A new version of Fizzilla — or, if you will, the Mozilla Netscape Build for Mac OS X — is available for download from the Mozilla Organization’s Web site.
Fizzilla is the Mozilla Organization’s implementation of a carbonized version of Mozilla designed to run on Mac OS X. The new build is an 11MB download.
Mozilla is an open source Web browser designed for standards compliance, performance and portability. The effort itself was formed out of Netscape Corp.’s decision to make its Netscape Communicator Web browser’s source code available.
Developed from the codebase originally used for Netscape Communicator, Mozilla has been created to support a variety of different operating systems. Supported operating systems include Mac OS, Windows, and various implementations of Linux and UNIX. In May 1999, modifications were made to Mozilla and a single binary was created that ran on both Mac OS 8.5 and Mac OS X. The resulting application was codenamed Fizilla and debuted at the Mac OS X Session at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference.
So why is Fizzilla going the Carbon route rather than being developed in Cocoa, Apple’s object-oriented development environment?
“No one wants to write in objective-C,” Mike Pinkerton of the Mozilla Organization said (somewhat tongue in cheek). “More importantly, however, I don’t believe that obj-c can easily be fit into the Mozilla codebase without an adaptor layer between the c++ and the obj-c at every calling site. Once you go there, what’s the point? There is already such little amounts of native (OS-specific) code in Mozilla, it really isn’t worth it. That said, we are not going to stop anyone from trying!! Obj-C implementations of Widget at GFX might be an interesting exercise.” (Thanks to MacCentral reader, Martin A. Totusek, for the heads-up on this one.)