Saturday, November 20, 2010

Progress on beta 8

Beta 7 has a rather annoying bug where if you repeatedly open and close the left-click-hold menus on the back and forward buttons, you can make the browser crash (right-clicking is okay). It took a little while to track down the problem, but it is fixed now in the internal tree. This is serious enough that we will insert a beta 8 instead of going to beta 9 as previously planned so that this fix gets rolled out also.

Also, new TenFourFox-specific branding is mostly complete and a new partial livery will accompany beta 8, along with portions of the infrastructure (similar to Classilla's custom user-support infrastructure). There will also be basic support for update checking -- while I do not plan in the near future to duplicate completely Mozilla's automatic update deployment framework, it will check for updates automatically, and facilitate you downloading them manually. Likely we will enable Sparkle-style updates when we leave source parity.

Mozilla is planning to release beta 8 by the end of November and it appears that they will be pretty close to this milestone, so you can expect TenFourFox beta 8 to emerge around the same time.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Picking the torch out of the dumpster

It seems that 10.4Fx has come out just in time, as Josh Aas from Mozilla reports that the "universal" builds of Firefox 4 beta 7 are now i386/x86_64, not the traditional definition, which is of course i386/ppc.

So this is where the new era begins. Welcome to TenFourFox, where PowerPC lives on. 10.4Fx doesn't support all the features of Fx 4, and may not ever (particularly features like out-of-process-plugins may even be irrelevant on PPC, given that Adobe Flash will be x86-alone any day now). But it does support those of us who still have perfectly good Power Macs, including those of us who still use them for Classic applications, and it includes all the great layout, HTML5 and CSS3 enhancements that are part of Gecko 2.

This blog covers some of the development progress so that you can stay informed. I'll probably be working up a Twitter account next, but new developments will get posted here first.

PowerPC forever!