Saturday, July 21, 2012

14.0 is 14.0.1, war is peace, etc.

For those wondering where 14.0.1 is, you've got it; 14.0 and 14.0.1 are the same, with the version difference merely for concordance with mobile.

15 is mostly done (a fix to typed arrays and WebM, some JavaScript tweaks and a widget bug), so the question is now what to do about 16. What might happen instead is that there will be a formal 17 aurora, a formal 17 beta, and then 17, and skip 16 altogether; there doesn't look like there are many breaking changes in 16 and frankly it is far more important we guarantee we successfully reach the next ESR.

Besides the fact that Mozilla has now officially flipped the switch and made 10.6.0 the minimum for Firefox 17, they are also switching to clang for OS X builds starting with Fx17 as well. As a fallback, Fx17 and presumably the ESR will still be compatible with gcc 4.2 (and we will do our darndest to maintain 4.0.1 compatibility for 17-stable), but Fx18 will require at least 4.4, and then only because of the Android NDK. Fortunately, Tobias has already done some work on this and I have an internal gcc 4.6.3 build working as of this evening; we will start using that for 18 once some minor issues are ironed out, or you can use the portfile in MacPorts for self-builds.

9 comments:

  1. Today I've found another great alternative Browser for G4- and G5-machines: an inofficial port of WebKit @ http://code.google.com/p/leopard-webkit/

    It's like a modern Safari 6 on Leopard! :)

    PS: Yes, it's an Universal Binary and also runs on i386 …

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  2. Regular followers of this blog know it is none other than the great Tobias who is behind Leopardwebkit. If only we could have a Tigerwebkit I'd be thrilled. Omniweb is pretty close, their in house webkit dates from December 11.

    Cameron, are you familiar with netsurf browser for RISC OS and others? They have a Framebuffer build that they say works independent of a GUI or OS. Was just wondering how difficult that would be to port over to Mac OS 9. Please don't get me wrong, I use and love Classilla...just a question. I emailed developers but no response.

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  3. https://code.google.com/p/tenfourkit/

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  4. I know Netsurf, but the question is whether CodeWarrior can compile it, and then connecting that to the OS 9 widget library. It's good code, but I'm not sure how good the finished product would be and whether CW is even up to the task.

    For that matter, there's OWB Webkit, but my philosophical differences with WebKit aside I don't know if CodeWarrior can compile that either.

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  5. Thanks Cameron. I haven't messed with Codewarrior since 1997, but I am willing to give it a shot. I will report results.

    Thank you commenter.

    For general information the developer of flashvideoreplacer says he is ceasing development and updating of the FVR extension. Google is changing its policies regarding third party youtube apps and he says its too risky for him to keep developing it. Hopefully this will not affect mactubes or the QTE. He didn't discuss details of the policy change, just a brief statement.

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    1. You're welcome,

      And as much as doom and gloom is always appreciated, and syndicated (http://ppcluddite.blogspot.com/2012/08/uh-oh.html) my educated guess is that FVR ceased development due to it's relatively antiquated position in the "market". I don't use x86 Linux (it's target base) and I can't confirm WebM performance on that platform but it is largely useless to us. H.264 is clearly the way forward and has been since Jobs announced it many moons ago with Tiger.

      As regards "The Great YouTube Policy Change of August 2012" this has already been "surmounted" and I've sent some tips to the maker of MacTubes.

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  6. What happens when you open ~40 Facebook tabs at the same time in TFF 14 (with 2 GB RAM installed in the G4 PowerBook). The browser is still responsive and usable, and all tabs load completely. I remember that in earlier versions, the browser would become completely unresponsive before all tabs were finished loading, so I had to force quit it after about half an hour.

    http://postimage.org/image/p2ecefqet/

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  7. http://lowendmac.com/lab/12lab/macs-in-space.html

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  8. Nice :-) As we see from our Pismos/Lombards/Wallstreets, a G3 with such a moderate clock speed should run at least a decade if it's shielded properly. So go, rover, go – we know your brain is reliable.

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