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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

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Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#61

Post by duxup »

zerkten wrote: post #33
duxup wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a back channel route to engineering at a company I worked for a while. A few of the engineers trusted me and a couple select customers / sales guys knew they could come to me to run a bug by me 'in theory' and if we had enough information I could unofficially run it by engineering without going through the song and dance of the typical support channels. I could get a quick ya or nay form them on some things and…

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…

Yup that's accurate. I was a regular old support drone who had some connections that allowed for some special paths to engineering.

We had 'official' faster escalation paths but those inevitably are determined by $$$ and there's always more ways to measure 'important customer' than can be defined / shown in $$$.

Management was totally aware of it all and supportive.

But eventually I got tired of the land of 'support' and moved on for a variety of reasons, mostly because time and again I saw support treated like the usual 'cost center' and I didn't want to be a part of that.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#62

Post by twic »

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?

This is a good question. On the one hand, the article says:

> Of all the work needed to support the new hardware, porting Firefox to the 64-bit ARM architecture was not actually something we needed to do: we’ve supported 64-bit ARM on Android and Linux for years.

On the other hand, it says:

> Secondly, we needed to adapt and fix the various parts of the Firefox codebase that deal with low-level calling conventions and particularly the interfaces between the JavaScript and C++ (and nowadays Rust) parts of the code.

I suppose MacOS on ARM has a different calling convention to both MacOS on x86-64 and Linux or Windows on ARM64.

Also:

> If the user visits such a site, Firefox will automatically download and install such a proprietary EME/CDM module. This presented a problem to us as we would be dependent on those third-party vendors to publish ARM64 versions of those decoders.

So what do Windows or Linux users on ARM64 do? Do they just not get DRM?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#63

Post by kitsunesoba »

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.

Feels like a bit of a nudge to developers to not take x86 compatibility for a given… kind of, "it's there if it's truly necessary, but you really should port that plugin/daemon/etc".

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#64

Post by ksec »

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…

>It’s notable that without this last-ditch effort we would have been effectively blocked from releasing a native Apple Silicon version for an indefinite period."

And they are Mozilla. Imagine Indies.

The Modern Day Apple requires you to get some Mainstream Media publish about How Apple block Open Sources Software to be running on M1 before Apple saw the PR damage and start acting on it.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#65

Post by cat199 »

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…

> What am I missing?

not much, or everything -

it's basically an accounting term on how you are tracking an expense and so it is very insightful as to how the effort of your project,group,department etc. is perceived by upper mgmt

so "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 frontiers of just how minimal the bare minimum could possibly be."

is pretty spot on, if the effort has been (mostly arbitrarily) categorized as such..

when i learned the accounting theory behind it, it suddenly illuminated managment attitudes in current/previous jobs - literally in some orgs overly reliant on this perspective there is literally nothing certain efforts can do through official channels to be viewed as 'valuable' ..

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#66

Post by lizknope »

meibo wrote: post #16
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…

My work laptop runs Windows. It runs Outlook, Chrome, Slack, and Exceed to connect to a remote Linux server where I do all of my work. At random times throughout the day the fan will get really loud. When I run the process viewer tool during this time I see things using 100% CPU. It's a Core i5-8350U with 8GB RAM and during these times it gets almost unusable. I've googled a few of them and they always seem to be antivirus things.

At home I have over 8 Linux machines and the only times their fans get louder are when I am actually running a video encoding program or something CPU intensive like that. Some of them are slower with only 4GB RAM and they are always responsive.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#67

Post by IainIreland »

green-bottle wrote: post #25

A bit tangential to the main topic of the post. They mention that they are working on another optimizing compiler Ion which will replace the cranelift compiler (which is still in nightly) as the new compiler for WebAssembly. They link the issue [1] tracking the change which also speaks about disabling cranelift. To my knowledge cranelift was made for the purpose of compiling WebAssembly in Firefox, so I am not sure i…

(I work on SpiderMonkey.)

Cranelift was originally started as a project to make a new backend for wasm in SpiderMonkey. It took on a life of its own, and has been transferred by the Bytecode Alliance (which Mozilla is a part of). At the moment it's not mature enough for us to use in production (both in terms of performance and in terms of code churn). We're hopeful that will change over the next few years, but we need to ship wasm support now, so we're sticking with our existing backend.

(We intend to keep Cranelift working behind a compile-time flag.)

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#69

Post by kevincox »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #63
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.

Feels like a bit of a nudge to developers to not take x86 compatibility for a given… kind of, "it's there if it's truly necessary, but you really should port that plugin/daemon/etc".

I suspect this as well. But it seems so obvious that it is necessary for a while that I doubt that anyone takes it seriously.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#70

Post by glandium »

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.

It's even worse. It's uninstalled when upgrading macOS.
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