14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has made available for download a fresh release of Firefox 2.0 that has moved past Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows Vista and onto Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. With the latest update to its open source browser, Mozilla moves from version 2.0.0.7 to 2.0.0.8. The new release comes one month after Firefox 2.0.0.7 and is designed exclusively as a response to Apple making available the next stage in the evolution of its Mac OS X operating system. As Leopard is scheduled to drop by the end of the month, more precisely on October 26, Mozilla has gone ahead and is offering support for the new cat from Apple.
In this manner, Mozilla is going head to head against Apple. The Cupertino-based company was until mid 2007 restricted to its proprietary platform with the Safari browser. At the beginning of June, this aspect changed, as Apple made available Safari 3.0 for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows XP and Windows Vista. Moving against Microsoft and Mozilla with Safari is a strategy that was based on a beta browser so far. But with the October release of Leopard, Apple will also finalize Safari 3.0, for Mac OS X 10.5 and for Vista and XP.
On the browser market, Internet Explorer is virtually intangible with a share of approximately 80%, but Firefox is a much more tangible rival for Safari. According to statistics delivered by Net Applications, Safari 3.0 has grown to 0.55% of the browser market since June, but is no match for Firefox 2.0 with 13.57% or for Internet Explorer 7 with 34.6%. Still, while Safari has come to Windows, Firefox 2.0, already a platform agnostic browser, offering support for Windows, Linux and OS X could have not ignored Leopard.
But just like this case with Windows Vista, Firefox 2.0 has some caveats with Leopard. "On OS X 10.5 (Leopard), there are known problems with some media plugins as well as Add-ons that contain binary components. Also, the tabs in Preferences > Advanced will not render properly. The "Close Other Tabs" action on the shortcut menu of a tab can fail with an error when more than 20 tabs are open. Java does not run on Intel Core processors under Rosetta. There is no Talkback on Intel-based Macs when running natively or under Rosetta. The Apple Crash report program should launch in the event of application crashes," Mozilla informed.
And in addition, there have been reports from a limited number of users describing problems with the integration and viewing of Macromedia Flash content on Intel Mac computers. In addition, Firefox 2,0 users on Leopard may experience problems when accessing display information for updated plug-ins.
Of course that while getting both new versions of Safari and Firefox, Leopard will have to make do without Internet Explorer. Microsoft ventured into such an offering for Mac users, but the initiative was discontinued in June 2003, with IE5 for Mac.