Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Next Safari INTEL ONLY?
- Thread starter HyperZboy
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
Try TenFourFox. It's based on later codebases than Camino, although less stable. It even has support for WebM and Ogg Vorbis video direct in the browser, fully G4-optimized.
But again, optimizations made available to apps would not be available under the old Xcode. Recent releases of 4 have introduced new compilers which can produce faster code.
Given that Safari is speed focused, they are likely planning on adopting these optimizations, which would permanently break PowerPC builds, as these optimizations are not available on PowerPC.
zen.state
macrumors 68020
You're forgetting that you can only run up to OS 10.5.8 on PowerPC Macs. What optimizations would there ever currently be for a 4 year old OS and it's apps?
zen.state
macrumors 68020
I find the Camino 7450 build running on my G4 1.8GHz 7448 is noticeably faster than TFF and just as compatible. I actually kept TFF around for a month or so and tried it every so often just to see if I could get all the fuss. I deleted it weeks ago.
I have no blind faith to Camino at all but the truth is it's faster and just better in general. I think the differences in opinion can only be explained by some either using the standard build from the Camino site or a different perception of time. 🙂
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
MagnusVonMagnum
macrumors 603
I never saw anything in Camino to help me comprehend why so many like it. TenFourFox seems very stable here to me and lets me use all the Firefox add-ons I like so much.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly my point. The optimizations Apple is likely planning to take advantage of support neither 10.5 or PPC.
As soon as the Safari team adopts LLVM 2 or LLVM 3, or the latest version of Obj-C, PowerPC support is permanently broken, and Safari won't compile with a PowerPC compiler.
This is likely why Apple disabled PowerPC compiles now. They're going to break permanently sometime in the near future.
zen.state
macrumors 68020
You may be right about Apple being able to stop PowerPC development on Safari but certainly not in general.
Anyone with an older xcode that still compiles PowerPC code can still code their own 3rd party apps and there is nothing Apple would ever be able to stop about that.
Only if the code in question is supported by older Xcode.
A lot of advancements introduced in Xcode 4 and 4.1 are not compatible with older XCodes. Even a lot of nice stuff that reduces the amount of code you have to write. If you take advantage of them, you can no longer compile your code in an older version of Xcode. The older compilers simply aren't compatible with the new advancements.
If people adopt these advancements, the existence of an older version of Xcode won't matter.
zen.state
macrumors 68020
Once again.. those new advancements wouldn't run on anything PowerPC in the first place anyway. You're looking at writing PowerPC apps like they need to work with new code advancements.
Old xcode, old mac, old OS. It's very simple to understand you don't need to be currently compatible in that situation. Not sure what you're missing here.
I'm not sure what you're missing here...
If I write an app with the latest version of Obj-C, which runs faster than the older versions, it won't work in Xcode 3, and won't compile for PowerPC.
In order to write code that would compile on PowerPC, I'd have to use an old version of Obj-C.
This isn't just "I'll leave out optimizations for PowerPC." Newer versions of Xcode have you write entirely different code that won't work on PowerPC and doesn't back port. These aren't optional nicities.
MagnusVonMagnum
macrumors 603
This whole line of thinking is hilarious. Optimized code? Where? Since when have we seen code get faster and more optimized over time as a whole? In practice (speaking as someone whose first computer was Commodore Vic-20 and who has been around to see the home computer industry develop in its entirety), I've seen just the opposite. As time goes on, hardware gets faster and faster and code gets sloppier and sloppier, slower and slower, less optimized and taking up obscene amounts of space, often with very little improvement to justify it overall at any given stage.
I mean what was so much better in Office 2008 over Office 2004 to explain why Office 2008 (with Intel code) ran slower than Office 2004 ran under emulation through Rosetta? I mean seriously. That's just 4 years. I remember when my Amiga 500 could run a WYSIWYG word processor with 1 Meg of ram with no problems or when a lowly C64 could produce professional looking documents with a whopping 64k of ram, not to mention thousands of games that were more fun than half the crap put out today that is all eye candy and little gameplay.
Was Leopard faster than Tiger? No. Was Snow Leopard faster than Leopard? No. (and that one is particularly funny since it was supposed to be an "optimized" version of OSX) Is OSX getting slimmer with each release? Is its ram requirements going down? So exactly where is this so-called "optimized" code at? Why was Leopard literally half the GUI speed of Tiger? How is that improved or optimized? You didn't notice? Yeah, if you bought a new computer with it, I guess not.
I've seen improvements in Safari for Javascript, but it seems that's all people look at. I guarantee that other aspects of Safari have been getting slower with every release. It's much more noticeable on a PowerPC machine because it doesn't have as much CPU power to waste. Things take longer to scroll while loading. Windows take longer to draw. It takes longer than it used to for my home page to come up (apparently other things are loading), etc. That's optimized?
Frankly, I watch how long it takes my MBP with dual-core 2.4GHz CPUS to draw an average web page today and think back about how web pages using simpler methods achieved the same information delivery and yet could run on a 25MHz 68030 with 18MB ram (i.e. my Amiga 3000) just fine. I can only imagine how information could come up literally instantly if all that newer unnecessary CRAP weren't on every web page out there.
Doesn't matter how you feel about it. That's the reality. Obj-C has changed over the past few years, with stuff like ARC being added that changes the code entirely, and those features aren't available in any PowerPC compiler.
If I write a project using ARC, it will never run on PowerPC, and it won't compile at all in Xcode 3.
You can say all you want how worthless optimizations are (and I tend to agree with you that Office is bad example of optimization), but Xcode 3 can't even compile new code even with all the optimizations removed.
MagnusVonMagnum
macrumors 603
And whose fault is it that PowerPC isn't supported in the latest Xcode? It's Apple's fault and therefore Apple sucks since they won't support their own computers half as well as they support Microsoft's computers. Case closed.
Not quite, because last time I checked Apple doesn't support Microsoft's computers more outright. The ONLY reason MS has a longer support frame in reality is because Apple has gone thru a massive architectural shift in the past decade, and the same applies to their executable format and programming language (.app has changed, as has Obj-C - and in many cases the changes wouldn't make much sense on the PowerPC platform). Whereas Windows NT Executables have barely changed in terms of making something work on XP, Vista and 7, only because the .NET Framework is relatively portable between Windows versions as they all share a common architecture (ie If the compiler tells the program to use an x86 register - it will be there). Porting a language with the amount of low-level control Obj-C has between architectures is "an absolute nightmare", and expecting Apple to continue it any longer than they absolutely had too is unreasonable. Say whatever you like, but the truth, from a CS and Business perspective, is that this day has come at a time when Apple isnt going to aggravate 90%+ of its user base, and in business thats the time you can get away with something)