Tuesday, December 13, 2011

QTE 9 available

The QuickTime Enabler for 9.0 is now available (alpha 114). As the version bump indicates, the only change from a113 to a114 is compatibility with 9. I am really hoping that Mozilla starts issuing simultaneous Add-On SDK compatibility updates with their betas, because it somewhat harshes our buzz to lose the QTE temporarily when we test our own betas. However, the QTE does not seem to cause any problems with stability, and because of this we may simply start including this as a built-in part of TenFourFox (I have not decided yet).

Simon Royal from LowEndMac has been trying to drum up interest in porting one of the open-source Flashes to PPC OS X. This is not a project I can personally donate time to, but if some of you out there are looking for a project the best one to port would be Lightspark (plus-minus Gnash for the older Flash applets), as it contains the most current version of the Adobe ActionScript virtual machine. The code is known to already work on PowerPC Linux, but the code would need to be altered to use either QuickDraw or CoreGraphics, and it would need to be buildable on OS X, so the port is possible but non-trivial. I'll add a carrot here: if someone gets this running and is able to maintain it, I will consider (technical limitations notwithstanding) lifting the plugin embargo. If the plugin exists, the plugin code in TenFourFox still works (we no longer test it, people are on their own) and someone is keeping it up-to-date, I'll not let it wither on the vine from this end. It's not much of a carrot, but hey, if you're just hanging around the house on the weekends now's your chance to be an abandoned platform rockstar.

Mozilla is due to sign off on Firefox 9 tomorrow, and we will do RC builds immediately after that. Tobias has fixes available for our VMX text converters which will appear in the beta immediately following. We also have a fix in tree for the icons problem, which is Mozilla bug 705516, so those of you using the image.mem.decodeondraw tweak mentioned in that bug should set it back to true before you upgrade to the RC or you will use more memory unnecessarily. RCs willl be announced here when they are ready, most likely by Friday or Saturday.

Methodjit is pretty much done, but we still have six tests (though out of over 1700) that fail and the browser is not able to stand up with the current code. I have not decided if I will hold Firefox 10 until methodjit is done -- tracejit is still in 10, just disabled. That buys us time for me to fix the last remaining failures by the end of tracejit in Fx11. Remember, don't try to enable it in Fx9 -- it will almost certainly not work, even though it is "secretly lurking."

6 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi,

    thanks very much for TenFourFox 8.0 and for Classila 9.2.3. TenFourFox works very well on my Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Mac OS X 10.5.8. And it works very good on my Mac Mini G4 with 10.5.8. I use Classila on Mac OS X 10.3.9 Panther.

    Is it possible to port Classila nativ (without Classic) to Panther?

    ----

    We have developed a new open source game for older PPC Macs. It's called Open Sonic. Open Sonic is an open-source game based on the "Sonic the Hedgehog" universe. It introduces a different style of gameplay called cooperative play, in which it's possible to control 3 characters simultaneously. Unlike most similar games, Open Sonic provides a greater level of interaction between the player and the levels. It's more than just a jump'n'run; the user must come up with some strategy in order to get through the levels.

    It runs on Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.

    Download: http://opensnc.sourceforge.net/home/download.php

    ReplyDelete
  3. This and other pages like it load differently in 8 & 9. Notice the CAPTCHA at bottom of page in 9, as well as no warning for incompatibility. Tested both 8 & 9 in safe mode.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-screenshot-capture-/?src=ss

    ReplyDelete
  4. Could be a regex bug. I worked some bugs out of the macro assembler backend while working on methodjit (see next post).

    Christian, Classilla does have Carbon targets in it. They probably don't work right anymore (they are 10.1 era and I haven't tried to maintain them, especially w/r/t JavaScript.shlb), but you could try building it that way in CodeWarrior. However, I don't have any plans to support that since I have enough to worry about just supporting OS 9 :P

    ReplyDelete
  5. ... I take that back, it's a security error that page appears to trigger. I'll do a little digging prior to release, though I don't consider it a showstopper (just hugely annoying).

    ReplyDelete
  6. ... and actually it wasn't a hard bug to fix. It's an irregularity due to the fact we aren't multiprocess and one of Mozilla's JS daemons assumed otherwise, so I wrote a stub to make it happy. It'll be in final.

    ReplyDelete

Due to an increased frequency of spam, comments are now subject to moderation.