Why Mac OS X is a better development environment than Windows, GNU/Linux or BSD!

Mac OS X combines the best of Free Software and Proprietary Software, and in this post I'll try to show why I believe it is the best developer-friendly OS, and try to fend off the myth about OS X being useless.

 • Cocoa and Objective-C : When it comes to API and programming language nothing beats this combo. It's better thought out and offers virtually everything, except for the times when you need to dive into Carbon;  read this article, for a better indepth explanation.
 • Xcode : Certainly not the best IDE out there; but being the official IDE of the Mac OS, and being capable of providing the developer everything he/she needs in a single version (no basic and professional nonsense) for free more than makes up for it minimum shortcomings.
 • MacPorts : This project enables developers and users to easily compile and install various Free and Open Source programs and libraries, bringing you the best the FOSS community has to offer.
 • Unix : Mac OS X is a full-fledged SUS-certified and POSIX-complaint Unix, and version 10.5 (Leopard) comes with X11 and the popular BASH pre-installed.

This list is obviously non-exclusive, but add this to the ease-of-use, simplicity of the Mac, and growing market share; and you get a very strong argument for development on the Mac.

Why Chrome is WebKit and not Gecko

When Google announced their browser and that it'd be using WebKit, it came to me as no surprise, they're using it in Android and are a supporter of the WebKit project. The question is, though, why?

Gecko obviously is more popular, more sites support Gecko than WebKit, Gecko has its strong points, as it is a descendent of Netscape. This legacy has its liability, and from those in the know, Gecko is unmanageable versus the cleaner WebKit which was based of KHTML. Though, this isn't the only reason, Gecko implements some Trident bugs and quirks [dubious|needs citation] this makes it better compatible with more webpages but less standard complaint than WebKit. Google basing its browser on WebKit tries to establish WebKit as a major player, which forces web developers to focus on standard compliance and cross-browser compatibility versus rendering engine specific bugs and quirks.

The most interesting bit though, is the code in Chrome borrowed from Mozilla, no idea what specific portions are borrowed but it would be interesting to find out how that all fits in the WebKit vs Gecko debate.