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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#171

Post by slim »

drewg123 wrote: post #142
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.

because A/V folks are hackers, not engineers. hackers do impressive things without reading the fucking manual. that's why they can break seemingly unbreakable things. but on the surface, to the engineer, they seem uncompetent.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#172

Post by [deleted] »

roca wrote: post #164
coldtea wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the experience is so much better why are Apple scared to let other browsers into the app store? Well, the weasel word "scared" kind of begs the question. Who said it's "scared"? Apple spearheaded the modern browser with Safari. Chrome wasn't even a thing then (it forked off of Apple's work on Safari/Webkit later, just like v8 came after Apple's own JSC JIT work). As for Mobile Safari, it took several years for A…

Mobile Safari does hold the Web back. Examples are easy to find: Safari doesn't support the standard unprefixed fullscreen API, while Firefox and Chrome have for years, so Web developers have to write a bunch of compatibility crap or accept fullscreen not working on iOS. Firefox and Chrome have supported WebGL2 for years, iOS Safari still doesn't.

[deleted]

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#173

Post by spijdar »

johndoe42377 wrote: post #170

What porting? Isn't C++ the most portable language in existence? Oh, there is also Rust. But isn't it just uses an LLVM codegen, same as Swift or clang? So, there is Rust's stdlib. Seems like these abstractions are not exactly zero-cost?

> But isn't it just uses an LLVM codegen, same as Swift or clang?

It's more complicated than that. I've been involved in a project (bootstrapping little-endian 32 bit PowerPC on linux) which needed a rust port. I didn't work on that, but from what I saw, it's at best a major nuisance, possibly a nightmare when something breaks. This may be a bad example since darwin/aarch64 is a more sane target, but still. ;-)

More importantly I guess, Firefox has some reeeeaally old platform specific cruft and some really rusty (hah!) ABI-glue stuff lying around. Stuff like the Netscape Portable Runtime. There's still code in Firefox from back when it ran on HP PA-RISC. There's even code for IBM Z mainframes in there. Really glossing over details, but there are some inner mechanisms that are very platform specific and need at least some custom code for each OS + CPU combo.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#174

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

drewg123 wrote: post #142
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.

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.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#175

Post by Closi »

kortilla wrote: post #145
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…

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…

I also disagree with the “cost centre” view, I think it’s often used too simplistically and doesn’t account for the fact that all areas should add value (otherwise you wouldn’t have them by design).

Some examples (that I have seen in reality):

Finance departments are cost centres, until you give them enough resource and they find you a more efficient tax structure. Cut finance departments start to struggle with things like credit control which affects your revenue.

Distribution Centres are usually seen as a cost centre, until you drop spend and it impacts COGS or customer lead times, or inventory in shops raises because of less frequent deliveries and you get out of stocks.

IT is a cost centre, but when funding is reduced change across the whole business slows and other areas are impacted (eg the customer web experience).

In reality the distinction of “some areas generate profit” and “some areas just cost” isn’t true in the end. All areas contribute to profit - some just do so indirectly.

I think the idea of Michael Porters “value chain” is better, where everything contributes to customer value (including indirect functions). The argument this makes is if you see some areas as just cost centres (e.g. fulfilment centres) then you can miss your ability to maximise customer value (e.g. offering faster delivery options).

Even sales people don’t usually generate profit on their own because without the other business areas they would be selling hot air.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#176

Post by sjwright »

geerlingguy wrote: post #144
kevincox wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is both correct and incorrect.

This is correct if you refer to how early versions of the Mac OS X installer was packaged. The Classic environment framework was always installed but a copy of Mac OS 9 was also required to be installed on the system volume as well—and this wasn't included when installing a fresh copy of Mac OS X from a CD.

There was a limited period of time when Apple shipped and installed both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on Macs—so for those people, the Classic environment was "effectively" installed by default. Though to reproduce this you'd need to run the Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 installers from their respective CDs.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#177

Post by msh »

terhechte wrote: post #93
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?

The IT department at the place where I work installs antivirus on all Macs. I’d guess it is the same at most bigger corporations

But was it not just a specific product?

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#178

Post by snoshy »

Closi wrote: post #175
kortilla wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I also disagree with the “cost centre” view, I think it’s often used too simplistically and doesn’t account for the fact that all areas should add value (otherwise you wouldn’t have them by design) . Some examples (that I have seen in reality): Finance departments are cost centres, until you give them enough resource and they find you a more efficient tax structure. Cut finance departments start to struggle with thin…

I think this is exactly right. However, the question still stands: how does a large tech-focused corporation encourage engineers to pay attention to such requests?

Expecting enough of them to just volunteer their time doesn't appear to be a sustainable answer.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#179

Post by Closi »

snoshy wrote: post #178
Closi wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also disagree with the “cost centre” view, I think it’s often used too simplistically and doesn’t account for the fact that all areas should add value (otherwise you wouldn’t have them by design) . Some examples (that I have seen in reality): Finance departments are cost centres, until you give them enough resource and they find you a more efficient tax structure. Cut finance departments start to struggle with thin…

I think this is exactly right. However, the question still stands: how does a large tech-focused corporation encourage engineers to pay attention to such requests? Expecting enough of them to just volunteer their time doesn't appear to be a sustainable answer.

Oh, I agree with that - I just disagree with the cost centre view (most of my career has been in logistics which is traditionally a 'cost centre' while at the same time people complain about the service they get! In logistics there is a relationship between service and cost).

I spent a few years in IT as a Product Manager (or a similar role), and I viewed my primary role as protecting my team from the barrage of shit that I got, so that they could focus. This involved making sure I was politically the first point of contact and reducing back-channels (some are fine, but not ones that change functionality, involve significant work or are too distracting), placating the people requesting functionality or fixes by understanding how serious the dependency/issue was, triaging it and either placing it on the roadmap or saying no. We also had an engineering manager that could be the contact for specific bugs who could then triage and pass it on.

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