Mozilla preps itself for Apple Intel turnover

THE MAKERS of the Firefox browser say that they have successfully ported their browser to cope with the new Intel based Apple computers.

Josh Aas, a chief developer of the Mozilla Firefox browser, posting on his "bog", here, said that most of the browser code was actually designed by Apple employees who wanted it for a demonstration.

After the demo, Apple sent Aas the patch and he had a fiddle with it. He admits that he never tried to get Apple's Firebadger running on Intel Macs by just applying the patches. Aas said the Apple patches were fairly out of date by the time he got them.

"However, 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 said.

After a bit of development, Aas and the Fireferrit team were able to install the software on an Intel Mac on Aas' desk and got a build up and running. The new version is still a bit buggy but it is working.

Apple is starting to move onto Intel Processors from next year with the complete move hopefully due in 2007 by which time we'll probably all have Pentium M desktops. The Great Architect willing. µ