Tag: panther

Categories
Apple Mozilla

Safari 1.3

As usual David Hyatt has the roundup on the changes for Safari 1.3. A must read blog post for all web developers.

My big question is how long will Mac OS X 10.3 be supported and receive Safari Upgrades? IMHO that’s the big problem. Microsoft at least makes most of it’s upgrades for all OS’s, so the majority of IE Users are 5.5 or 6.0 at this point. Firefox and Opera don’t really care you can update at any point. It’s hard for web developers to take advantage of these fixes if Mac OS 10.2 users still don’t have them. Not everyone upgraded (especially businesses) to 10.3. I know 2 of my systems aren’t upgraded because Panther feels slower on them. I doubt everyone is upgrading to Tiger. While nice, I don’t think average joe will see it worth the effort/price.

I ask Apple to help us out here. Make Safari so that it’s available for 10.2+ and supports 10.2+. All updates go to all Mac OS X versions. That way people upgrade and Safari becomes easier to support. I don’t want to support several versions of Safari. This makes Mac’s easier to support, and that’s good for everyone. Come on Apple.

Categories
Mozilla

Apple Helping out Mozilla

Very interesting developments lately regarding Apple and Mozilla. At first, it appeared the groups were closer than they appeared. Rumor was that iBrowser (known as Safari now), was going to use then Chimera (now Camino) as it’s basis. Ended up Apple used KHTML, and some claimed it made them “compete”, though most including myself believe any standards compliant engine is good.

Now Pinkerton makes a very interesting find:

Apple has started bundling NSPR and NSS in Panther

From November 3, 2003 @ 10:38 PM

So Apple apparently is providing some sort of Aid for Mozilla technologies. But that’s not all.

David Hyatt notes his work on Safari:

(5) A complete implementation of the XUL box model. Safari on Panther supports the complete XUL box model, including horizontal and vertical boxes, the ability to flex, and the ability to reorder content and reverse content. If you’re building canned content that you control using WebKit, you’ll find a whole new range of layout possibilities at your disposal. Need to create dynamically sized headers and footers and flexible center content? The XUL box model can do that. Need to center an object within the viewport? The XUL box model can do that too.

From October 28, 2003 @ 12:48 AM

Henrik Gemal also notes XUL support in Safari.

Ok, I found it interesting. Perhaps someone else will as well.

Categories
Apple

Safari 1.1 for Jaguar

This is more of a question than a regular post (as if I never ask questions to the net community at large). But does anyone know if Safari 1.1 will be released for Jaguar (Mac OS X.2)? Hyatt notes the release here and here.

I’m not into upgrading to Panther at this point (don’t want to shell out the cash so soon after my Jaguar update, which wasn’t to long ago, and want a few bug fixes to take place of course). But would still like to play with Safari 1.1, which from how Dave plays it, is pretty neat.

People telling me to hit Hot line and download “Free” Panther need not comment. All those comments will be deleted (as much as I hate deleting comments, I regard those equivalent to “spam” like the Viagra ones).

So if anyone (including David Hyatt if you read this) knows, comment email, IM would be greatly appreciated.

I’m also curious if there is anyone else who is a bit hesitant to upgrade to Panther. I’ve got a Beige G3 (unsupported) and a B&W G3. Just upgraded to Jaguar a few months ago. They run perfectly. Not a complaint. I guess they saying is “don’t fix what isn’t broken”. Anyone else waiting a while? Or has everyone left me in the dust?

Categories
Apple

Panther Coming Soon

Apple Announced Mac OS X Panther ships in a few day (October 24th to be exact). I’m excited, but I doubt I will upgrade very soon. In all honesty, I just moved to 10.2 rather recently. Why you may ask? Because I value my stability, and upgrading always introduces new issues. My system is running great, I don’t get to use it that much (on this Wintel laptop during the week)… So why upgrade?

Mac OS X 10.2 is really good. I love it. The performance is good, so is the stability. As long as I can patch it to meet my needs, it stays.

Not to mention 10.3 isn’t officially supported on my Beige G3 server, and I don’t feel like using unofficial patches at this time. My B&W G3 could take it, but I don’t see a clear advantage to upgrading at this time.

Perhaps Apple would realize that it would be better to do more incremental free upgrades, rather than charge $100+/year to upgrade to the latest. Smaller upgrades to less damage. Giving it’s clientele an OS that’s always updated with no costs is very attractive to home users, especially with MS doing all this “Activation” and licensing stuff.

Home users aren’t very inclined to upgrade, it looks technical. So if it costs money… They don’t want to bother. Leaving users running several versions of OS X, and making work harder for developers.

Free smaller upgrades are more attractive, as they encourage people to upgrade. Making the Mac OS community more consistent with OS version, hence more attractive to developers.

It’s less work to support just 1 version, than several. Keeping users as close to this as possible would be more beneficial, than the current method. Not to mention free OS is very enticing to potential Wintel converts.