So I built a version of 2.5 that runs on my PPC Mac

[hikerbiker]

A couple minor tweeks to a few files and I have a running version of 2.5 on my MAC OS 10.5.8 based PowerBook G4 ( a PPC based machine ).

I did also have to unset ENABLE_JIT. So my question now is why isn't it officially supported since there's no big deal in creating a working build given MacPorts and the 2.5 tar ball ?

[rsx11m]

I'm not using Mac OSX myself, thus I can only speculate to some extent. In general those platform issues are following whatever Firefox decides, given that the requirements in question likely affect Core code (i.e., anything you've modified under the "mozilla/" directory to get it work).

There is a TenFourFox effort to make Firefox run on 10.4 and PPC again, from such obviously also the other applications (including SeaMonkey) would benefit.

[hikerbiker]

No code was modified. Changes are nothing of any significance just some make related mods and that's only affecting a single line or 2 here or there. About 5 files total that the right #defines would remedy.

ENABLE_JIT had to be disabled though because they apparently have processor specific assembly code in there. Disabling the JIT doesn't seem to cause any noticeable runtime effects that I notice.

One thing I notice is that HTML5 video doesn't play smoothly though possibly because there are no hooks into hardware assists to the decoding software ????? Don't know.

I spent many years coding for embedded systems at all levels. I'm between contracts now so just for snicks I thought I'd give the build process ( that documentation could use some cleaning up ! ) a whirl and see what I come up with. I just don't see from my perspective why they decided to drop PPC support when it's all there and seemingly working like a champ. I love my Powerbook G4s and have always been a huge proponent/user of Motorola/IBM/Freescale processors. Yeah it's like religion but I hate Intel with a passion and will never buy another Intel oriented product of Apple's. Apple would do well to switch over to a homegrown processor from their A series, maybe they are working towards that who can say.

I just did this to see for myself what the issues were and I found next to none though to read some earlier replies and commnetary ( especially on the FireFox threads ) it was made out to be an impossible task considering all the work that the TenFour Fox site seems to indicate that needs to be done to get FireFox to work. Sure there could be more to it than I think as I just barely scratched the surface here but it sure doesn't seem like it.


So what am I missing ?

[Philip Chee]

No code was modified. Changes are nothing of any significance just some make related mods and that's only affecting a single line or 2 here or there. About 5 files total that the right #defines would remedy.

ENABLE_JIT had to be disabled though because they apparently have processor specific assembly code in there. Disabling the JIT doesn't seem to cause any noticeable runtime effects that I notice.

One thing I notice is that HTML5 video doesn't play smoothly though possibly because there are no hooks into hardware assists to the decoding software ????? Don't know.

I spent many years coding for embedded systems at all levels. I'm between contracts now so just for snicks I thought I'd give the build process ( that documentation could use some cleaning up ! ) a whirl and see what I come up with. I just don't see from my perspective why they decided to drop PPC support when it's all there and seemingly working like a champ. I love my Powerbook G4s and have always been a huge proponent/user of Motorola/IBM/Freescale processors. Yeah it's like religion but I hate Intel with a passion and will never buy another Intel oriented product of Apple's. Apple would do well to switch over to a homegrown processor from their A series, maybe they are working towards that who can say.

I just did this to see for myself what the issues were and I found next to none though to read some earlier replies and commnetary ( especially on the FireFox threads ) it was made out to be an impossible task considering all the work that the TenFour Fox site seems to indicate that needs to be done to get FireFox to work. Sure there could be more to it than I think as I just barely scratched the surface here but it sure doesn't seem like it.


So what am I missing ?

If you have a working contributed build of SeaMonkey 2.5 for PPC with a working JIT and working support for plugins, and passes all our unit tests (did you build with --enable-tests ?). Then we might be able to host your builds under our contributed builds section. But I'd like Cameron Kaiser from TenFourFox to go through your changes to see if they are sufficient.

Phil

[ClassicHasClass]

TenFourFox isn't just Firefox hacked to run on PPC; it is also hacked to remain compatible with the 10.4 SDK (there is a lot of code dedicated to this -- widget/cocoa is very different now), and has additional new features such as an AltiVec-assisted WebM decoder, AltiVec-assisted JPEG decoding, and a PPC JavaScript tracejit backend. In 9.0 we will be introducing regular expression compilation, and hopefully JaegerMonkey support in the 10 or 11 timeframe. So we aren't Firefox, even though we are closely related.

Most of the problems we've had were with either our own features, or problems with the 10.4 SDK or Xcode 2.5. However, as long as Mozilla still supports 10.5 as a target (but see http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla. ... 4381b344a# ), supporting 10.5 PPC should still work with relatively minimal changes and there have been such builds. I would be happy to offer feedback on a patch if someone has an open bug to review it.

Cameron Kaiser

[Philip Chee]

TenFourFox isn't just Firefox hacked to run on PPC; it is also hacked to remain compatible with the 10.4 SDK (there is a lot of code dedicated to this -- widget/cocoa is very different now), and has additional new features such as an AltiVec-assisted WebM decoder, AltiVec-assisted JPEG decoding, and a PPC JavaScript tracejit backend. In 9.0 we will be introducing regular expression compilation, and hopefully JaegerMonkey support in the 10 or 11 timeframe. So we aren't Firefox, even though we are closely related.

Most of the problems we've had were with either our own features, or problems with the 10.4 SDK or Xcode 2.5. However, as long as Mozilla still supports 10.5 as a target (but see http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_thread/thread/ef440e54381b344a# ), supporting 10.5 PPC should still work with relatively minimal changes and there have been such builds. I would be happy to offer feedback on a patch if someone has an open bug to review it.

Cameron Kaiser

Ah thanks for the clarification.
Remind me, what prevents PPC users on 10.4 upgrading to 10.5 (Assuming that we can come up with a PPC SeaMonkey 2.5 (==Firefox 8).

Phil

Phil

[ClassicHasClass]

Speaking as a PPC user who didn't, the biggest things that prevented me from going to 10.5 was slower performance (less of a problem with G5, worse with G4) and losing Classic. There are some OS 9 apps I have become excessively fond of and have no decent OS X replacement. All of my PPC Macs still run 10.4.

Fx8 and 9 should build relatively easily on 10.5 PPC (therefore 2.5 and I assume 2.6). Fx10 could be troublesome -- see, among others, http://code.google.com/p/tenfourfox/iss ... ail?id=102