Macenstein

Posted by Dr. Macenstein

Developer Josh Aas has posted an unofficial version of Firefox for owners of the first generation if Intel Macs. This is welcome news for the five people who have actually received their Intel Macs already and are dissatisfied with Safari’s (allegedly) amazingly fast performance. While the full version of Firefox for Mactel is slated to appear sometime this March, there is a relatively stable version available for download from the Mozilla website. The two main issues keeping this build from achieving Mozilla’s stamp of approval are both an incompatibility with Macromedia’s Flash plug-in, as well as some trouble with the way Java is implemented in OS X for x86. Both Java and Flash are therefore disabled in this build, but this shouldn’t be a big deal for most users as only a handful of sites use Flash or Java (sarcasm). Users are warned to download and use this build at their own risk (always an encouraging sign).

Also available for the adventurous, are version of the Camino web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client. For the not-so-brave-of-heart, the current PPC versions of Mozilla’s software should run just fine under Apple’s Rosetta software.