News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
ADVERTISEMENT
According to our cousins at Computerworld, the developers of Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser are deep in discussions about the future of the program on Mac OS X Tiger. While the final nail has yet to be driven into the purest Carpathian wood of 10.4’s coffin, the writing for the striped cat appears to be on the wall.
Support for Tiger was dropped from the development version of Mozilla’s Gecko framework last September, but the required code for supporting 10.4 was left intact, in case that decision was changed. On Thursday, Mozilla developer Josh Aas laid out the case for dropping support for Tiger altogether, in order to take advantage of more modern features introduced in Leopard and Snow Leopard.
Mozilla's stats from January 25 of this year show that users on 10.4 account for about 24 percent of Mac users running Firefox 3.5 and about 12 percent running the recent 3.6 update—all told, almost 1.5 million out of more than 6 million Mac Firefox users. That’s not bad for an operating system that was released in April 2005, but even that will likely not be enough to earn Tiger support a last-minute pardon. Aas says that historically, Firefox has not lost significant market share for dropping previous OS X versions.
Were support for Tiger to go the way of the garefowl, users would be able to continue using Firefox 3.6 until Mozilla discontinues support for that, which is scheduled for several months after the release of the next major Firefox version later this year.
Mozilla would hardly be on the only developer to drop support for the five year-old OS; many new programs released these days require at least Mac OS X 10.5. In fact, as Mozilla’s Aas points out, the company is usually one of the last to support older OS X releases, sometimes to its detriment as Apple at some point stops issuing security updates for previous versions of OS X.
As of this writing, the thread contained ten messages and only one poster objected to the 10.4 removal, on the basis of not being able to personally afford to upgrade his equipment. It seems a foregone conclusion that support for Tiger will be on the next ship to the Grey Havens and, while some may mourn its demise, the vast majority of Mac users are likely to not even notice its passing.
If you're using Apple's Safari browser, PayPal has some advice for you: Drop it, at least if you want to avoid online fraud. Safari doesn't make PayPal's list of recommended browsers because it doesn't have two important anti-phishing security features, according to Michael Barrett, PayPal's chief information security officer. "Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers," Barrett said in an interview. "Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera." Safari is the default browser on Apple's Macintosh computers and the iPhone, but it is also available for the PC. Both Firefox and Opera run on the Mac. Unlike its competitors, Safari has no built-in phishing filter to warn users when they are visiting suspicious Web sites, Barrett said. Another problem is Safari's lack of support for another anti-phishing technology, called Extended Validation (EV) certificates. This is a secure Web browsing technology that turns the address bar green when the browser is visiting a legitimate Web site.
Robert McMillan | Feb 29, 2008
Almost exactly at the stroke of midnight Tuesday (Sydney time), Apple released a new version of its Safari web browser for Mac and Windows operating systems. This keeps with the "tradition" this year of releasing or at least announcing products on Tuesday each week (Cupertino time). This one had the added convenience of not requiring too late a night for Antipodean Apple watchers.
Jim Dalrymple and Matthew JC. Powell | Mar 19, 2008
PayPal, eBay’s electronic payment service, plans to take the dramatic step of locking out people using older versions of web browsers in order to stem phishing attacks. PayPal said a “significant” group of people still use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3, released in 1996, and IE 4, which debuted in 1997. Those browsers lack a phishing filter, which can block users from accessing a reported phishing web site.
| Apr 21, 2008
Amit Singh thought something was missing from OS X. The Google engineer — and author of Mac OS X Internals — took a look at what the Mac operating system didn’t have that Linux and Solaris did. “One thing stood out,” Singh said. “There was no easy way to do file systems.” So Singh decided to create one, even though he worked for Google’s search team at the time and wasn’t part of the company’s Mac development efforts. The reaction of his bosses to this use of company time? Go for it.
Phillip Michaels | May 16, 2008
This morning Apple released a new version of its iPhone SDK for developers. iPhone SDK beta 2 includes Interface Builder, a component of Apple’s development tools that lets developers create the interface for their applications. That seems to be the only major change in the latest build, according to the SDK’s read me, which continues to list some known issues. Apple says “this second beta is known to be incompatible with installation folders other than the default /Developer.” Given the importance of UI on the Mac, Interface Builder is a pretty critical tool in the development process, and some developers had chosen to hold off on their efforts until the SDK was revised. Apple unveiled the iPhone SDK at a special event earlier this month, allowing developers to begin building applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Several high-profile companies have already jumped onboard, demoing their applications at the event. Highlighting the demos was AOL with a native AIM client; other applications from Electronic Arts, Salesforce.com, and Apple were also shown.
