Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon • Hacker News Board

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#181

Post by account42 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #73

ksec wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

So what do you do if an antivirus vendor is uncooperative? Can you sue them for defamation?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#182

Post by ttflee » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 8:56 AM UTC

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 issue itself sounds like a prologue for an A.I. dystopian story.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#183

Post by fwn » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

roca wrote: post #163

jonny383 wrote: post #156

I wonder if Mozilla regrets laying off 25% of their engineering team [0] given their rapidly declining browser market share [1], and their rapidly declining performance. Not to mention their forced adoption of the new Firefox on Android which disables all add-ons except Mozilla approved ones, despite their promises to correct this [2]. Mozilla _used_ to be about open internet and security, but that's just a false pre…

Nice trolling. You can use general extensions on Android in Nightly, so this is in progress: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... But sure, if you want to "throw away the idea of internet freedom" then that's your choice.

Not the parent but just to clarify:

The ability to install non-store extensions got completely removed on Firefox for Android and there is (AFAIK) no hint at whether it will ever reappear. That's pretty frustrating and clearly not a win in internet freedom.

Store extensions can be used if you create a Firefox account and use their Nightly, which is really hard to justify, IMO. To me it looks like they wanted to push their account numbers and I have great difficulties to find any potential hidden greatness in this policy.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#184

Post by bzb6 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #129

partlysean wrote: post #120

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?

I know of a lot of people like that, when presented with very illogical UI decisions, or controls that look absolutely nothing like the rest of the system, they just cannot see what the issue is. I wonder if it’s poor eyesight, lack of attention, or whatever.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#185

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

> The Apple Silicon chips are one of the first desktop chips that are a heterogeneous design with distinct performance and efficiency cores. We’re revising much of our core threading and thread pooling architecture to handle the distinction better, improve efficiency, and eventually be able to schedule less performance-critical tasks on the efficiency cores.

Isn't this at the wrong abstraction level? I would expect this to be a job for the OS scheduler.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#186

Post by jonny383 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:37 AM UTC

bilkow wrote: post #167

jonny383 wrote: post #156

I wonder if Mozilla regrets laying off 25% of their engineering team [0] given their rapidly declining browser market share [1], and their rapidly declining performance. Not to mention their forced adoption of the new Firefox on Android which disables all add-ons except Mozilla approved ones, despite their promises to correct this [2]. Mozilla _used_ to be about open internet and security, but that's just a false pre…

What rapidly declining market share? Did you even open the wikipedia page you're referring to? There are no graphs over the last few months, and if you look at the sources[0][1][2], it looks like their market share declined BEFORE the layoff (from January to August 2020). After the layoff, it seems pretty stable. As a reference, I'm going to post the values here: Source: Jan 2020 - Aug 2020 - Jan 2021 netmarketshare:…

You have to be joking right? You'd have to be blind to not see the rapid decline in Firefox marketshare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#...

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#187

Post by kzrdude » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:43 AM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #185

> The Apple Silicon chips are one of the first desktop chips that are a heterogeneous design with distinct performance and efficiency cores. We’re revising much of our core threading and thread pooling architecture to handle the distinction better, improve efficiency, and eventually be able to schedule less performance-critical tasks on the efficiency cores. Isn't this at the wrong abstraction level? I would expect t…

the application knows the tasks better than the OS?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#188

Post by bostik » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:03 AM UTC

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…

> * The antivirus industry is the biggest player of the modern adware/malware crisis.*

This is so true it hurts. Veracode releases an annual report ("State of Software Security"), part as marketing material, part as an industry insight leaflet. The worst offenders for software security and defect rate are, year after year, security products.

As an infosec veteran, it's obvious to me that the "industry" at large is not obeying the rules they set for others. The shoemaker's children have no feet.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#189

Post by sam_goody » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

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…

> There are very few that I could actually recommend, like Malwarebytes

Malwarebytes installs a program with elevated privileges that starts on boot and always runs in the background, and regularly sends data home - despite that it is an ON DEMAND scanner.

I have written to the company to understand this virus-like behavior, and have gotten no response.

Do you have a reason to trust them?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#190

Post by wooger » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

Wait, what? People run anti-virus on Macs? What proportion of the userbase is this?

It's good to hear from Mozilla doing some browser developmenmt, and not making bizarre political announcements that an authoritarian shutdown of a social network by a cartel of tech giants is "not enough".