Live data from Hacker News

Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

hacks.mozilla.org

131–140 of 242 posts

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm using firefox on macos right now and I can't see what the issue is. The the menus show up in the main top bar like every other app. Am I missing something?

Yes.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#132
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ant…

The built-in Windows Defender is absolutely painful on low end machines. Yours should be absolutely fine, but on a 2010 macbook with an ancient core2duo and 2gb ram, it's very noticeable.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#133
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Or you know, because they disallow dynamic code execution of arbitrary downloaded code in apps, and JIT JS compilers do just that. What would you call a webview? Is it that much different if it is webkit or gecko or blink doing it? If I used a webview to run js-linux, xfce and firefox should that be disallowed too?

The code of the webview is made by Apple, it's part of the OS – so it doesn't abide by App Store rules.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#134
post #40
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…

Originally everything was a cost centre, but some rebranded as profit centres, and the PHBs swallowed it.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm using firefox on macos right now and I can't see what the issue is. The the menus show up in the main top bar like every other app. Am I missing something?

Pretty sure this bug is about the right-click menu.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is an indictment of the lack of organizational skills in the area of software engineering. It is still an industry run by the sit of their pants. There is no clear separation of responsibilities and everyone wants to do everything (and usually badly).

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#137

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"

Wow - that bug can now legally drink in all 50 states!

Not until April 5th.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#138

> 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…

And in turn this blocks a large Swift app I work on from shipping Apple silicon support…software dependency chains can be brutal.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#139

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"

Aesthetics aside, is there anything Firefox's context menu lacks because it's non-native? Like accessibility features and such?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ant…

The built-in Windows Defender is absolutely painful on low end machines. Yours should be absolutely fine, but on a 2010 macbook with an ancient core2duo and 2gb ram, it's very noticeable.

I have an i7 with 16GB of RAM and when Defender and update both decide to run at the same time it cripples the machine for half an hour.
Post reply on HN