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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?

#171

Post by robenkleene »

deergomoo wrote: post #165
flohofwoe wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things. Why is it such a hassle to install a vim extension, requiring code-signing shenanigans? In other IDEs and text editors this is at most a few button clicks to install an extension. The "Scheme" system to manage per-target options is a joke even when being used to it. The debugger variable-view-pa…

> IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things It's the text editing portion of it that's really lacking IMO. It's only has multi-cursor support and tabs (tabs!!) for a couple of years.

Valid complaints in this thread, but just a quick correction that Xcode has supported tabs since 2010 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1184997/enabling-tabs-in...).

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

#172

Post by robenkleene »

panic wrote: post #125
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…

All three of those developers started writing Mac software (or NeXT software, in Omni's case) in the 80's and 90's, before Xcode or the Apple Developer Program. The wider Mac developer community was hollowed out by the iPhone in the late 2000's-early 2010's and never really recovered. Who is starting a Mac-only software shop in 2021?

I'd argue that the Mac developer community was hollowed out by mandatory Sandboxing in the Mac App Store, introduced in 2011, not by the iPhone (2007). Sketch, arguably the most successful third-party Mac-only app since OS X, was released in 2010, several years after the iPhone, but almost immediately before mandatory sandboxing.

I believe the reason sandboxing destroyed the Mac software ecosystem is because it's too restrictive to support the kinds of productivity utilities that have historically thrived on the platform. And those apps are too small to handle promotion without Apple's help, Apple's help now being reserved for apps in the Mac App Store, which are by extension sandboxed.

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

#173

Post by kosinus »

freediver wrote: post #27

We are working on a new native macOS browser based on Webkit with native web extension API support built in. We have uBlock origin and many others extensions working already. By doing this we get best of both worlds - performance and energy use of Webkit and extensions from chrome/firefox. Screenshot: https://ibb.co/7V8sfyX We are open for beta testers. Please email me if interested with short background and area of…

How are you tackling all the missing / private APIs in Cocoa WebKit? Stuff like location, fullscreen, WebRTC, etc.

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

#174

Post by saagarjha »

flohofwoe wrote: post #156
saagarjha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things. Why is it such a hassle to install a vim extension, requiring code-signing shenanigans? In other IDEs and text editors this is at most a few button clicks to install an extension. The "Scheme" system to manage per-target options is a joke even when being used to it. The debugger variable-view-pa…

Xcode is…not very extensible IDE, I'll grant you that. The true impact of XcodeGhost is felt to this day :( I wish it was more extensible, and have myself done sketchy things to make it so, but I entirely agree with you that this is not a positive by any means.

If you are dealing with Xcode settings, move everything you can into xcconfigs, full stop. Just do it. It will save you countless merge conflicts, you'll be able to do mix and match and inheritance easily, and you'll actually understand what your build process is doing rather than it being a black box. I have no qualms blowing away targets and schemes now because I can just make them on demand and let Xcode autocreate the rest. I can "rebrand" an app in seconds and undo the changes in the same amount of time. Things which get used by other people always have ⌘B do the full build rather than some strange dance of "oh CocoaPods changed those settings so you should try to not set your development team on these targets and the dependency analysis is a little broken so…".

Debugger variables are…fine, I guess? I think the biggest issue I have with it is that it's placed in a not-so-great place, where it is generally to small to really see things. So usually I grab that information myself through a combination of p/po.

Xcode is still slick, IMO. Performance wise I haven't seen a huge change–it gets steadily bigger and slower and more complicated, but at about the rate that I update my computer. The people testing Xcode are clearly not using an Early 2015 MacBook Pro like I am, so I write off some of the features like Playgrounds or Previews or many simulators, but other than that I guess it's fine? I certainly value that it opens "immediately" rather than "initializing" (looking at you, Java-based IDEs…).

Where Xcode really shines is the things you touched upon: its integration with LLVM is first-class. It's certainly my preferred frontend to LLDB. The ability to flip on a bunch of diagnostics with one click has surely found many bugs, and the the built-in tooling for debugging memory graphs and view hierarchies is quite good–yes, it breaks sometimes, but it gives me useful results that I can't quickly get anywhere else nine times out of ten. Instruments is certainly unparalleled on macOS for external developers, and in comparison to tooling elsewhere it's a very solid offering.

Finally, of course, it's a nice native Mac app that plays well with all the other ones. That has to count for something :)

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

#175

Post by saagarjha »

user-the-name wrote: post #169
deergomoo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things It's the text editing portion of it that's really lacking IMO. It's only has multi-cursor support and tabs (tabs!!) for a couple of years.

Multi-cursor support is something I want maybe once every few months? Certainly nowhere near a crucial feature, and barely one that makes a list of nice-to-have things.

Multi-cursor editing is frequently a very good substitute for inscrutable vim or awk.

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

#176

Post by saagarjha »

panic wrote: post #125
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…

All three of those developers started writing Mac software (or NeXT software, in Omni's case) in the 80's and 90's, before Xcode or the Apple Developer Program. The wider Mac developer community was hollowed out by the iPhone in the late 2000's-early 2010's and never really recovered. Who is starting a Mac-only software shop in 2021?

Semi-relevant username?

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

#177

Post by saagarjha »

coldtea wrote: post #129
AaronFriel wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does any of that have to do with supporting the WebExtension open specification? It sounds like, to me, I can't ship a WebExtension for Safari because I don't own a Mac. Is that right? Does that sound right to you?

More than right, sounds like the responsible thing to do. Sorry, I don't trust extensions or programs from people who won't even own a machine to test them on for that particular platform!

Developers can and should test their code in a high-fidelity simulator for some configurations–limiting myself to just Apple platforms, I certainly don't have every Mac, iPhone, or Apple Watch in every combination of versions in front of me. I shipped support for iPhone X and Apple Watch Series 4 without having either of those devices on hand–for the latter, as you probably know, without even recompiling it. None of my personal Macs have a Touch Bar, but that hasn't stopped me from writing code for it.

It's completely fair–actually, it should be expected–that extensions targeting standardized APIs should function correctly regardless of platform. If you're coming from a position of trying to incentivize people who largely don't care about a tiny, strange platform to begin with, locking them out entirely based on hardware requirements is frankly about the worst thing you could do to drive adoption.

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

#178

Post by coldtea »

deergomoo wrote: post #165
flohofwoe wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things. Why is it such a hassle to install a vim extension, requiring code-signing shenanigans? In other IDEs and text editors this is at most a few button clicks to install an extension. The "Scheme" system to manage per-target options is a joke even when being used to it. The debugger variable-view-pa…

> IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things It's the text editing portion of it that's really lacking IMO. It's only has multi-cursor support and tabs (tabs!!) for a couple of years.

>It's only has multi-cursor support and tabs (tabs!!) for a couple of years.

It has had tabs since forever. As for multi-cursor support, that only got really popular in the past few years (first on Sublime Text iirc).

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

#179

Post by coldtea »

asddubs wrote: post #121
saagarjha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or even just test things in safari. Guess I have to spend at least 200$ on an ipod touch if i want to test in some sort of version of safari, significantly more if i want to test on a non iDevice (with an actual console etc) Obviously for a business this is a neglegible cost but for someone just making a hobby app, it's ridiculous. microsoft at least offers VMs with edge and ie on it

>Obviously for a business this is a neglegible cost but for someone just making a hobby app, it's ridiculous.

Sorry, why do you want to make a hobby app for a platform you don't own?

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

#180

Post by _qulr »

coldtea wrote: post #166
panic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three of those developers started writing Mac software (or NeXT software, in Omni's case) in the 80's and 90's, before Xcode or the Apple Developer Program. The wider Mac developer community was hollowed out by the iPhone in the late 2000's-early 2010's and never really recovered. Who is starting a Mac-only software shop in 2021?

> Who is starting a Mac-only software shop in 2021? A lot of people? There are more Mac users (and thus app buyers) today than ever were, several times more than in the 80s and 90s. If people don't do it it's because they can make a quicker buck elsewhere (e.g. web SaaS and such), not because it's a worse market in absolute terms. It sure beats being an indie game dev, that's for sure...

> A lot of people?

Name them. This is a serious request. I'm a longtime professional Mac developer who knows a lot of other Mac developers.

> There are more Mac users (and thus app buyers)

The premise is true, but the conclusion is not necessarily true. The crap store and the iOSication of the Mac have really hurt the Mac software market.

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