Rosetta

[bflywings]

Hi everyone,

I was just on a website that required flash, and when going to the Adobe site, they said to switch to "Rosetta" on Safari and the website would consequently work. So I looked up how to switch to Rosetta in the Mac Help, and then switched it. But can anyone explain how Rosetta works? I don't really understand what it does, and I just want to make sure that having Safari operate under Rosetta won't change anything.

Thanks

 

[searay345]

Hello Bflywings,

Do not worry about using Rosetta. It doesn't change any of your personal settings. The only thing that changes is how safari loads and reads web pages.

Rosetta was created when Apple switched to Intel based processors. It is a "invisible" program that only runs when it needs to or when it is forced to either by a particular program, like Microsoft Office, or when a user forces it to run, like in your case with safari.

Think of Rosetta as a translator. Just like you would use your translator widget to translate English to Spanish, Rosetta translates the "PowerPC process language" to the Intel based language. A term that came out of this is "Universal Application." A Universal application is program such as Adium or Safari, etc that can run "natively" on both PowerPC Macs and Intel based Macs because the language was written in a universal format. Rosetta takes a non-universal application like Microsoft Word and translates the "PowerPC" program's language into something that the Intel processor will understand.

Flash is not a universal application. Why Adobe hasn't written a Universal Flash player yet, I don't know. But they better soon. But until then, if you want to keep switching Rosetta on and off, no worries. It will not harm your system or applications.

I hope this helps you out. Let me know if you need more information or clarification on anything I have written.

Cheerio
Searay

 

[Jonah]

Re: Rosetta installation?

How do I install Rosetta for a web development piece of software called Aptana that seems insistent that it must have Rosetta installed.

Jonah