Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon • Hacker News Board

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#201

Post by meibo » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 12:30 PM UTC

sam_goody wrote: post #189

meibo wrote: 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…

> 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?

Commercial Malwarebytes isn't on-demand, it's an actual anti-exploit/rootkit solution. I assume the free version, which only has the on-demand features, comes with these components anyways? Might explain that behavior.

My reason to trust them is that they seem to be generally respected still, I've been using them for a long time and they've yet to start annoying me with dark patterns and upsells - of course that's not a super great indicator.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#202

Post by chris_wot » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

As they linked to the LibreOffice bug that we hit,[1] it might be worthwhile explaining how the cross platform architecture works in LibreOffice.

The widgeting/graphics library is actually run by something called VCL (the Visual Component Library). It's a bit of a mess to be honest, but the simplified version is that there is a class called OutputDevice that the rest of the app uses, which basically acts as a fascade over a platform specific class called SalGraphics (there are a number of other platform specific classes, SalGraphics is what I focus on here).

Basically it is a class that implements a bunch of primitive drawing functions which call on abstract functions. We then implement these functions in a platform specific class.

To see the guts of the Mac class, see AquaSalGraphics [2] - and no, none of know why it was named "Aqua"... our codebase is old.

FWIW, OutputDevice has serious issues. I have detailed them in a mailing list post. [3]

1. https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138122

2. https://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/vcl/inc/quartz/sa...

3. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2020-Dece...

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#203

Post by azalemeth » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

Gaelan wrote: post #26

brundolf wrote: post #21

> If the user visits such a site, Firefox will automatically download and install such a proprietary EME/CDM module. This presented a problem to us as we would be dependent on those third-party vendors to publish ARM64 versions of those decoders. Wait, modern browsers still download and run native binaries at the request of certain sites? How is this different from the days when native plugins like Flash were massive…

As I understand it, it's a single trusted binary (Google's Widevine), not arbitrary binaries from sites, so I doubt it's a huge security liability. Not to discount all the other problems with DRM on the web, of course.

This is correct.

I still think the "best" answer is to untick the box that says "Play DRM Content" in the Firefox preference panes, and refuse to support corporations that would otherwise use it.

I haven't bought DRM media for over fifteen years.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#204

Post by m_st » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

oauea wrote: post #198

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.

Though I get your point, in this particular case it was the antivirus company that was the problem. Not Apple.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#205

Post by m_st » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 1:36 PM 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…

I once did the same with Microsoft Windows 8 (or 8.1) keyboard layout changes breaking old software. You'd think they don't suddenly change from '.' to ',' as decimal separator. But that's what they did. And so did Apple more years ago by the way, even resulting in a calculator that couldn't be used anymore with the numeric keypad.

Anyway, found a guy working on keyboard layout stuff at Microsoft through LinkedIn as the other support channels were non-responsive. Unfortunately he just confirmed the change if I remember correctly. But at least we knew what was coming.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#206

Post by Steltek » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #112

glandium wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse. It's uninstalled when upgrading macOS.

Well, it's OS-version specific…

It should be expected that during this transition, everyone will have one x86 app or another. An upgrade breaking nearly 100% of users is a laughed-out-the-door bad user experience.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#207

Post by wtetzner » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

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.

I suspect it’s that they don’t care. It’s not an issue for them because they don’t use the missing native functionality anyway.

Also, if you frequently use cross platform software on multiple platforms, it’s possible consistency within the app is more important than consistently with the OS.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#208

Post by toyg » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

You're so, so spectacularly wrong on this, I am honestly gasping for air.

Accountants are the only people who know if your company is alive or a walking dead. How do you expect to run a company if you don't know reliably and with precision how much money it actually has/makes/spends? Money is the lifeblood of a company! Don't you want to be constantly improving the way you make, spend, and report it to investors and the public?

The biggest companies in the world typically end up with CEOs that come either from sales or from accounting. That is not an accident. Business is about money, and you want smart and innovative people to look after it. Conservative CFOs can be the death knell of a company, among other things.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#209

Post by Merad » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:17 PM 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

This used to be the case, but the commercial/enterprise cloud version of MBAM (required by my company) is godawful. It seems to call out to its cloud back end every time an executable launches, and it murders performance. It's most obvious in terminals when it causes a simple command that should run in < 1 second to take 4-5 seconds.

Re: Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon

#210

Post by hrktb » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

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.

I feel your pain.

But also ended up completely moving out of most "native" tools for a reason or another (from TextMate to VSCode, Mail to Gmail tab, FaceTime to Skype/Meet etc.). At this point deep platform integration looks more like exceptions than the norm, for the better or worse. There are things that I kind of hate in a lot of Apple product (Safari included), which make Firefox's approach a decent tradeoff.