Since I use web/email quite intensively, I decided to make pure Intel binaries for my Intel MacBook. You can also use them:
Firefox-2.0.0.2.en-US
Thunderbird-1.5.0.10.en-US
Quick F.A.Q.:
Q. What is all this about?
A. Intel binary builds are optimized for running on Intel cpus so they’re a few percent faster than the regular ones (and almost twice smaller 
)
Q. Why my “Firefox” became “BonEcho” and “Thunderbird” – “Mail/News”?
A. I cannot distribute binaries with Official mozilla.org Branding so these are so called development releases.
Q. Can I build these on my own?
A. Yes, build instructions are here (they are for both- universal and individual builds):
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mac_OS_X_Universal_Binaries
Q. Is it hard to build them?
A. It’s really easy. It’s just that for the first time it takes quite a lot to download and install.
Q. Do you have your own builds with –enable-official-branding?
A. Yes
Q. Can you share them?
A. No
I know, I know – it’s been a while since my last post here. I’m OK, it’s just that I got too busy recently.
Wondering how is my switch to Mac? Did I finally receive it? Although it took three weeks to ship a MacBook from US to France, it did ship. As for a switch, I will not get into details, as it would probably be yet another successful Mac switcher story, I’d just mention that OS X has exceeded my expectations – it has more cool software than I would ever need, keyboard shortcuts can be learned quite easily, the interface is really nice as well as other features I got used to, that will stop me from switching back to windows or any other OS for a while.
Is MacBook 13″ enough for me? Frankly – yes. It’s not as small as it sounds. Yet, it is really powerfull: 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 4MB L2 cache per CPU, 2G of RAM – I wouldn’t ask anything more from a todays notebook.
Anyways, what bothers me is that it has been only a month, but I already had two issues with the notebook:
- This is really funny but when I received the notebook, it just did not work out of the box. After an hour of reading the book that’s been shipped with the notebook, I came to the section where RAM upgrade procedures are explained and I thought “since they had to upgrade notebook with 1G additional RAM module, maybe they did not insert it properly” and I was so damn right. After reinserting both of the modules, the MacBook started working and the excitement has begun.
- The Battery. Yes, it’s already dead. And, as far as I know, it’s not the first time for apple: in the middle of 2006, “Apple has initiated a worldwide battery exchange program for certain rechargeable batteries that were sold for use with 15-inch MacBook Pro computer systems from February 2006 through May 2006″. I find users with the same problem this year too. I guess apple changes battery supplier in the beginning of every year and looks like this year is an unsuccessful one too.
But don’t get me wrong – I like my mac. It’s just that nothing is perfect. Even macs aren’t.