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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

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Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#41

Post by setpatchaddress »

wlesieutre wrote: post #27
sjg007 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean there is mac malware and some of it is quite sophisticated. The compiled apple script bitcoin miner being one of the more ingenious ones. But those were distributed through pirated applications. There are probably a few zero days as well that maybe an AVE package could help stop if a signature is rapidly distributed. Ignoring the fact that the AV engine itself is a target too. Most people using only the app st…

The one in recent memory for me is the KeRanger ransomware that was distributed in the official Transmission installer. https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/new-os-x-ransomware-kera... >Transmission representative John Clay told Reuters via email that the ransomware was added to disk-image of its software after the project's server was compromised in a cyber attack. >"We're not commenting on the avenue of attack, othe…

Just to answer the original question: that's an example of something Apple handled -- no external AV required.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#42

Post by kevincox »

I'm surprised that Rosetta 2 isn't installed by default. It seems that for the next couple of years the vast majority of people will need at least one x86 app.

I guess split-architecture applications were also not foreseen as it is clear that the auto-install prompt doesn't work very well in that case.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#43

Post by techsupporter »

coliveira wrote: post #39
zerkten wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exists in almost every company by design. Engineering teams wouldn't make any progress towards their mission if they are constantly dealing with outside interruptions, but at the same time there are things which should be qualified. Customer support is a cost center and the focus is on mitigating the cost of providing that support. If you fail to do this you can burn through a lot of cash quickly. What managemen…

The biggest problem we have in software engineering is the lack of support staff. You don't think a civil engineer has to deal with minutiae of paperwork, but software engineers for some strange reason think it is ok to be inundated by clerical work all the time. The industry eventually must evolve to create software assistants capable of running code, triaging bugs, etc.

> The industry eventually must evolve to create software assistants capable of running code, triaging bugs, etc.

In my opinion, we had this. They were your senior support staff or were operations; some companies combined this into a formal role called "Support" or "Service" "Operations."

But then we as an industry decided that operations is bad[0] and if you write the code then you can obviously test the code, deploy the code, maintain the code, and support the code. Then every Hip And Cool Start-Up adopted the model of "sysadmins and support staff are bad because we've had bad experiences in the past so we will also have our devs talk directly to customers until they get tired of doing that and we just replace it with a contact form encumbered by CAPTCHA and a no-reply e-mail address."

As someone who has greatly enjoyed, been very good, and very well paid (so my employers agreed that I was good at it), at support and operations roles only to see them disappear into the inky void of Everyone Codes All Of The Time, I am both biased and frustrated.

0 - Because money, I suspect.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#44

Post by wlesieutre »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #41
wlesieutre wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one in recent memory for me is the KeRanger ransomware that was distributed in the official Transmission installer. https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/new-os-x-ransomware-kera... >Transmission representative John Clay told Reuters via email that the ransomware was added to disk-image of its software after the project's server was compromised in a cyber attack. >"We're not commenting on the avenue of attack, othe…

Just to answer the original question: that's an example of something Apple handled -- no external AV required.

Yes, although it snuck by Gatekeeper to begin with by being signed by another developer account.

Would make it past Apple's new notarization scheme these days?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#45

Post by coldtea »

skrowl wrote: post #31
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?

On iOS there are no web browsers other than Safari, per the app store rules. "Chrome" / "Firefox" / etc on iOS are just basically skins on top of Webkit. See 2.5.6 here - https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ This is why you don't get any of the features / extensions / etc of Chrome or Firefox on iOS. Apple does this so that the mobile web can never replace apps that they have a monopoly on and get…

>Apple does this so that the mobile web can never replace apps that they have a monopoly on and get a % from

Or you know, because they disallow dynamic code execution of arbitrary downloaded code in apps, and JIT JS compilers do just that.

>If you could just visit netflix.com and have it install a Netflix SPA that worked as well as the native app, why would you ever install the native app?

It's like asking "why would you ever use a native app". Because it's faster, native, and much more convenient?

Take the best desktop browser engine, e.g. Chrome, and put it inside a mobile browser app. Still, I (and most I guess) wouldn't use it to watch Netflix over individual apps.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#46

Post by cududa »

kevincox wrote: post #42

I'm surprised that Rosetta 2 isn't installed by default. It seems that for the next couple of years the vast majority of people will need at least one x86 app. I guess split-architecture applications were also not foreseen as it is clear that the auto-install prompt doesn't work very well in that case.

I wonder if it has anything to do with licensing costs of everything that went into Rosetta? I imagine they owe someone royalties and licensing costs on some components in it, saves some pennies to dollars to only install it as needed

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#47

Post by masklinn »

> Apple introduced a translation cache that likely removes this overhead completely for most applications but it does not work for code that is output by a JIT. With the native build, this second translation is avoided completely and we’re back to having a snappy browser.

Indeed while Rosetta does have support for JITs (which is really impressive in and of itself), every piece of machine code generated by the JIT has to be translated on the fly.

While the hiccup at the initial run is not too costly / annoying for a regular application being AOT-compiled in its entirety and Apple can then shove the result somewhere nearby, for a JIT it's basically constant, continuous overhead which can't be cached because it won't be around next run. I'm not surprised that the gains are significant there.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#48

Post by floatboth »

gspr wrote: post #24
mugivarra69 wrote: post #13

does firefox use llvm to compile ?

Yes. There are essential Rust components in Firefox, and the only serious Rust compiler uses LLVM. (This has nothing to do with clang as someone else suggests)

"does firefox use llvm to compile" is a very weird question that can be interpreted in a variety of ways :D

Seems your interpretation is "does Firefox require any LLVM based compiler to compile?" and yeah. But "does Mozilla use clang for official builds?" is another valid way to parse the question.

(Mozilla does use clang, and they even do cross-language LTO thanks to that: https://blog.llvm.org/2019/09/closing-gap-cross-language-lto...)

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#49

Post by dhritzkiv »

skrowl wrote: post #31
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?

On iOS there are no web browsers other than Safari, per the app store rules. "Chrome" / "Firefox" / etc on iOS are just basically skins on top of Webkit. See 2.5.6 here - https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ This is why you don't get any of the features / extensions / etc of Chrome or Firefox on iOS. Apple does this so that the mobile web can never replace apps that they have a monopoly on and get…

Is there anything stopping Netflix from working in Safari on iOS? and then being installed as a bookmark to the Home Screen?

I believe it's Netflix that prefers that users use the app.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#50

Post by noizejoy »

jkaptur wrote: post #40
zerkten wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exists in almost every company by design. Engineering teams wouldn't make any progress towards their mission if they are constantly dealing with outside interruptions, but at the same time there are things which should be qualified. Customer support is a cost center and the focus is on mitigating the cost of providing that support. If you fail to do this you can burn through a lot of cash quickly. What managemen…

The binary distinction between "cost centers" and "profit centers" has always seemed arbitrary to me (especially since, as an engineer, I've been in both without my work being substantially different). To be frank, it seems like an organizational way to say "we don't find this work to be valuable or interesting, and we'd like to do the bare minimum of it - in fact, we'd like to unleash smart people to explore new fro…

x% of support requests are of questionable nature - to mention just a few categories:

* people expecting to use a sophisticated tool (for doing complex business processes requiring special know-how) without paying for and spending time on adequate training)

* people unwilling to RTFM, google, youtube, etc.

* people whining when a general purpose tool doesn’t fit their exact workflow to a tee

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