they require 10.6.

Once Fx4 moves to a stable branch, changesets will be issued against that stable branch, and the unstable branch will be idle for an indeterminate period until Firefox 5 goes through a sufficient number of betas. More about that when it actually happens, and knowing Mozilla, I don't see this happening much before summertime.

By the way, Flash 10.2 came out, and as threatened it is Intel-only. It is unclear if there will be any more 10.1 fixes, and to even get 10.1 you have to find their archived Flash Player versions page. I'd advise you don't hold your breath over continued support. Flash Player 9 has been completely deprecated, so if you must use Flash, use Flash 10.1.

10 comments:

  1. Nice nice job. Work perfectly on my iBook G4 1.33/10/5/8, my MDD 2x1.25/10.5.8 and my G4 2x450/10.4.11.

    But, how can I make TFF speak french ?

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  2. 10.4Fx has slightly different strings than Firefox due to features that were changed or reworked (mostly UI and the automatic updates infrastructure), so regular Firefox language packs don't work. When I get the features stabilized, I will be soliciting community help to translate the few missing strings, along the lines of the Classilla translation project that is occurring now.

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  3. hi,
    how can I compile TenForFox on GNU/Linux PPC (e.g. on CRUX PPC)?
    Is it possible?

    thanks a lot for your nice work!
    cheers,
    Nell

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  4. Actually, for PPC Linux it should simply compile as is. Most of the PPC-specific compiler problems have since been worked out; as long as CRUX can meet the lib prereqs (I imagine it does), it should be able to build and run stock Fx 4.

    If you want to use the nanojit, you can apply the patch from bug 624164 but that only adds the code; you need to enable it in the build by changing the configure.in for js/. You can model it on 10.4Fx's if you like; look at the changesets for how I did it in Mac OS X.

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  5. thank you. I'll do a build try on CRUX PPC as soon as possible.

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  6. I'm trying to build a MintPPC Build. I'm just, for the moment, at hg clone http://mozilla....

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  7. FF4 do not build out of the box on linux ppc. Something dealing with IPC. Do I need to apple TFF Patches ?

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  8. No, but you probably need --disable-ipc in your .mozconfig. I don't see why it wouldn't build, but IPC is not strictly required (in fact, TenFourFox is built without IPC, since it won't build on 10.4).

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  9. I succeeded to build FF4 Beta 12 on my G4 466 Linux (MintPPC). But where can i find the mozconfig files you used to build TenFourFox ? I want to try to optimize the build for the G4 7400.

    And what about the specific patch applied ? I tried hg import, but this give me errors...

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  10. The mozconfig files are in the changesets (you would hg import them sequentially; see the build instructions on the Google Code wiki).

    However, if you just want the build config and compiler options, pick the desired version, run it on the Mac and do about:buildconfig -- this will show you most of what you need to know.

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