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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

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Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#71

Post by mlyle »

rebelwebmaster wrote: post #35
vlovich123 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was Cylance made by Blackberry.

I had an awful experience with Cylance and some open source software I maintained, too-- false positive detections, and they wouldn't fix it.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#72

Post by SloopJon »

cududa wrote: post #46
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

Could be. I suspect that's a factor in the fonts available for download or document support in Catalina and Big Sur:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210192

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211240

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#73

Post by mlyle »

ksec wrote: post #64
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.

This was about Cylance being jerks, not Apple. I've fought Cylance quite a bit on Windows for flagging open source software as malware, too (and they fail to respond / fix).

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#74

Post by mortenjorck »

Gaelan wrote: post #26
brundolf wrote: post #21

> 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. Wait, modern browsers still download and run native binaries at the request of certain sites? How is this different from the days when native plugins like Flash were massive…

As I understand it, it's a single trusted binary (Google's Widevine), not arbitrary binaries from sites, so I doubt it's a huge security liability. Not to discount all the other problems with DRM on the web, of course.

Worth mentioning is that this is also solving a different problem from the old browser plugin ecosystem. Rather than enabling third parties to extend browser functionality, this exists exclusively to partition the open-source Firefox codebase from closed-source DRM code, a workaround to enable DRM playback in an open-source browser.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#75

Post by dingaling »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #32
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…

That sounds like a dream career -- any advice getting there when you've hacked on graveyard startups most your life?

Soft skills are key; getting to know key people, and their responsibilities and capabilities and personalities.

But above all: be a good listener. Listen to what they say, think about it and build it on next time you talk with them. If they see you showing interest and learning about their domain, you'll get a direct line to them. And don't always bring them problems, be sure to stroke their ego too by asking what they're working on.

It doesn't happen overnight, it requires perserverence and a dollop of luck. You won't walk into a job like that, it takes years of building a reputation for yourself.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#76

Post by glandium »

twic wrote: post #62
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 an…

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

The Windows ARM64 build of Firefox comes with a copy of the 32-bits x86 Windows Firefox binaries to launch the win32 CDM.

There is no support for things like this for Linux, and I don't think there's a native ARM64 Linux CDM (although I could be wrong. I mean, such a CDM likely exists, considering ARM64 Chromebooks)

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#77

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

coldtea wrote: post #45
skrowl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

I can't speak to the mobile/desktop distinction, but comparing "watching Netflix in Firefox on my desktop" with "watching Netflix on my LG WebOS TV", there's barely any difference. If anything, the browser version wins because of the superior input devices (kbd, mouse) attached to it compared with the TV. This suggests to me that there would be little difference when comparing mobile/desktop or app/browser, other than the netflix logo being the point of entry (and if you could run the SPA literally like an app, no difference at all).

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#78

Post by glandium »

floatboth wrote: post #51
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?

Yes, "Apple Silicon" is the marketing name for macOS/ARM64. (Why did 3 other people interpret this comment as saying something about iOS?!)

> (Why did 3 other people interpret this comment as saying something about iOS?!)

Because originally, the comment also said "Firefox already works on apple silicon, on iOS".

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#79

Post by e40 »

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…

This really bugs me about Apple. We had the DTK (pre-release hardware for the M1). We got into trouble with an upgrade from beta2 to beta10 and the machine was bricked. Everywhere we turned, we were told to use the developer forums. We did. There were no responses there and I didn't see anyone but customer helping customers.

So, since we're an Apple developer, we decided we would use one of our DTS (developer technical support) tickets. Nope. Pre-release anything is not supported.

So, we ended up waiting for release, bought a new M1 mini and then started our porting effort. Then, we ran into problems and used one of our DTS incidents and we got some help. However, we lost months.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#80

Post by shrimpx »

FYI you still cannot get a full native experience with Chrome and Firefox, due to plugins that have not been ported.

For example Chrome ships with an x64 version of Widevine, a plugin that is required to watch live streams on YouTube TV (and perhaps other services with live TV). Currently, YouTube TV does not work natively in Chrome or Firefox.

All that said, it will work fine if you run Rosetta -- the x64 decoder will run in Rosetta.

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