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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

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Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#111

Post by saagarjha »

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…

I don't have a bricked DTK, but the last seven builds or so kernel panic every few hours of use. It's kind of sad to see where the program is now…

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#112

Post by saagarjha »

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.

Well, it's OS-version specific…

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#113

Post by ed25519FUUU »

> Rust in particular was a concern. Firefox depends on Rust code, and we require a working Rust compiler to build the browser. Although Apple Silicon support for Rust was underway, it took until mid-August for there to be functional compiler builds, which limited the amount of progress possible for Firefox.

Lack of rust support for 64-bit ARM was a bit surprising to me, especially given the velocity in which people have been rewriting certain components in Rust.

Take for example ffmpeg failing to compile because librsvg was rewritten in rust: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/61668

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#114

Post by toyg »

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…

You're missing the lack of creativity and courage in the managerial class.

Support can very much be a profit center. Support personnel is relatively cheap; if their services are priced correctly, they can easily become a stream of recurring income - and everybody knows that "recurring income is best income".

However, this requires efficiency and creativity at the managerial level. It's easier to see support as a burden and just work on shrinking its costs, instead of maximizing its revenues by formulating good price plans. The former is an internal effort that is fairly easy to implement in short timeframes and will easily win brownie points with direct superiors (who doesn't like to cut costs?); the latter requires actual pricing skills and market knowledge, and might take a while to get results. The mediocre manager will always prefer the former.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#115

Post by macksd »

duxup wrote: post #55
anonymouse008 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It wasn't an official job. I was a regular support drone as far as anyone knew. I just had some connections that came about because I could be discrete and the engineers understood that I didn't bring them garbage too early (without enough information) or without good reason.

And this is why it's important to recognize and retain people who get the right things done. One does not simply backfill a support position and replace someone who has built up the internal AND external reputation and relationships required for issues like this to get fast-tracked and fixed in a way that makes everyone happy.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#116

Post by steveklabnik »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #113

> Rust in particular was a concern. Firefox depends on Rust code, and we require a working Rust compiler to build the browser. Although Apple Silicon support for Rust was underway, it took until mid-August for there to be functional compiler builds, which limited the amount of progress possible for Firefox. Lack of rust support for 64-bit ARM was a bit surprising to me, especially given the velocity in which people h…

It has gotten significantly better recently, with Arm themselves pitching in.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#117

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

ddingus wrote: post #52
jkaptur wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not much. "Cost center" can be transformed into something else given both an understanding that support can and should contribute to future sales, and an organization capable of putting that understanding to work. I have seen a similar scenario in manufacturing where various setup, prep, quality tasks are seen as cost centers and minimized. Doing this kind of thing has ripple costs. Always. In a perfect world, we mak…

Our support team is not technical in any way (they are support for our entire moderately sized membership-based nonprofit), but they are consistently a source of extremely high quality feedback, for the reasons you mentioned.

If there are serious UX issues, your designer might not uncover them, but support will hear about it. If there are edge case performance issues, your dev team might not uncover them but support will hear about it. Very few people know more about how real users interact with your products than support.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#120

Post by partlysean »

markdog12 wrote: post #87

Got a kick out of one of the bugzilla links: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572 "Use native context menus on Mac OS" "Opened 21 years ago"

It’s little things like this that keep me from using Firefox. Context menus, various micro-interactions, visual design decisions—they all feel so non-native.
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