BIOS: Technology Means Business

Apple has made the most substantial update to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Over the weekend Apple seeded developers with build 8F46, the first seed to not specify any known issues - generally a good indicator that the update is almost ready for public consumption.

Mac OS X 10.4.3 will weigh in at around 100MB and include more than 550 fixes and improvements, although unconfirmed reports have pegged this number at more than 1000 when smaller, undocumented changes are included in the count.

The patch claims to deliver increased system performance, additional compatibility with third-party products and the fixing of a number of bugs. Additionally, the update resolves issues with foreign language versions, including Arabic, Hebrew and Traditional Chinese.

The latest seed has added tweaks to CoreGraphics, CoreImage, and OpenGL, as well as iChat and WebKit, among other improvements. It also has numerous fixes to key components including the Finder and Spotlight searching, Safari, syncing and Mail. It is not known whether the update will correct issues plaguing owners of 1.8GHz Power Mac G5 (late 2004) systems running Tiger.

Changes made to Finder and Spotlight include improved responsiveness during Spotlight searches in the Finder, preservation of Spotlight comments entered in the Finder during iDisk syncing, items copied into a Drop Box have permissions set correctly, and the Spotlight image indexer now uses the 'Software' TIFF property to support graphics rendering and image editing applications that use this property.

Safari now passes the Acid2 test for rendering standards compliance and has improved Web camera compatibility and improved compatibility with OpenGL-accelerated Shockwave 3D content. There's also fixes for AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS and FTP network file services, AirPort and Bluetooth wireless access, Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image and RAW camera support, as well as disc recording when creating and burning media.

The patch is the third major update for the operating system since its launch in April. The vendor updated the software to version 10.4.1 in May, followed by version 10.4.2 in July.