At 5:55 PM -0800 1/11/2011, Tom wrote:
It's 10.5.8 with all updates applied
Ok. In the future, please include a quick description of your
hardware and the softwares involved. One or two lines. Without
that fundamental information, all you're going to get are
shot-in-the-dark incomplete guesses.
and the misbehavior by Safari I alluded to (i.e. whenever I tried
version 5) was simply a failure to launch-- blank window appears
with the URL bar half filled, and there she stops, requiring a Quit.
What InputManagers and Plug-ins have you installed? Glim,
SafariStand, CosmoPod, SIMBL? You are describing exactly the
interaction of those products with Safari 5. ...Apple publishes
standard interface guidelines for a reason. Some developers ignore
them, then end up looking like the idiots they are when their
products break. Worse - they can't be bothered to participate in the
beta cycle, so they miss the *months* of obvious opportunity to test
their products! The first three must be removed and/or updated.
SIMBL is, well, a long standing nightmare with big hoofs that just
won't die. Rip it out and salt then burn its bits.
I always thought of Safari as an application, like Firefox, but it
sounds like it's interwoven into the OS like one of those inoperable
cancers with tentacles that reach throughout the organ.
No, not cancer. Simply a smart way of doing software development and
delivery. Apple provides a lot of frameworks (shared libraries),
both proprietary and open source, in OS X. All apps take advantage
of those frameworks.
Products like Firefox never include updates to those frameworks --
even if there are horrific bugs therein. They wait for Apple to do
it. :\
Apple updates those frameworks as part of the normal system updates,
security updates, and their product updates.
Safari is under serious development both within and outside of Apple.
It's 90% open source, which is being worked on *daily*. In order to
get the fixes and features out to you as fast as possible, Apple
bundles a lot of the frameworks with the Safari updates. And since
they're built together, that means that Safari.app can use older
frameworks but not the other way around! An older Safari.app
wouldn't know how to talk to the newer frameworks!
...If you'd like to see a list of all the things an app talks to, use
the lsof command in Terminal. That command puts out a massive list,
so it's best to filter it for the specific app name. eg:
lsof | grep Safari
(just copy the above line as-is and paste it into Terminal.app. Then
be patient, as it takes a few seconds to produce the output).
The older version, Safari 4, is actually behaving all right,
launches and runs fine, but not being able to rename it nor make any
aliases for it just seems like a warning that something is rotten in
Denmark.
No, not rotten. Simply the normal file permissions. It is locked
down to ensure that neither you nor a piece of malware can reach in
and corrupt its internals. You can fark around with it if you do a
Get Info then change the permissions to give yourself read+write
access. Bad idea tho. Just don't do that.
I think you mentioned wanting to make an alias for it on your
desktop. You know you can just drag things onto your Dock, to put
aliases there. For your desktop, there is a standard shortcut - well
documented in Apple's help info... select the file and drag it to the
destination folder while holding down the cmd and option keys.
HTH,
- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
--
You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for
those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs.
The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette
guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
