Mozilla Firefox
| Mozilla Firefox | |
| Icon: |  |
|---|---|
| Maintained by: | Peter Naulls |
| Description: | This is a port of the Mozilla Firefox web browser for RISC OS. |
| OS Restrictions: | RISC OS 4/5/6 |
| Languages: | English |
| Alternatives: | NetSurf, Oregano |
| Website: | http://www.riscos.info/index.php/Firefox |
About
Development of Firefox represents part of a long term effort to bring new applications to RISC OS and has involved significant time and effort to date. Your contribution is greatly appreciated.
Mozilla Firefox 2 Non-RiscPCFor IYONIX pc, A9home, Omega. and VirtualRPC (StrongARM version only). This will not work on RiscPCs. Release 8 for RISC OS (August 3rd 2009, upstream 2.0.0.20):
This is a bug fix release only. Ensure you read the included !Help for full documentation and specific details of changes and history. Releases 1 and 2 have been deprecated, since they offer no benefit over this version. |
Mozilla Firefox 2 RiscPCThis version is suitable for RiscPCs and older versions of VirtualRPC. It will work on newer systems, but with more limited performance. This version has been provided only because its use on such machines is preferable to the older 1.5 versions which have many issues (both in the RISC OS version and mainstream). Even so, most users will find performance unacceptably slow on sub-300MHz machines You will need RISC OS 4 or later.
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Installing and using Firefox 2Download all the necessary parts. As well as the Firefox application you will also need:
ELFLoader and UnixHome are not required for this release. |
Building Firefox 2 from sourceFirefox 2 can be built from source with patches in the GCCSDK Autobuilder. Follow the Using GCCSDK tutorial for details. The autobuilder also includes patches for Thunderbird which is based on the same sources, and Firefox 3.6 (see below). |
Experimental Versions
Experimental versions may exist for testing of new developments. Often, these are an executable only, which should be replace the one from the most recent release. These versions are discussed on the GCCSDK mailing list.
Firefox for RISC OS Roadmap
This outlines plans and progress to move Mozilla Firefox forward on RISC OS, and to improve its obvious deficiencies. This will be regularly updated to indicate progress.
| Feature | Progress | Rationale | Will help other programs |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChoX11 event code to own thread | 75% | Improve multitasking usability and performance | Yes |
| Improve image handling | 50% | Image handling at present for RISC OS sits on top of X, and often creates 2 copies of images. Removing this will significantly improve memory usage, and have some performance improvements. | No |
| Native scrollbars | 0% | Scrolling is presently with Mozilla-drawn scrollbars, which do not integrate well with RISC OS desktop. | Maybe |
| Firefox 3.6 patches | 80% | Move patches from version 2 to 3.6 to enable future port, and submit upstream | No |
| Native cairo/pango/fontconfig font handling | 20% | Almost any program using GTK2 requires these, and a straight port doesn't work in RISC OS. The X backend used in Firefox 2 has been removed, so any Firefox 3.6 port has to have these | Yes, would immediately enable Gnumeric port |
| RUfl integration in ChoX11 | 10% | Allow display of more than just 7-bit characters. This is somewhat tricky, since ChoX11 used DeskLib, and RUfl uses OSLib, which do not co-exist well. | Yes |
| Shared Library Firefox | 80% | The present static build precludes the use of SSL certificates. There may be a way around this, but a static build may not be possible at all for Firefox 3.6. | Yes |
