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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#11

Post by milkytron »

dubcanada wrote: post #6
loufe wrote: post #2

We talk often on this forum of how innaccessible giants like Google and Amazon are for the little guy. I thus found this point particularly interesting: >"Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection. They immediately understood the seriousness of the problem and took prompt a…

Obviously there is more to it then what I am going to say, and who knows with remote workers where people are. But Apple and Mozilla headquarters are 5 miles apart (roughly). Couldn't you just walk/drive/scoot/fly/what ever over and talk to someone?

I'd imagine that security and the front desk are going to prevent anyone from entering to meet with specific teams or individuals without an appointment.

If you knew someone and had scheduled time with them, then yeah I'm sure you could hoverboard your way over.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#15

Post by djrogers »

dubcanada wrote: post #6
loufe wrote: post #2

We talk often on this forum of how innaccessible giants like Google and Amazon are for the little guy. I thus found this point particularly interesting: >"Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection. They immediately understood the seriousness of the problem and took prompt a…

Obviously there is more to it then what I am going to say, and who knows with remote workers where people are. But Apple and Mozilla headquarters are 5 miles apart (roughly). Couldn't you just walk/drive/scoot/fly/what ever over and talk to someone?

Setting aside that the problem with AV had nothing to do with Apple, for the most part nobody was working at either of those offices over the summer (2020, remember?). Also, which of Apple's 130+ Silicon Valley offices are you going to go to, and who do you ask for when you get there?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#16

Post by meibo »

loufe wrote: post #2

We talk often on this forum of how innaccessible giants like Google and Amazon are for the little guy. I thus found this point particularly interesting: >"Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection. They immediately understood the seriousness of the problem and took prompt a…

The antivirus industry is the biggest player of the modern adware/malware crisis.

The dark patterns used in software like AVG and avast, both making every system I see them on so slow that they might as well be unusable, are all focused on getting more installs, be it to force people into getting whatever "premium" subscription or harvesting data(e.g. attaching themselves to every sent email like a virus).

There are very few that I could actually recommend, like Malwarebytes - for most users, Windows Defender will be more than enough nowadays. I haven't used a mac in a while, do you actually need AV on them today?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#17

Post by jfk13 »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #12

Is “apple silicon” the port job here? Isn’t this more correctly described as a port of their existing ARM64 target to macOS?

Firefox on iOS is based on the system's Webkit engine; Firefox elsewhere is built on Gecko, so there's a vast difference in the codebase involved.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#18

Post by vlovich123 »

bluedino wrote: post #3
loufe wrote: post #2

We talk often on this forum of how innaccessible giants like Google and Amazon are for the little guy. I thus found this point particularly interesting: >"Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection. They immediately understood the seriousness of the problem and took prompt a…

If Mozilla can’t get a hold of anyone... 20 years ago Google would have sent someone to Mozilla HQ for a week to work on stuff

This is the problem with jumping to conclusions from a vague excerpt. The vendor is some random anti-virus vendor and if you know what trying to get a handle there means....

> More of a concern was user reports that some antivirus software was flagging all our Universal Binaries as malware, and corrupting the Firefox installation the moment the update arrived.

> The software was using machine learning techniques and presumably observed that our combined Universal Binaries didn’t quite look like any other legitimate software it had ever seen before.

> Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#19

Post by r00fus »

> The Apple Silicon chips are one of the first desktop chips that are a heterogeneous design with distinct performance and efficiency cores. We’re revising much of our core threading and thread pooling architecture to handle the distinction better, improve efficiency, and eventually be able to schedule less performance-critical tasks on the efficiency cores.

I found this bit interesting. Likely more prevalent in mobile apps, but perhaps shifting desktop code to Big.Little approach and using core affinity will result in a lot less wasted energy.

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