ray's big blog

As a result of the tinkering I did with building Mozilla, I got the middle mouse button support working in MacOS X. I found a bug that someone had entered in Bugzilla, and I patched Mozilla 1.7.2 and rebuilt it. In addition to having middle mouse button support, the speed seems improved to me. I think that is because I compiled it without any of the debug options, and the executable is only like 12MB, whereas it was 40MB before. Maybe I messed something up, but it seems to be working fine for me. You can download Mozilla for Mac with middle mouse button support by clicking on this link.

For those of you that don't know, the middle button in Mozilla lets you open a link in a new tab, and then clicking on a tab with the middle button will close the tab. VERY nice feature.

update 06-Sept-2004:
I found out that I didn't compile it with security features enabled. So, in addition to the instructions found here, I added the following to my .mozconfig file:

ac_add_options --enable-crypto

I got that additional tidbit from this link. The file linked in the original post is now correct and links to the version with security enabled.

update 07-Sept-2004:
Now I've really got something. I added a flag to the .mozconfig file that really speeds things up on my dual G5.

Change this line:

mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS=-j4   # use parallel make

to this:

mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS=-j4 CFLAGS=-fast   # use parallel make

If you never had that line (because you only have one processor), then just add this to the file:

mk_add_options CFLAGS=-fast

That line turns on the "-fast" flag in Apple's GCC compiler, and it makes Mozilla FLY. There is absolutely no delay doing anything, even switching between a browser and an email window. Instant. Very nice. Of course, this is all on a dual G5. I'm not posting the binary because it will probably only work on a G5 machine - but just leave me a comment if you want me to post the binary.

update 16-Sept-2004:
Whoops! Turns out that the reason my Mozilla was so much smaller than the official distribution is that it was only half baked! I didn't run the final command that puts everything together, so unless you happened to run the binary on my machine, it wouldn't work. There are security updates anyway, so I compiled a new version - 1.7.3 with the middle mouse button support for MacOS X 10.3. I corrected the above link to the binary.

The command that I forgot to run is:

make -C xpinstall/packager

Which puts everything into the Mac app bundle. I got that info from this mozilla page about building a distribution. The app bundle ends up in "dist/mozilla/". Whatever, now the download is much larger!


update 03-March-2005:
All of this is officially an academic exercise... the patch is now included in the Mozilla trunk! This means you will get middle mouse button support in Mozilla 1.8 Suite or FireFox 1.1.

WOW! What a difference. I thought this machine was fast before, but now
I'm just floored. I can't believe how much the extra gig of RAM helped.
Mozilla now does its thing much faster. Applications only bounce once or
twice. The amount of swapping to Virtual Memory is not even really
detectable - even while compiling Mozilla.

I decided to compile Mozilla myself, since even in my machine's newly
hopped-up state Mozilla still is not a performer. What kind of fantastic
hardware must the developers be using??? Hard to believe that they don't
notice it's lackluster performance considering it's just a web browser
and email checker. Anyway, my hunch is that it will rocket once I
compile it for my G5 without any debug stuff turned on. I tried to
compile this morning prior to installing the RAM, but it brought the
machine to its knees... now with the RAM installed it is flying along
merrily.

My nearly 6-year-old G3 Mac finally up and died. It was an old 350MHz, so I wasn't exactly sad to see it go, per se, but I was hoping to get another couple of months out of it. Anyway...

Got me one of them new-fangled dual G5 PowerMacs... went with the low-end 1.8GHz, since that's the only one not priced into the stratosphere. Since my other Mac was dead, I couldn't do the normal transfer from one Mac to the other thing. Instead, I had to move the hard drive over. Unfortunately, the old Mac used the old EIDE connectors and the new Mac uses serial ATA. So I took out the optical drive, stuck the old hard drive in there, and then used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a clone of the old drive. Not only did that work, but I was then able to boot the new machine off of the cloned hard drive. Allah bless Macintoshes, man - all my settings, files, etc. just got ported over. The only two burps were that I had to point iTunes at my music directory and I had to show Quicken where the data file was.

Anyway, this new machine is FAST. I love it. It really needs more memory though - it only shipped with 256MB, and you can feel it swapping out to disk constantly. No worries, some sweet Micron memory coming tomorrow from crucial.com. By the way, Crucial is the only place I buy memory. I work for a semiconductor company and I've been in a lot of RAM factories, and Micron (the parent company of Crucial) has the cleanest, nicest factories I've seen - and they are in Idaho of all places! To be fair, I haven't seen the inside of many Japanese factories, so they might also make nice RAM.