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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

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Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#141

Post by tylerfontaine »

techsupporter wrote: post #43
coliveira wrote: post #39

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…

There are still lots of good support organizations out there, and not every place looks at support as a burden. It's a pretty critical piece in the "new" 'as a service' world, helping folks use complex systems that they don't control, etc.

I've been heavy in the data space, and get to do some fascinating work with folks, helping design data models, implement analysis, and other things in a wide variety of verticals. It's support, so sometimes there's some more tedious things too - there's no avoiding that. :)

But, and perhaps I'm biased, it's still a great career path, even if it's not as flash as "code all the time" work.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#142

Post by drewg123 »

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…

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.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#143

Post by dsjoerg »

sedatk wrote: post #139
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"

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

Speech. and the whole Services ecosystem.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#144

Post by geerlingguy »

kevincox wrote: post #69
kitsunesoba wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like a bit of a nudge to developers to not take x86 compatibility for a given… kind of, "it's there if it's truly necessary, but you really should port that plugin/daemon/etc".

I suspect this as well. But it seems so obvious that it is necessary for a while that I doubt that anyone takes it seriously.

I believe the Mac OS Classic environment wasn't installed by default in the early OS X days.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#145

Post by kortilla »

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…

There are parts of the business that cannot boost revenue. “Investing” in them doesn’t really make sense beyond nominal amounts because the max return they can provide is eliminating themselves.

Unless you’re into fraud, “accounting” and “accounts payable” are examples of cost centers. You don’t hire a bunch of innovative people to boost it because it’s not going to ever increase your revenue.

The distinction is made from a strategic perspective because scaling up “cost centers” should be avoided at all costs and scaling up “profit centers” is something you want to do as much as you can.

It has no overlap with “interesting work”. Very often the boring parts of an industry are the profit centers (e.g. in academia the profit comes from packing students into classrooms, not research).

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#146

Post by ddingus »

noizejoy wrote: post #123
ddingus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no free lunches. Expecting otherwise is a very good sign the enterprise is penny wise, pound foolish.

Not every business environment is captured by grand sweeping general statements. Reality is a lot more nuanced than that.

Precisely.

And the fact is, enterprises seeing to make every support transaction a positive ROI are, in fact and in deed, penny wise and pound foolish.

They will see an opportunity cost due to missed sales opportunity.

They will see greater load due to people using an inferior process and poorly empowered people, repeatedly.

They will see a diminished overall market perception.

Their products will provide less value due to a greater misalignment with both exiating and potential users needs, which drive perception of value, which drives more dollars.

Personally, having been on all sides of this matter, I rank what we are discussing at the very top when considering who I will buy from and or work with.

Flat out, when I see enterprises putting seriously crazy amounts of money in the bank, I accept zero excuses in this regard.

It is not necessary. Lives are short, money hard to come by. Best get solid value for the dollar.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#147

Post by ddingus »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #117
ddingus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Word

I should have included that. Glad you did.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#148

Post by noizejoy »

ddingus wrote: post #146
noizejoy wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every business environment is captured by grand sweeping general statements. Reality is a lot more nuanced than that.

Precisely. And the fact is, enterprises seeing to make every support transaction a positive ROI are, in fact and in deed, penny wise and pound foolish. They will see an opportunity cost due to missed sales opportunity. They will see greater load due to people using an inferior process and poorly empowered people, repeatedly. They will see a diminished overall market perception. Their products will provide less value…

I generally agree with your arguments when the customers are medium to large businesses - and I assume that’s where your experience is. In the consumer and small business space the dynamics are very different.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#149

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

sedatk wrote: post #139
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"

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

Unlike native right click menus, Firefox's don't let you type to select an option after right clicking. Right clicking text in Firefox also displays a different set of options from the standard textual right click menu which is pretty annoying if you're used to the standard one that appears in literally every other app (for instance, the native one lets you right click a misspelled word to select a correction).

This is one of those rare instances of "no, it's not just different, it's actually much worse".

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#150

Post by kiwijamo »

mr_toad wrote: post #140
floatboth wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is strange. Until fairly recently my daily driver was a low end ex-lease HP machine from 2013 or so with an i3 with 4gigs of RAM. Never saw much issue with Defender or the updates. Not unusual for updates of any kind to be all over and done with in <5mins from clicking update to a fully usable desktop. Win10 has improved a heck of a lot over previous versions even on old hardware. My work-supplied Mac on the other hand, even with much better specs than my lowly home machine, usually takes at least 30mins to do updates (with most of the time spent during the reboot which means I can't use it at all). One of many reasons why I moved away from Apple for my own hardware.
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