14 DAY TRIAL // It was only natural, after Apple's surprising shift towards Intel, for the software developers to start working on applications that would run on the new Mac-Intel CPU's.
And according to Renai LeMay for ZDNet Australia, one of the first developers to attempt this transition has been the Mozilla foundation, which successfully ported the Firefox browser onto the new Intel-based Mac OS X platform, with help from Apple.
According to Firefox developer and Mozilla Foundation employee Josh Aas, Mozilla's development team used Apple's preliminary development work as a basis for porting the browser onto the new platform.
However, according to what Aas wrote on his blog, "Apple employees got Firefox running on an Intel Mac for the sake of using it as a demonstration of what it takes to port a complex application. After the demo, they sent me patches.
"I never tried to get Firefox running on Intel Macs by just applying their patches. For one thing, they were not worried about cross-platform patches or writing the code in such a way that we could actually land it in our [source code] tree," he added. "They just wanted it to run"
In any case, these patches were not very helpful, because some of them were rather obsolete, due to the developments Firefox's code had undergone since they had been created.
"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," wrote Aas.
Firefox's developer is also happy that, perhaps for the first time in the company's history, they're now able to keep up with the latest developments in the IT industry.
"I think for the first time in the history of Mac Mozilla products, we're actually ahead of the game in a way," he wrote. "You'll have fresh native copies of Firefox and [competing Mozilla-based Mac browser] Camino for your shiny new Intel Macs when or soon after they come out."