Problem starting FrostWire 4 up on MacOSX - quickfix found

Has anybody been having problems starting up FrostWire on MacOSX?

It appears FW's default startup procedure of utilising Tiger (OSX 10.4) utilities is causing the problem. FW should be skipping this and using Leopard utilities instead, so for this to be happening suggests something has broken in the meantime. (I'm surmising this might be due to using a redundant OSX system version checker. Several techniques exist but one or more have become redundant and no longer work properly with osx 10.10 or later.)

Quickfix: Open FrostWire's application package (Right-click and choose 'Show Package Contents'.) Then open Contents, Resources and then Java.
/Applications/FrostWire.app/Contents/Resources/Java/

(You can use the Go menu Go To Folder command and enter the above address if your FW is in the Applications folder.)

Step 1: Find libGURLTiger.jnilib and send to Trash.
Find libGURLLeopard.jnilib and right-click and choose Duplicate. Then rename the copy as libGURLTiger.jnilib

Although FW appears to open after this, I suspect you should also do steps 2 and 3 below using the same technique.

Steps 2 and 3: Replace both libGrowlTiger.jnilib and libSystemUtilitiesTiger.jnilib in the identical fashion and with the Leopard equivalents by duplicating: libGrowlLeopard.jnilib and libSystemUtilitiesLeopard.jnilib renaming the Leopard portion with Tiger.
(ignore the file extension portion during renaming if you have your system set to hide file-extensions.)

Now FrostWire should open without problem. A simple and silly hack but hopefully it works for you if you are having same problem. But only do this if your FW refuses to open on MacOSX.



Why is FrostWire often slow to connect?

FW was designed with DHT bootstrap servers of which it may take up to 50 seconds to explore something that no longer exists before even attempting to connect using other techniques (FW will repeat this process during a session.) Simply be patient and I do mean exceptionally patient; FW these days can be incredibly slow to obtain a full list of hosts. Of course you might also need a fresh connection file, links to which you can find on this forum.

FW is not wired for initial TCP bootstrapping and relies on UDP instead. So if your FW is firewalled then it will be even slower to connect.
FW's backup bootstrapping for connections also uses out of date UHC listings.

I had noticed a year or so ago attempting to run FW in DHT mode appeared to cause struggles for connection for me on both Windows and OSX.

Also FW appears to be semi-broken as I've been discovering over recent days running FW on Windows. It is no surprise the population of FrostWire 4 users has dropped considerably over the past four years; a drop I can compare to BearShare earlier in the decade.

When you consider OSX Leopard was released in 2007 suggests that after the original two highly competent developers left the FW project, nothing more was upgraded in regards to OSX system utilities support for FW.

On the topic of broken FrostWire, I've never been able to open the FrostWire 5 or later torrent only versions on any of my OSX's. I wonder if it is due to the same problem of using outdated platform specific code.