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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

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191–200 of 242 posts

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#191

Post by rkangel »

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.

Given the sibling comment "It's even worse. It's uninstalled when upgrading macOS." does it also give a way of monitoring emulation usage without violating privacy too much?

"X% of machines have installed Rosetta on this version of MacOS" would be a useful number without measuring the specific executions.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#192

Post by rkangel »

Toutouxc wrote: post #88

> 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?

They can't selectively release Firefox. If 5% of machines have AV, then the new version of Firefox wouldn't have worked for 5% of machines. That's far too high a failure rate to release.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#193

Post by EE84M3i »

wooger wrote: post #190

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".

Many enterprises require some form of anti-virus on all endpoints, including macs.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#194

Post by sylvestre »

Vogtinator wrote: post #180
sylvestre wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but this will probably change too.

I hope not, we need diversity. (Yes, also more rust compilers)

We will still have jobs to build Firefox with gcc and gcc is not going anywhere in general: the % of package built with clang in Debian/Ubuntu is a fraction compared to gcc.

Nathan Froyd wrote this great blog post about compiler usage: https://blog.mozilla.org/nfroyd/2018/05/29/when-implementati...

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#195

Post by afandian »

partlysean wrote: post #120
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.

What else do you use?

Last time I used Chrome they pretty much reimplemented everything from buttons to modal sheets.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#196

Post by zaphirplane »

floatboth wrote: post #132
lizknope wrote: post #66

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.

Out of interest why is the performance of a basic a/v be affected by “older” cpu.

Isn’t it basically finger printing files and intercepting IO and so the resources it uses just depends on the activity of the device not the age of the CPU

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#197

Post by climb_stealth »

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…

If anyone ever tries to install Sophos on your Mac, do your best to avoid it. Corporate IT seems to like it. It slows everything down. It's a nightmare to get rid off again.

The problem is for a lot of jobs you don't get a choice. The employer enforces it, no dark patterns necessary. And then you end up with a computer that is 70% busy doing AV-stuff and leaving 30% for actual work.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#198

Post by oauea »

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…

Surprising they even went through with that. Personally I'd have said fuck it, blamed Apple and moved on with my life.

If Apple wants to create incompatible hardware, let them put the effort & money into fixing the software, if they want the software on their platform.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#199

Post by ClumsyPilot »

bzb6 wrote: post #184
SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And thanks to the 'native ui' purists which you can never satisfy, now we are drowning in webapps and electron. How native does thst feel?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#200

Post by icebraining »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #174
drewg123 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was doing Mac drivers about a decade ago, and some of the dumbest and most ignorant questions on the kernel and drivers mailing lists came from A/V folks. Things like "my machine locks up when our software does X", where it was clear that X was blocking the entire kernel waiting for a userpace thread. Ugh. I've resolved to never, ever run A/V software on any machine I control based on the quality of those devs.

how do you "secure" machines if they are windows ones and dumb people plugin flash drives and click on big shiny download ram buttons. genuinely curious.

One way to do it is to whitelist all binaries in the system, and sandbox all applications (to prevent chances of a malicious PDF/image/etc abusing a buggy application).
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