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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

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Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#81

Post by magicalhippo »

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…

> Customer support is a cost center

For us, great customer support is one of our stronger sales arguments. In fact we've not had to push hard on sales due to our customers calling former colleagues who moved to a competitor to tell them "you have got to get this software". Having great support has been key to this experience.

Most of our support people have been recruited from our customers, so they know not just our software well but the processes and regulations around it, allowing them to quickly understand the issue at hand and offer relevant help.

So while it might look like a cost center on paper, I'm quite certain it's a massive net gain overall.

Of course as you say, we work hard to mitigate the cost of providing that support, like routinely looking at implementing changes that'll reduce repeat support issues. Maybe as simple as reworking a dialog text, to adding more automation.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#82

Post by gigatexal »

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 not like Mozilla is a nobody software outfit. For this to be what they had to do go get someone's attention at Apple is terrible.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#83

Post by [deleted] »

e40 wrote: post #79
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 technic…

[deleted]

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#84

Post by r00fus »

glandium wrote: post #70
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.

What does this mean, for dot releases? There's only been one release with Rosetta2 enabled.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#85

Post by r00fus »

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.

The best case is you need no x86 apps. Bought an M1 Air for a kid - as soon as Zoom was native they didn't need Rosetta.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#86

Post by cosmie »

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…

> What management needs to realize is that this is also an important interface point which requires attention. This doesn't happen at all, or is inconsistent.

> What I've always found interesting, is that all of these are often failing in some way at the same time in an organization of any size.

The formalization of it is frequently the cause of it failing or being inconsistent. Once it's a workflow that's explicitly acknowledged and condoned by management, it will start to lose its effectiveness. As an official express lane between customers and engineering, every account/sales person will become aware of it and overload it, either in the general course of supporting their client portfolio as much as possible, or even worse, by making this internal express route known to clients, as they can get incremental revenue by branding it as a "VIP Support" service or to make at-risk clients feel special. Which will eventually end up in actual client contracts in some form or another, opening the door to client abuse (or misuse) as well as causing legit cases that would have gone through this implicit channel to get routed to and trapped in normal support because the client at hand didn't pay up for the express lane.

You've also replaced a channel built off of relationships and mutual trust/respect into one based on official responsibilities and inertia, and all the hazards that entails. Such as political/managerial turf wars that add friction to the process, as well as cost minimization efforts that deskill the role over time and profit maximization efforts that overwhelm the capacity of the role, alienating the engineering team and undermining the entire intent.

... not to say it's impossible. But that's generally why you'll see it failing in some capacity any time you witness it, because it's almost impossible to maintain equilibrium the moment you officiate it.

An alternative that tends to be more lasting is for management to _actively facilitate organic growth_ of these sorts of things. Enable and encourage and provide opportunities for inter-departmental relationships and lines of communications to form. That way there is no single "back channel", and organic lines of communication between different parts of the org are robust against the loss of a single node.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#88

Post by Toutouxc »

> 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.

Effectively blocked from releasing it for the single-digit-percentage of people who run an antivirus on a Mac.

Does anyone have credible numbers on this?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#89

Post by bla3 »

shrimpx wrote: post #80

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 wi…

The post talks about this in some length.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#90

Post by cozzyd »

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.

Their website is... blech.
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