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Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

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Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#111

Post by asiachick »

coldtea wrote: post #74
chmod775 wrote: post #71

As someone who has (re-)implemented and shipped quite a few native applications across ecosystems (Apple, Android, Windows, Linux) all I can say about this is: Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague . I will do it if I'm paid for it - I generally charge twice my hourly rate for anything Apple - but I cert…

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

I'm pretty confident the top apps for Mac include Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, After Effects, Microsoft Word, and other cross platform apps.

Mac users are just fine with cross platform apps.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#112

Post by kitsunesoba »

asiachick wrote: post #111
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

I'm pretty confident the top apps for Mac include Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, After Effects, Microsoft Word, and other cross platform apps. Mac users are just fine with cross platform apps.

As true as this is, when it comes to Adobe products there's also no shortage of griping about things like UIs getting progressively more glitchy and less responsive and bad or nonexistent hardware acceleration… gripes that largely didn't exist 15 years ago when those same Adobe products were more closely tuned for the platforms they ran on instead of going all-in on one-size-fits-all.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#113

Post by kitsunesoba »

josephg wrote: post #108
coldtea wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah but there's nothing that says the Xcode experience has to be so painful Well, who says it is objectively painful (as opposed to just not what the grandparent is used to or prefers)?

Its pretty bad. XCode (with swift) seems to crash on me regularly just with normal usage. The last time I used it occasionally it would lag so badly that it sometimes lost characters I was typing, and my code would come out completely garbled (what!?). A few weeks ago I tried to do a local build of Signal's iOS app and the swift compiler errored out on some random function. Apparently it spent so long doing type infe…

Xcode with Swift is a bit odd in that its performance varies greatly depending on project structure and as nonintuitive as it may be, the way the developer writes code.

For instance a sprawling project with an even split of Objective-C and Swift that constantly call into each other can bring SourceKit to its knees, as can some CocoaPods setups. Going Swift-only or even just reducing the surface between Objective-C and Swift to the absolute bare minimum can speed things up a lot.

As for writing style, there's a few things that can trip SourceKit up but I've found that the main things to avoid are chaining optionals too deeply and nesting closures too deeply (recommend keeping both to 2-3 tops) as well as casting to/from Any too often.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#114

Post by nsm »

floatingatoll wrote: post #30

The most popular web extensions are those that deprive sites of direct and indirect revenue, which necessarily means they can’t charge for the service or their userbase would revolt and steal their rule sets (which is easy to do for a web extension). Having to pay money for such things goes against the grain of those users, and the sort of breakage that people think is acceptable for content blockers isn’t quite as a…

Vim/emacs key bindings for the browser like Vimium.

Prevent me from quitting the browser accidentally - Ctrl + Q

Tree Style Tabs which I would happily pay for.

Third party bookmark service like Pinboard, although this could be accomplished by an app as well.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#115

Post by asiachick »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #112
asiachick wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confident the top apps for Mac include Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, After Effects, Microsoft Word, and other cross platform apps. Mac users are just fine with cross platform apps.

As true as this is, when it comes to Adobe products there's also no shortage of griping about things like UIs getting progressively more glitchy and less responsive and bad or nonexistent hardware acceleration… gripes that largely didn't exist 15 years ago when those same Adobe products were more closely tuned for the platforms they ran on instead of going all-in on one-size-fits-all.

Those gripes are universal cross platform gripes. Nothing to do with them being Mac specific. 15 years ago was CS2, already a cross platform app

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#116

Post by ramraj07 »

coldtea wrote: post #74
chmod775 wrote: post #71

As someone who has (re-)implemented and shipped quite a few native applications across ecosystems (Apple, Android, Windows, Linux) all I can say about this is: Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague . I will do it if I'm paid for it - I generally charge twice my hourly rate for anything Apple - but I cert…

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

While you might be true in that Apple tries to cater to a different band of Devs dedicated to their eco system, let's also not kid ourselves that they have had their experience at heart when making decisions about their platform. Are you telling me that dedicated apple devs have the greatest dev enviroment and experience there is? Or are you merely saying that they have a less shittier experience because they decided to drink the coolaid and get into a one sided relationship with Apple?

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#117

Post by saagarjha »

mmastrac wrote: post #39

Is Safari a privileged process on OSX? Could someone develop a ptrace-style solution to disable signing and allow installation of Firefox WebExtensions?

Somewhat: it enables library validation and getting rid of that will break Apple’s signature on it and render it unable to access its data vault. Plus, such a thing would be a significant amount of effort, especially on an “API” that isn’t designed for this at all…see ‘freediver’s comments above for an idea of how much work needs to go into implementing Web Extensions even with full, source-level control of the browser.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#118

Post by coldtea »

asiachick wrote: post #111
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

I'm pretty confident the top apps for Mac include Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, After Effects, Microsoft Word, and other cross platform apps. Mac users are just fine with cross platform apps.

Those are top-tier professional staples. Mac users can't chose another Photoshop, because there's no other at that level (Affinity and co are great, but nowhere as comprehensive).

But even so, Photoshop, Premier and co, has ties to native functionality, gets the native look and feel for things like file dialogs and such, is quick to move to Apple Silicon / M1 natively (and even has a native iPad version, complete with native UI) and so on.

It's not some lowest-common-denominator cross platform affair, like most cross platform lesser GUI apps are.

Also, Word and co. Microsoft apps are not cross-platform. They are special codebases for macOS, complete with macOS native UI and everything.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#119

Post by saagarjha »

coldtea wrote: post #74
chmod775 wrote: post #71

As someone who has (re-)implemented and shipped quite a few native applications across ecosystems (Apple, Android, Windows, Linux) all I can say about this is: Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague . I will do it if I'm paid for it - I generally charge twice my hourly rate for anything Apple - but I cert…

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

I’ve used Xcode for many thousands of hours at this point and I have to say I actually think it’s pretty good now that I understand how it is supposed to work. But for a web developer who just shipped some JavaScript for Firefox and Chrome…just no, this is stupid however you look at it. The fact that you have to download a dozen gigabytes just to get access to what’s a glorified shell script, then packaging some web code in an app bundle for no reason and mandating that it is signed and distributed on the Mac App Store is just dumb. It’s an awful experience from Apple all around if they are trying to get people to port their extensions to Safari.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#120

Post by kristofferR »

coldtea wrote: post #118
asiachick wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confident the top apps for Mac include Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, After Effects, Microsoft Word, and other cross platform apps. Mac users are just fine with cross platform apps.

Those are top-tier professional staples. Mac users can't chose another Photoshop, because there's no other at that level (Affinity and co are great, but nowhere as comprehensive). But even so, Photoshop, Premier and co, has ties to native functionality, gets the native look and feel for things like file dialogs and such, is quick to move to Apple Silicon / M1 natively (and even has a native iPad version, complete wit…

True, but at the same time the Adobe apps certainly doesn't feel as "native" as they could have. Affinity feels much better for example.
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