[HN Gopher] Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
___________________________________________________________________
Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
Author : sylvestre
Score : 630 points
Date : 2021-01-20 16:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hacks.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hacks.mozilla.org)
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > 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?
| dilly_li wrote:
| i.e. all the folks who are using a macbook from work -- I don't
| think that's a small fraction.
| terhechte wrote:
| 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
| msh wrote:
| But was it not just a specific product?
| rockdoe wrote:
| How many anti-viruses for macOS are there exactly? If it's
| the most popular one (whatever that is), it probably
| doesn't change much about the problem.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| Doesn't that assume that all these IT departments and
| corporations are using the anti-virus software in question? I
| feel like most AV software vendors were aware of the ARM
| transition and would know to look for the new Universal
| Binaries...
| rkangel wrote:
| 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.
| fomine3 wrote:
| For who curious, the antivirus that caused problem looks like
| Norton 360.
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682834#c39
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| > _Rust in particular was a concern. Firefox depends on Rust
| code, and we require a working Rust compiler to build the
| browser. Although Apple Silicon support for Rust was underway, it
| took until mid-August for there to be functional compiler builds,
| which limited the amount of progress possible for Firefox._
|
| Lack of rust support for 64-bit ARM was a bit surprising to me,
| especially given the velocity in which people have been rewriting
| certain components in Rust.
|
| Take for example ffmpeg failing to compile because librsvg was
| rewritten in rust: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/61668
| saagarjha wrote:
| And in turn this blocks a large Swift app I work on from
| shipping Apple silicon support...software dependency chains can
| be brutal.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It has gotten significantly better recently, with Arm
| themselves pitching in.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Pretty sure Rust has supported aarch64 Linux targets for ages.
| It is just aarch64 Darwin/macOS target support which needed to
| be added.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > 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.
| kzrdude wrote:
| the application knows the tasks better than the OS?
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| The OS already needs to properly schedule tasks of different
| load intensities and match them to the available cores, which
| might already be running different processes. An application
| has strictly less visibility into whats going on overall in
| the system, what else is using resources etc., so I don't see
| how it can decide any better? All it needs to do is set the
| proper priorities, so the OS scheduler knows whats more
| important.
| rockdoe wrote:
| If you read the linked bug, isn't that exactly what's being
| proposed:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678083#c3
| liquidify wrote:
| Love you firefox. Keep fighting the good fight. Keep that budget
| figured out.
| green-bottle wrote:
| A bit tangential to the main topic of the post. They mention that
| they are working on another optimizing compiler Ion which will
| replace the cranelift compiler (which is still in nightly) as the
| new compiler for WebAssembly.
|
| They link the issue [1] tracking the change which also speaks
| about disabling cranelift.
|
| To my knowledge cranelift was made for the purpose of compiling
| WebAssembly in Firefox, so I am not sure if I am missing
| something here (it's not yet production ready maybe). The
| Cranelift README[2] mentions that it will be a backend for
| IonMonkey.
|
| I am a complete layman here so I am curious if someone here has a
| better understanding.
|
| [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1687626
|
| [2]
| https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/tree/main/crane...
| kibwen wrote:
| _> They mention that they are working on another optimizing
| compiler Ion which will replace the cranelift compiler (which
| is still in nightly) as the new compiler for WebAssembly._
|
| Ion (nee IonMonkey) predates Cranelift, being the natural
| evolution of Mozilla's previous SpiderMonkey JITs. From your
| link:
|
| _" Prototyping work (bug 1678097) has demonstrated that Ion
| can generate good code quickly for wasm on ARM64, and given
| that Ion has good stability and we know it well, we will ship
| it as the initial optimizing compiler for wasm on that
| platform."_
|
| The keyword being "initial"; it appears to just be saying that
| Ion is good enough to enable, with support for Cranelift being
| retained in the event that it ever surpasses IonMonkey in
| capability.
| twic wrote:
| I think the situation is:
|
| Cranelift - experimental, quick to port
|
| Ion - production, slow to port
|
| So Firefox on Apple Silicon got Cranelift first, but only in
| nightlies, and will soon get Ion in release builds - "become
| the new default" means it will replace the baseline compiler.
| IainIreland wrote:
| (I work on SpiderMonkey.)
|
| Cranelift was originally started as a project to make a new
| backend for wasm in SpiderMonkey. It took on a life of its own,
| and has been transferred by the Bytecode Alliance (which
| Mozilla is a part of). At the moment it's not mature enough for
| us to use in production (both in terms of performance and in
| terms of code churn). We're hopeful that will change over the
| next few years, but we need to ship wasm support now, so we're
| sticking with our existing backend.
|
| (We intend to keep Cranelift working behind a compile-time
| flag.)
| shrimpx wrote:
| FYI you still cannot get a full native experience with Chrome and
| Firefox, due to plugins that have not been ported.
|
| For example Chrome ships with an x64 version of Widevine, a
| plugin that is required to watch live streams on YouTube TV (and
| perhaps other services with live TV). Currently, YouTube TV does
| not work natively in Chrome or Firefox.
|
| All that said, it will work fine if you run Rosetta -- the x64
| decoder will run in Rosetta.
| bla3 wrote:
| The post talks about this in some length.
| jonny383 wrote:
| 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 pretense at this point [3][4].
|
| I believe it's time to embrace Chromium / Blink, throw away the
| idea of internet freedom and just use the best performing browser
| of the week.
|
| [0] https://thenextweb.com/insights/2020/08/11/mozilla-
| firefox-l...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
|
| [2] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/09/03/firefox-update-
| face...
|
| [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-
| than-d...
|
| [4] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-
| robo...
| bilkow wrote:
| 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:
| 3.61% - 3.00% - 2.98% wikimedia analytics: 5.2% - 4.6% -
| 4.7% statcounter: 4.7% - 4.09% - 3.77%
|
| Also I'm actually pretty satisfied with Firefox.
|
| [0] https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
| share.aspx?options...
|
| [1] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-
| sit... (change date range to Jan 1 2020 - Jan 21 2021, remove
| other browsers)
|
| [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share#monthly-2020... (remove other browsers)
| jonny383 wrote:
| 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#.
| ..
| bilkow wrote:
| First, (as I understood) you indicated that the market
| share decline and the layoffs were somehow related. Given
| that the graph started in 2009, 1 year after Chrome was
| first released and only the last datapoint is after the
| date, I don't think they're related at all. We all know
| that Chrome captured the IE/Firefox market share in the
| whole last decade and that's what the graph's showing.
|
| Second, your concept of rapid decline clearly differs from
| mine. That is an eleven year decline and I don't think it's
| "rapid" at all for a browser.
| roca wrote:
| 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.
| fwn wrote:
| 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.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| > [...] throw away the idea of internet freedom and just use
| the best performing browser of the week.
|
| I'm not sure if you realise the ridiculousness of your
| statement.
|
| I think many of your citations are used on a surface level to
| push your point. I don't think you considered the reasons for
| Chrome's dominance in the market, which is more to do with
| other issues such as Google's position of power than the issues
| you brought up here.
|
| Chrome on Android has never supported addons, and now with
| Google spear heading changes such as manifest v3, I would
| consider these worse than decisions Mozilla have made with
| Firefox. You fail to mention decisions such as Mozilla's
| continued investment into tracking protection, which have been
| inheriting protections originating from the Tor Browser
| project.
|
| I think the reasons why Mozilla have decided to slowly
| reintroduce addons to their new Android release should be
| considered. Their efforts to work with uBlock Origin to create
| a better mobile interface seems to point towards a desire for
| quality control, one that Google avoids with Chrome on Android
| altogether.
| wooger wrote:
| 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".
| EE84M3i wrote:
| Many enterprises require some form of anti-virus on all
| endpoints, including macs.
| fernly wrote:
| What an interesting and informative article! Nicely done!
| [deleted]
| r00fus wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I found this bit interesting. Likely more prevalent in mobile
| apps, but perhaps shifting desktop code to Big.Little approach
| and using core affinity will result in a lot less wasted energy.
| chris_wot wrote:
| 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...
| [deleted]
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| > and no, none of know why it was named "Aqua"... our codebase
| is old.
|
| The macOS UI is called Aqua, and has been for quite a while!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
| johndoe42377 wrote:
| 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?
| spijdar wrote:
| > 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.
| markdog12 wrote:
| 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"
| mlindner wrote:
| Lol wow. When I first read that bug when I read the article my
| brain automatically translated that to "21 days ago" as it
| viewed "21 years" to be impossible.
| sedatk wrote:
| Aesthetics aside, is there anything Firefox's context menu
| lacks because it's non-native? Like accessibility features and
| such?
| dsjoerg wrote:
| Speech. and the whole Services ecosystem.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| 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".
| pfranz wrote:
| Look Up "[selection]" constantly bugs me. I constantly use it
| to define words. I feel like there are others that come up
| periodically. It sounds pedantic, but it's enough of a pain
| point that I'm itching to switch browsers.
| bombcar wrote:
| Wow - that bug can now legally drink in all 50 states!
| saagarjha wrote:
| Not until April 5th.
| nichos wrote:
| But it can go to war and get married the past 3 years!
| partlysean wrote:
| 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.
| cle wrote:
| I don't really care much about the native menus, but the non-
| native scrolling in Firefox drives me nuts.
|
| Granted neither of these are deal breakers for me. I don't
| use Firefox b/c of pretty context menus.
| hrktb wrote:
| 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.
| afandian wrote:
| What else do you use?
|
| Last time I used Chrome they pretty much reimplemented
| everything from buttons to modal sheets.
| Tagbert wrote:
| There are so many things that are different between different
| apps and different OS and I've used many of them. Minor
| variations like this are just to be expected and I don't feel
| thrown when I see something different.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| 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?
| ianlevesque wrote:
| Yes.
| bzb6 wrote:
| 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.
| wtetzner wrote:
| 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.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 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?
| nomel wrote:
| People that come from a Linux desktop background seem to
| be immune to these things. The rough sandpaper that is
| open source UI will eventually wear anyone's awareness
| down.
| dstaley wrote:
| Pretty sure this bug is about the right-click menu.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| I just checked again and the firefox one looks so close
| to the native right click that I can hardly tell the
| difference other than it not supporting dark mode
| loufe wrote:
| 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 action to get a fix shipped, thus preventing quite the
| disaster for the users of this product. 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."
| oauea wrote:
| 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.
| m_st wrote:
| Though I get your point, in this particular case it was the
| antivirus company that was the problem. Not Apple.
| [deleted]
| dubcanada wrote:
| Obviously there is more to it then what I am going to say, and
| who knows with remote workers where people are.
|
| But Apple and Mozilla headquarters are 5 miles apart (roughly).
| Couldn't you just walk/drive/scoot/fly/what ever over and talk
| to someone?
| djrogers wrote:
| Setting aside that the problem with AV had nothing to do with
| Apple, for the most part nobody was working at either of
| those offices over the summer (2020, remember?). Also, which
| of Apple's 130+ Silicon Valley offices are you going to go
| to, and who do you ask for when you get there?
| dak1 wrote:
| It sounds like this was an issue with an independent
| antivirus vendor, not Apple.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| Also, pandemic, remote workers, etc. gcp and the engineers
| who worked on this do not live in SV.
| milkytron wrote:
| I'd imagine that security and the front desk are going to
| prevent anyone from entering to meet with specific teams or
| individuals without an appointment.
|
| If you knew someone and had scheduled time with them, then
| yeah I'm sure you could hoverboard your way over.
| meibo wrote:
| 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 very few that I could actually recommend, like
| Malwarebytes - for most users, Windows Defender will be more
| than enough nowadays. I haven't used a mac in a while, do you
| actually need AV on them today?
| sjg007 wrote:
| I mean there is mac malware and some of it is quite
| sophisticated. The compiled apple script bitcoin miner being
| one of the more ingenious ones. But those were distributed
| through pirated applications. There are probably a few zero
| days as well that maybe an AVE package could help stop if a
| signature is rapidly distributed. Ignoring the fact that the
| AV engine itself is a target too.
|
| Most people using only the app store helps cut that down.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| The one in recent memory for me is the KeRanger ransomware
| that was distributed in the official Transmission
| installer.
|
| https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/new-os-x-ransomware-
| kera...
|
| _> Transmission representative John Clay told Reuters via
| email that the ransomware was added to disk-image of its
| software after the project's server was compromised in a
| cyber attack._
|
| _> "We're not commenting on the avenue of attack, other
| than to say that it was our main server that was
| compromised," he said. "The normal disk image (was)
| replaced by the compromised one."_
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| Just to answer the original question: that's an example
| of something Apple handled -- no external AV required.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Yes, although it snuck by Gatekeeper to begin with by
| being signed by another developer account.
|
| Would make it past Apple's new notarization scheme these
| days?
| climb_stealth wrote:
| 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.
| sam_goody wrote:
| > 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?
| meibo wrote:
| 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.
| 3395810 wrote:
| The free version of MBAM is an old-demand scanner but the
| paid version has "active" protections.
| lizknope wrote:
| 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
| antivirus things.
|
| At home I have over 8 Linux machines and the only times their
| fans get louder are when I am actually running a video
| encoding program or something CPU intensive like that. Some
| of them are slower with only 4GB RAM and they are always
| responsive.
| floatboth wrote:
| 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.
| mr_toad wrote:
| 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.
| fomine3 wrote:
| "i7 CPU" is totally zero informative for now. It's vary
| from 2core 1GHz (ancient i7 620UM) to 18 core.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| 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.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| 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
| Merad wrote:
| > 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.
| bostik wrote:
| > * 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.
| ksec wrote:
| >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.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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).
| account42 wrote:
| So what do you do if an antivirus vendor is uncooperative?
| Can you sue them for defamation?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Even working for a big multinational with a big tailored
| support contact, support from our major IT services vendor is
| abysmal. It's not just the little guys that have trouble.
| tyingq wrote:
| Oh wow. So in this case, a foundation with roughly half a
| billion in revenue per year is still somewhat of a little guy,
| at least for the standard process. I'm curious which antivirus
| vendor it was. Mozilla did eject a few extensions written by
| antivirus vendors in 2019, probably for good reasons.
| m_st wrote:
| 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.
| TwoBit wrote:
| AV vendors and software are cancer.
| dpkonofa wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. Why would an anti-virus product
| accidentally flagging their Universal Binary block them from
| releasing a native Apple Silicon version? Of all the Macs in
| use, I'd have to imagine that only a small percentage are using
| that specific anti-virus software much less any anti-virus
| software at all. It might cause them some headaches with
| specific people who are using that software but why extend that
| all the way to blocking the release indefinitely?
| ttflee wrote:
| The issue itself sounds like a prologue for an A.I. dystopian
| story.
| gigatexal wrote:
| It's not like Mozilla is a nobody software outfit. For this to
| be what they had to do go get someone's attention at Apple is
| terrible.
| lambada wrote:
| It wasn't Apple they were trying to contact, it was a random
| anti-virus vendor who were flagging all new Universal
| Binaries as malware.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Doh! My bad
| robin_reala wrote:
| I guess this was Cylance: I ran into this one on my work laptop
| with Firefox Nightly and managed to get it escalated internally
| from us too.
| jmull wrote:
| They are being very careful not to identify the anti-virus
| vendor.
|
| So it's hard to tell if the size of the vendor is the issue
| here.
| selykg wrote:
| My experience working with antivirus vendors is... not good.
|
| Product I used to work on had frequent false positives from
| antivirus software marking certain files as having some malware
| or whatever in it.
|
| It's super unpleasant trying to get those changes pushed out.
| Glad that they were able to get some resolution quickly,
| usually that isn't the case, at least in my experience.
| duxup wrote:
| I was a back channel route to engineering at a company I worked
| for a while. A few of the engineers trusted me and a couple
| select customers / sales guys knew they could come to me to run
| a bug by me 'in theory' and if we had enough information I
| could unofficially run it by engineering without going through
| the song and dance of the typical support channels.
|
| I could get a quick ya or nay form them on some things and it
| was so much faster for everyone involved.
|
| If it was a ya, I knew we had something, still more work to do
| but the case would skyrocket through the usual channels and
| engineering was engaged and ready.
|
| If it was a nay, the usual channels it went and everyone was ok
| with that.
|
| The engineers would give me a few minutes knowing I wasn't
| going to bring them poorly thought out garbage, I would limit
| the rate of these special situations, and special customers /
| sales guys could get the job done way faster.
|
| It was a well known process by those who knew about it... but
| not everyone knew.
| zerkten wrote:
| 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
| management needs to realize is that this is also an important
| interface point which requires attention. This doesn't happen
| at all, or is inconsistent.
|
| It's important for at least the following to happen:
|
| 1. Bad issues that engineering will fix don't get stuck in
| support.
|
| 2. Product management review and respond to feature requests,
| or enable support to respond to customers.
|
| 3. Support have a reasonable level of technical and
| communication skill, and are empowered to answer for the
| company.
|
| 4. The organization works through rather than around support.
|
| What I've always found interesting, is that all of these are
| often failing in some way at the same time in an organization
| of any size.
|
| Your role as the back channel is helping to provide some
| coherence here. However, things can go bad if you left.
| Inevitably, this is the fault of the company, but when I've
| found myself in this position I've tried to "promote" people
| in support to take the lead on this role. Further,
| formalizing the special request process to be minimally
| tracked helps visibility with my manager and others.
| Eventually managers ask why you have become a gopher.
|
| Improving the workflow often involves helping support build
| relationships with engineering. Management can buy in if
| support attrition is high (it often is if there is a limited
| career ladder for support) and it can also improve their
| perception when people are focused on trimming support cost.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > Customer support is a cost center
|
| For us, great customer support is one of our stronger sales
| arguments. In fact we've not had to push hard on sales due
| to our customers calling former colleagues who moved to a
| competitor to tell them "you have got to get this
| software". Having great support has been key to this
| experience.
|
| Most of our support people have been recruited from our
| customers, so they know not just our software well but the
| processes and regulations around it, allowing them to
| quickly understand the issue at hand and offer relevant
| help.
|
| So while it might look like a cost center on paper, I'm
| quite certain it's a massive net gain overall.
|
| Of course as you say, we work hard to mitigate the cost of
| providing that support, like routinely looking at
| implementing changes that'll reduce repeat support issues.
| Maybe as simple as reworking a dialog text, to adding more
| automation.
| cosmie wrote:
| > What management needs to realize is that this is also an
| important interface point which requires attention. This
| doesn't happen at all, or is inconsistent.
|
| > What I've always found interesting, is that all of these
| are often failing in some way at the same time in an
| organization of any size.
|
| The formalization of it is frequently the cause of it
| failing or being inconsistent. Once it's a workflow that's
| explicitly acknowledged and condoned by management, it will
| start to lose its effectiveness. As an official express
| lane between customers and engineering, every account/sales
| person will become aware of it and overload it, either in
| the general course of supporting their client portfolio as
| much as possible, or even worse, by making this internal
| express route known to clients, as they can get incremental
| revenue by branding it as a "VIP Support" service or to
| make at-risk clients feel special. Which will eventually
| end up in actual client contracts in some form or another,
| opening the door to client abuse (or misuse) as well as
| causing legit cases that would have gone through this
| implicit channel to get routed to and trapped in normal
| support because the client at hand didn't pay up for the
| express lane.
|
| You've also replaced a channel built off of relationships
| and mutual trust/respect into one based on official
| responsibilities and inertia, and all the hazards that
| entails. Such as political/managerial turf wars that add
| friction to the process, as well as cost minimization
| efforts that deskill the role over time and profit
| maximization efforts that overwhelm the capacity of the
| role, alienating the engineering team and undermining the
| entire intent.
|
| ... not to say it's impossible. But that's generally why
| you'll see it failing in some capacity any time you witness
| it, because it's almost impossible to maintain equilibrium
| the moment you officiate it.
|
| An alternative that tends to be more lasting is for
| management to _actively facilitate organic growth_ of these
| sorts of things. Enable and encourage and provide
| opportunities for inter-departmental relationships and
| lines of communications to form. That way there is no
| single "back channel", and organic lines of communication
| between different parts of the org are robust against the
| loss of a single node.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| It's funny you mention that. I was a support drone when I
| was in the situation I described above.
|
| But support being support ... it is eventually devalued
| and I chose to learn to code to move out of those types
| of roles.
|
| When I moved on (through a somewhat handy acquisition and
| layoff and etc) some engineers reached out to me to join
| the support team there.... but I was done with support
| (and other factors).
| techsupporter wrote:
| > 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 the code, maintain the code, and
| support the code. Then every Hip And Cool Start-Up
| adopted the model of "sysadmins and support staff are bad
| because we've had bad experiences in the past so we will
| also have our devs talk directly to customers until they
| get tired of doing that and we just replace it with a
| contact form encumbered by CAPTCHA and a no-reply e-mail
| address."
|
| As someone who has greatly enjoyed, been very good, and
| very well paid (so my employers agreed that I was good at
| it), at support and operations roles only to see them
| disappear into the inky void of Everyone Codes All Of The
| Time, I am both biased and frustrated.
|
| 0 - Because money, I suspect.
| tylerfontaine wrote:
| 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.
| coliveira wrote:
| I think this is an indictment of the lack of
| organizational skills in the area of software
| engineering. It is still an industry run by the sit of
| their pants. There is no clear separation of
| responsibilities and everyone wants to do everything (and
| usually badly).
| jkaptur wrote:
| 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 frontiers of just
| how minimal the bare minimum could possibly be."
|
| It seems like this leads to incredibly predictable
| problems: brain drain, demoralized workers, the bare
| minimum being aimed for and not actually being achieved,
| etc.
|
| I feel like a better organization has no "cost centers" -
| every single role at the company contributes to the mission
| and to the bottom line. If they didn't, that position
| wouldn't exist.
|
| What am I missing?
| ddingus wrote:
| 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 make software, or hardware, and it
| just works and people grok it.
|
| In the one we live in, these are fantasies and we can
| choose to understand, recognize the value, or not and get
| the benefits or not.
|
| The users, customers, move from role to role, and support
| often determines their willingness to use the product
| again. That is straight up powerful marketing by
| referral.
|
| Support often is the first to understand a user, customer
| needs an option too, or add on, replacement, preventative
| maintenance. Done right, these leads into lean,
| consistent sales.
|
| "Cost center" to me has always been a bit silly in this
| way. There is opportunity to add value throughout the
| chain of people, process, machines, systems that are all
| necessary to properly conceive, realize and deliver
| something to others.
|
| One thing often missed along with failing to understand
| value is failing to ask to be compensated for it.
|
| Doing things in a robust, high value for the dollar way
| is not the cheapest way, in terms of raw product price,
| and depending, size of margin.
|
| But, we do get what we pay for too, and the lowest price
| often comes with externalities paid by both the
| enterprise and its customers too.
|
| Sometimes I see this all framed as a luxury. That is just
| as much of an error, and does come with unnecessary costs
| and or poor alignment with actual value.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| 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 will hear about it. Very few
| people know more about how real users interact with your
| products than support.
| ddingus wrote:
| Word
|
| I should have included that. Glad you did.
| toyg wrote:
| You're missing the lack of creativity and courage in the
| managerial class.
|
| Support can very much be a profit center. Support
| personnel is relatively cheap; if their services are
| priced correctly, they can easily become a stream of
| _recurring_ income - and everybody knows that "recurring
| income is best income".
|
| However, this requires efficiency and creativity at the
| managerial level. It's easier to see support as a burden
| and just work on shrinking its costs, instead of
| maximizing its revenues by formulating good price plans.
| The former is an internal effort that is fairly easy to
| implement in short timeframes and will easily win brownie
| points with direct superiors (who doesn't like to cut
| costs?); the latter requires actual pricing skills and
| market knowledge, and might take a while to get results.
| The mediocre manager will always prefer the former.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| I feel like this is a double edged sword. Corporations
| have already embraced this idea of converting cost
| centers into profit centers and it makes life more
| difficult for consumers. Every time I call support at my
| ISP, because my internet is down, they work on my problem
| and tell me that my plan is slow and that I can upgrade
| my package for an increase in my bill.
|
| This sets up perverse incentives, that as far as I can
| tell, are theoretical, but have potential to become more
| prevalent. Because of the cost center as a profit center
| idea, my ISP can generate more revenue by providing
| _less_ value to me. If failing infrastructure causes me
| to call support more often, and more support calls
| increase the likelihood of more revenue, why should the
| ISP invest in better infrastructure?
|
| The key to having a successful business is to carefully
| align the incentives of specialities in an organization
| to make the most competitive offerings to the market. If
| there are competitors, and customers can switch to them,
| and the competition is more compelling, then I would go
| to other ISPs.
| toyg wrote:
| I agree that what is good for an individual company is
| not necessarily good for consumers or the market as a
| whole, and that there is always a balance to find, but
| that's another issue. After all, the ideal scenario for a
| company is to have customers pay for support _without
| actually using it_ most of the time.
| cat199 wrote:
| > What am I missing?
|
| not much, or everything -
|
| it's basically an accounting term on how you are tracking
| an expense and so it is very insightful as to how the
| effort of your project,group,department etc. is perceived
| by upper mgmt
|
| so "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
| frontiers of just how minimal the bare minimum could
| possibly be."
|
| is pretty spot on, if the effort has been (mostly
| arbitrarily) categorized as such..
|
| when i learned the accounting theory behind it, it
| suddenly illuminated managment attitudes in
| current/previous jobs - literally in some orgs overly
| reliant on this perspective there is literally nothing
| certain efforts can do through official channels to be
| viewed as 'valuable' ..
| kortilla wrote:
| 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).
| toyg wrote:
| _> 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| > You're so, so spectacularly wrong on this, I am
| honestly gasping for air.
|
| Calm the fuck down. It's a conversation.
|
| > 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?
|
| You entirely missed the point. At no point did I say
| accounting was not important. I pointed out though that
| investing more and more into accounting does not boost
| returns. If that were true, every company could just hire
| thousands of accountants to boost their profits. This is
| what separates a cost center from a profit center. Your
| department provides value in the same way that running
| water does. It's critical and you don't want to skimp on
| it, but it's just a part of the business that isn't
| helping grow the total market capture.
|
| > The biggest companies in the world typically end up
| with CEOs that come either from sales or from accounting.
|
| Why would you include sales together with accounting?
| Sales is precisely the opposite of accounting in this
| regard because it's very easy to tie sales directly to
| revenue. So easy their compensation is literally based on
| it.
|
| Not so hot take: CEOs that come from accounting and not a
| customer-oriented profit center are the worst. They know
| what the numbers look like but are fundamentally
| disconnected from why customers give money to the
| business. Seeing the minutiae of the ins and outs of
| money gives a super false sense of understanding the
| business. Accounting CEOs are terrible in any industry
| that requires innovation or getting ahead of trends.
| zepto wrote:
| I generally agree with you about not dismissing the value
| of accounting.
|
| However this:
|
| "Accountants are the only people who know if your company
| is alive or a walking dead."
|
| I disagree with.
|
| A walking dead company is only walking dead until one of
| its initiatives pays off.
|
| The accountants will only know this _after the fact_ ,
| whereas numerous other functions may know it to varying
| degrees of confidence before the fact.
| toyg wrote:
| _> The accountants will only know this after the fact_
|
| The accountants know when your debits have to be repaid,
| how likely they are to be repaid or refinanced by then,
| and what the penalty for not doing so will be. I'd argue
| that, in most cases, nobody employed in the
| development/production chain will have that information,
| possibly not even the CEO.
| zepto wrote:
| Sure, but accountants will not know the likelyhood of
| success of a new product or service, how the features
| will affect sales, the likelyhood of making large sales,
| the state of strategic relationships, etc. etc.
|
| Yes, they may have models and estimates, but the real
| information will be in the hands of those involved
| directly.
|
| Even things like refinancing and the options for doing so
| can be affected by things like letters of intent from
| potential large clients, industry validation, etc.
|
| Just knowing numbers and dates isn't enough.
|
| I'm not saying accounting isn't important, but it just
| isn't the only source of truth.
| Closi wrote:
| 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| They are still cost centers. Being a "cost center" does
| not mean money can be cut from the department and the
| business won't suffer. It means that pouring extra money
| and scaling up the department does not generate more
| revenue.
| snoshy wrote:
| 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.
| Closi wrote:
| 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.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Originally everything was a cost centre, but some
| rebranded as profit centres, and the PHBs swallowed it.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| You should have shared you wisdom with Boeing in 2010 ...
| noizejoy wrote:
| x% of support requests are of questionable nature - to
| mention just a few categories:
|
| * people expecting to use a sophisticated tool (for doing
| complex business processes requiring special know-how)
| without paying for and spending time on adequate
| training)
|
| * people unwilling to RTFM, google, youtube, etc.
|
| * people whining when a general purpose tool doesn't fit
| their exact workflow to a tee
| ddingus wrote:
| Those are all sales and service opportunities, BTW.
|
| Back in my support role for higher end software, I flat
| out hit numbers comparable to sales and generated a ton
| of great leads.
|
| Fact is, people do what they do and they have their
| reasons.
|
| Judging them and acting on that judgement by
| marginalizing an important and necessary part of the
| process has a higher net cost to the world, and often the
| enterprise, than just doing those things reasonably does.
|
| Net happiness goes up too. True for the enterprise and
| users, people at large.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Not all sales and service opportunities have positive ROI
| ddingus wrote:
| There are no free lunches. Expecting otherwise is a very
| good sign the enterprise is penny wise, pound foolish.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Not every business environment is captured by grand
| sweeping general statements. Reality is a lot more
| nuanced than that.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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.
| noizejoy wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| Been there. They aren't. Some of the mechanics vary, but
| good service does not.
|
| Right now, I am in the small business space and rock
| solid support is how we are killing it.
|
| Been there, very large, small, medium, consumer, b2b...
|
| Don't tell me it can't or should not be done when
| billions land in accounts free and clear.
|
| It can. Should.
|
| I spend with those who get that first and foremost.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Maybe you should quit your current career arc and help
| companies change their attitude and thus unearth extra
| billions in profits?
|
| And I don't mean that cynically - since if it's as easy
| and guaranteed profitable as you say, why wouldn't you be
| able to convince numerous CEOs to unearth all of those
| extra billions?
| ddingus wrote:
| It is all value judgements.
|
| Again, if the priority is to always have a positive ROI,
| and that metric is computed every quarter, without due
| and inclusive consideration for externalities?
|
| All the things I discussed here are going to get watered
| down. And it is always the same priority on max dollars
| now, max recurring dollars now, and WGIF about the
| future, others.
|
| Where that happens, so do the things I just said. Not my
| mess to clean up.
|
| Some enterprises get it. They get my time, attention,
| dollars and referrals first.
|
| Beyond that? Got better things to do.
|
| Clearly you value things differently. That does not make
| anything I said wrong.
|
| Take care. You get last word on this.
| indymike wrote:
| There is a fine line between running interference and sales
| prevention.
| duxup wrote:
| Yup that's accurate. I was a regular old support drone who
| had some connections that allowed for some special paths to
| engineering.
|
| We had 'official' faster escalation paths but those
| inevitably are determined by $$$ and there's always more
| ways to measure 'important customer' than can be defined /
| shown in $$$.
|
| Management was totally aware of it all and supportive.
|
| But eventually I got tired of the land of 'support' and
| moved on for a variety of reasons, mostly because time and
| again I saw support treated like the usual 'cost center'
| and I didn't want to be a part of that.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| In my company, there is a blurriness between support and
| technical sales, and while that can be a little chaotic,
| one benefit of that approach is support is looked at as a
| profit center to a degree. This is because the support
| people keep an eye out on upselling, maintaining
| subscriptions, and promoting consulting work. We're not
| obnoxious about it, but there's some awareness that part of
| the role of support is to promote the long-term growth of
| the customer relationship and sales.
|
| I think if there was a stricter division between support
| and technical sales, there would be more of a temptation to
| focus on burning through support requests as quickly as
| possible. The flip side of this is that it is easy for us
| to get bogged down in a complex half-support half-sales
| opportunity situation and that can sometimes cause other
| support requests to fall through the cracks.
| tines wrote:
| Just for reference, the pair is spelled "yea or nay" rather
| than "ya or nay".
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| That sounds like a dream career -- any advice getting there
| when you've hacked on graveyard startups most your life?
| cosmie wrote:
| Stuff like what the parent described tend to be "on top" of
| your day job, rather than your actual day job.
|
| Parent likely established a working relationship with
| individual(s) in engineering organically over time, and at
| some point leveraged that relationship to ping them about a
| customer issue that crossed their path and seemed to be an
| engineering concern vs user-error. That didn't cause waves
| and went well, and got repeated enough to become an
| established but unofficial "thing" parent was capable of,
| and they became known by a few sales/account folks as the
| go-to person when they felt a situation may warrant that
| unofficial route.
|
| You _can_ make a career off of doing this sort of thing,
| but I 'd caution against it. If a company is hiring for
| specific scenario of "fast lane between client and
| engineering", the actual job is "support with special
| escalation privileges, servicing clients splurged for the
| premium package". You get all the soul-crushing hell of
| working a normal support role, but with the added benefit
| of solely servicing clients that expect you to hand them
| the world because they paid extra for it. Which is far
| closer to a nightmare than a dream; particularly
| considering someone working one of these official roles
| likely has the skills to pivot out of the support org and
| into the engineering org in some capacity, and drastically
| increase their salary potential while simultaneously
| improving their quality of (work) life.
|
| In a more general sense though, pretty much any career
| benefits from doing what the parent described. It's
| effectively just flexing your soft skills and establishing
| relationships with people outside of your immediate
| sphere/department. Which has a tendency to make it easier
| for you to get things done, and garnering a reputation to
| that effect.
| duxup wrote:
| It wasn't an official job.
|
| I was a regular support drone as far as anyone knew.
|
| I just had some connections that came about because I could
| be discrete and the engineers understood that I didn't
| bring them garbage too early (without enough information)
| or without good reason.
| macksd wrote:
| And this is why it's important to recognize and retain
| people who get the right things done. One does not simply
| backfill a support position and replace someone who has
| built up the internal AND external reputation and
| relationships required for issues like this to get fast-
| tracked and fixed in a way that makes everyone happy.
| dingaling wrote:
| Soft skills are key; getting to know key people, and their
| responsibilities and capabilities and personalities.
|
| But above all: be a good listener. Listen to what they say,
| think about it and build it on next time you talk with
| them. If they see you showing interest and learning about
| their domain, you'll get a direct line to them. And don't
| always bring them problems, be sure to stroke their ego too
| by asking what they're working on.
|
| It doesn't happen overnight, it requires perserverence and
| a dollop of luck. You won't walk into a job like that, it
| takes years of building a reputation for yourself.
| e40 wrote:
| This really bugs me about Apple. We had the DTK (pre-release
| hardware for the M1). We got into trouble with an upgrade from
| beta2 to beta10 and the machine was bricked. Everywhere we
| turned, we were told to use the developer forums. We did. There
| were no responses there and I didn't see anyone but customer
| helping customers.
|
| So, since we're an Apple developer, we decided we would use one
| of our DTS (developer technical support) tickets. Nope. Pre-
| release anything is not supported.
|
| So, we ended up waiting for release, bought a new M1 mini and
| then started our porting effort. Then, we ran into problems and
| used one of our DTS incidents and we got some help. However, we
| lost months.
| jarjoura wrote:
| beta 10 also bricked my DTK unit as well. Total paper weight
| saagarjha wrote:
| I don't have a bricked DTK, but the last seven builds or so
| kernel panic every few hours of use. It's kind of sad to see
| where the program is now...
| [deleted]
| bluedino wrote:
| If Mozilla can't get a hold of anyone...
|
| 20 years ago Google would have sent someone to Mozilla HQ for a
| week to work on stuff
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Apple did this when transitioning from CodeWarrior to the GNU
| chain. Apple had to apply patches to the C++ compiler for the
| company I was at.
| zerkten wrote:
| This is surprisingly common for large companies. It often
| isn't formalized because no one wants to dedicate engineers
| to going onsite with customers.
|
| Often the expert is too valuable to give up, or is a poor
| choice for customer engagement. If you have a consulting
| team, they may lack the experience needed, or reputation,
| that the customer wants. As soon as you send the expert
| onsite, you will have a challenge not sending them at a
| later time. This scares off engineering managers from
| lending their engineers because inevitably they have to
| fight off the requests.
|
| The better workflow is one where you can send a less
| expensive resource (however you measure it) onsite and have
| them work remotely with the expert. If you can stick with
| that you often end up with the onsite person leveling up
| their skills and the ability to re-engage in a scalable
| manner. Any engagement needs prep before the onsite, a plan
| for escalation when onsite, and a disengagement plan.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| It was Agfa in Antwerp. Their guy was very polite but I
| had to explain to him what was going wrong. I think he
| was more tech support than anything else.
|
| Edit: Apple also had to change the linker for the sake of
| Macromedia's monolithic applications. Another story
| though.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| This is the problem with jumping to conclusions from a vague
| excerpt. The vendor is some random anti-virus vendor and if
| you know what trying to get a handle there means....
|
| > More of a concern was user reports that some antivirus
| software was flagging all our Universal Binaries as malware,
| and corrupting the Firefox installation the moment the update
| arrived.
|
| > The software was using machine learning techniques and
| presumably observed that our combined Universal Binaries
| didn't quite look like any other legitimate software it had
| ever seen before.
|
| > 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.
| rebelwebmaster wrote:
| It was Cylance made by Blackberry.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Their website is... blech.
| mlyle wrote:
| I had an awful experience with Cylance and some open
| source software I maintained, too-- false positive
| detections, and they wouldn't fix it.
| drewg123 wrote:
| 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.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| 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.
| icebraining wrote:
| 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).
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| can you do that on windows? every single exe, every
| process?
| slim wrote:
| 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Apple introduced a translation cache that likely removes this
| overhead completely for most applications but it does not work
| for code that is output by a JIT. With the native build, this
| second translation is avoided completely and we're back to having
| a snappy browser.
|
| Indeed while Rosetta does have support for JITs (which is really
| impressive in and of itself), every piece of machine code
| generated by the JIT has to be translated on the fly.
|
| While the hiccup at the initial run is not too costly / annoying
| for a regular application being AOT-compiled in its entirety and
| Apple can then shove the result somewhere nearby, for a JIT it's
| basically constant, continuous overhead which can't be cached
| because it won't be around next run. I'm not surprised that the
| gains are significant there.
| kevincox wrote:
| 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.
| glandium wrote:
| It's even worse. It's uninstalled when upgrading macOS.
| r00fus wrote:
| What does this mean, for dot releases? There's only been one
| release with Rosetta2 enabled.
| glandium wrote:
| M1 Macbooks were shipped with 11.0, they're now on 11.1.
| Upgrading from one to the other removed Rosetta2 on mine
| (as well as Command Line Tools).
| r00fus wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see if this is a trend or 11.1
| was a one-off.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Well, it's OS-version specific...
| Steltek wrote:
| 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.
| macintux wrote:
| The point to Rosetta this misses, however, is that for
| the vast majority of use cases it's silently re-installed
| on demand.
| glandium wrote:
| It essentially works only when launching apps from the
| Finder or the dock (not when app A launches app B, except
| if it did something about it, but that's unlikely) and
| brings up a prompt window. The opposite of silent.
| macintux wrote:
| I wasn't aware of the prompt. Mea culpa.
| glandium wrote:
| It could be upgraded rather than uninstalled.
| r00fus wrote:
| The best case is you need no x86 apps. Bought an M1 Air for a
| kid - as soon as Zoom was native they didn't need Rosetta.
| cududa wrote:
| I wonder if it has anything to do with licensing costs of
| everything that went into Rosetta? I imagine they owe someone
| royalties and licensing costs on some components in it, saves
| some pennies to dollars to only install it as needed
| SloopJon wrote:
| Could be. I suspect that's a factor in the fonts available
| for download or document support in Catalina and Big Sur:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210192
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211240
| rkangel wrote:
| 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.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| 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".
| kevincox wrote:
| 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.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I believe the Mac OS Classic environment wasn't installed
| by default in the early OS X days.
| sjwright wrote:
| 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.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Oh hey, the author is also the guy who developed the amazing open
| source AlphaGo reimplementation Leela Zero:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leela_Zero
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Is "apple silicon" the port job here? Isn't this more correctly
| described as a port of their existing ARM64 target to macOS?
| jfk13 wrote:
| Firefox on iOS is based on the system's Webkit engine; Firefox
| elsewhere is built on Gecko, so there's a vast difference in
| the codebase involved.
| twic wrote:
| This is a good question. On the one hand, the article says:
|
| > Of all the work needed to support the new hardware, porting
| Firefox to the 64-bit ARM architecture was not actually
| something we needed to do: we've supported 64-bit ARM on
| Android and Linux for years.
|
| On the other hand, it says:
|
| > Secondly, we needed to adapt and fix the various parts of the
| Firefox codebase that deal with low-level calling conventions
| and particularly the interfaces between the JavaScript and C++
| (and nowadays Rust) parts of the code.
|
| I suppose MacOS on ARM has a different calling convention to
| both MacOS on x86-64 and Linux or Windows on ARM64.
|
| Also:
|
| > 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.
|
| So what do Windows or Linux users on ARM64 do? Do they just not
| get DRM?
| glandium wrote:
| > So what do Windows or Linux users on ARM64 do? Do they just
| not get DRM?
|
| The Windows ARM64 build of Firefox comes with a copy of the
| 32-bits x86 Windows Firefox binaries to launch the win32 CDM.
|
| There is no support for things like this for Linux, and I
| don't think there's a native ARM64 Linux CDM (although I
| could be wrong. I mean, such a CDM likely exists, considering
| ARM64 Chromebooks)
| skrowl wrote:
| On iOS there are no web browsers other than Safari, per the app
| store rules. "Chrome" / "Firefox" / etc on iOS are just
| basically skins on top of Webkit.
|
| See 2.5.6 here - https://developer.apple.com/app-
| store/review/guidelines/
|
| This is why you don't get any of the features / extensions /
| etc of Chrome or Firefox on iOS.
|
| Apple does this so that the mobile web can never replace apps
| that they have a monopoly on and get a % from. If you could
| just visit netflix.com and have it install a Netflix SPA that
| worked as well as the native app, why would you ever install
| the native app?
|
| Edit after reading replies - lol, that programming of Apple
| users to believe "we need an app for every possible site".
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Apple does this so that the mobile web can never replace
| apps that they have a monopoly on and get a % from_
|
| Or you know, because they disallow dynamic code execution of
| arbitrary downloaded code in apps, and JIT JS compilers do
| just that.
|
| > _If you could just visit netflix.com and have it install a
| Netflix SPA that worked as well as the native app, why would
| you ever install the native app?_
|
| It's like asking "why would you ever use a native app".
| Because it's faster, native, and much more convenient?
|
| Take the best desktop browser engine, e.g. Chrome, and put it
| inside a mobile browser app. Still, I (and most I guess)
| wouldn't use it to watch Netflix over individual apps.
| SahAssar wrote:
| > Or you know, because they disallow dynamic code execution
| of arbitrary downloaded code in apps, and JIT JS compilers
| do just that.
|
| What would you call a webview? Is it that much different if
| it is webkit or gecko or blink doing it? If I used a
| webview to run js-linux, xfce and firefox should that be
| disallowed too?
| floatboth wrote:
| The code of the webview is made by Apple, it's _part of
| the OS_ - so it doesn 't abide by _App Store_ rules.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I can't speak to the mobile/desktop distinction, but
| comparing "watching Netflix in Firefox on my desktop" with
| "watching Netflix on my LG WebOS TV", there's barely any
| difference. If anything, the browser version wins because
| of the superior input devices (kbd, mouse) attached to it
| compared with the TV. This suggests to me that there would
| be little difference when comparing mobile/desktop or
| app/browser, other than the netflix logo being the point of
| entry (and if you could run the SPA literally like an app,
| no difference at all).
| filleduchaos wrote:
| > watching Netflix on my LG _WebOS_ TV
|
| No offence but what do you think applications for _Web_
| OS are written with?
| coldtea wrote:
| How many watch web-based Netflix on their Android phone,
| where Chrome is available, and "Safari" doesn't hold the
| marvel of web apps back?
|
| How many care to use web based apps over native apps in
| Android?
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > Or you know, because they disallow dynamic code execution
| of arbitrary downloaded code in apps, and JIT JS compilers
| do just that.
|
| No, they explicitly disallow other implementations, whether
| they JIT or not. Since Apple's WebKit is missing so many
| features, this has the effect that GP noted.
|
| "2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate
| WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript."
|
| https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
| coldtea wrote:
| > _No, they explicitly disallow other implementations,
| whether they JIT or not. Since Apple 's WebKit is missing
| so many features, this has the effect that GP noted._
|
| So, do you know people who prefer web apps over native
| apps for their Android, where "other browsers" are not
| disallowed, and Chrome is available?
|
| I'm sure you'll find some. I doubt you'll find any
| significant percentage though.
|
| I, personally, never do, and haven't seen any doing it in
| the wild, except for things there's not an app for...
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > So, do you know people who prefer web apps over native
| apps for their Android, where "other browsers" are not
| disallowed, and Chrome is available?
|
| I do. Twitter's PWA is superior to its native app, and I
| can customize it with extensions. I prefer mobile Firefox
| over mobile Chrome though.
| have_faith wrote:
| >Still, I (and most I guess) wouldn't use it to watch
| Netflix over individual apps.
|
| If the experience is so much better why are Apple scared to
| let other browsers into the app store?
|
| Phones are general purpose computers for the majority of
| the world's population, exercising such authoritarian grip
| over what a user can do with the device is very depressing
| to see being defended.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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 Android
| browsers to come close: Android Browser in particular was
| a piece of crap, slower, and lacking more features, than
| Mobile Safari. Was Google also "scared" of web apps?
|
| Also note that, when Apple suggested to developers they
| make their own web apps in lack of a native SDK, most
| dissed those and wanted, nay, demanded a native SDK.
|
| And Mobile Safari is not exactly some bad browser holding
| those apps back. You can watch Netflix on mobile safari,
| on the web, if you so want. Why would you though?
|
| And here's the 1000 pound argument: do you see many
| people watching Netflix on Android Chrome, as opposed to
| using the Android Netflix app?
|
| Didn't think so.
|
| Why would they do it on the iPhone then, if Chrome was
| available in the App Store?
|
| > _Phones are general purpose computers for the majority
| of the world 's population_
|
| Not even close.
| have_faith wrote:
| >Apple spearheaded the modern browser with Safari...
|
| >As for Mobile Safari, it took several years for Android
| browsers to come close...
|
| >suggested to developers they make their own web apps in
| lack of a native SDK, most dissed those...
|
| >Safari is not exactly some bad browser holding those
| apps back...
|
| >do you see many people watching Netflix on Android
| Chrome...
|
| Absolutely none of these points are arguments against
| having the option to have an alternative browser
| rendering engine. Not sure why you think they are.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Absolutely none of these points are arguments against
| having the option to have an alternative browser
| rendering engine. Not sure why you think they are._
|
| Not sure why you think they were intended to be.
|
| Those weren't "arguments against having the option to
| have an alternative browser rendering engine".
|
| Those were arguments about "Apple not having an
| alternative rendering engine" is not about sabotaging
| some imaginary web app revolution, just about Safari
| having its own timeline and priorities.
|
| Regarding that, not how there's no such web-over-native-
| app trend in Android either, where Chrome IS available.
| Most still prefer native apps.
|
| If you think, you could also think them as "arguments not
| against, but as to why it's no big deal to not have an
| alternative browser rendering engine".
| have_faith wrote:
| I don't think this conversation is going anywhere to be
| honest. Maybe I misinterpreted your point.
|
| My central point was I see no reason for Apple to
| disallow altnernative browsers (not just shells around
| webkit) other than to gatekeep. Your points about safari
| being better or users not using a PWA for netflix don't
| seem to relate to this I don't think. I think Apple is
| only concerned about staying in control with regards to
| what users can install on their devices. I don't think
| they want other browsers to be genuine alternatives to
| iOS safari so they've essentially neutered the
| competition.
|
| I also think you flippantly dismissed that a very large
| portion of the world is mobile first (not just the third
| world anymore) and this to me makes having the choice
| even more important.
| roca wrote:
| 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]
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Having used an iPad for general web browsing for a while,
| the worst change they made was allowing web apps write
| their own fullscreen interfaces. I can't think of _any_
| video website where they 've done a better job at basic
| video player controls than what the OS does natively.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Exactly. As we can see, everybody that uses Android watches
| Netflix on the web, and the Netflix Android app is left to
| languish with a measly 1B+ installs. There's _clearly_ no
| reason why a long-running, DRM-heavy video streaming service
| like Netflix would want an actual native app on mobile
| devices.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| Is there anything stopping Netflix from working in Safari on
| iOS? and then being installed as a bookmark to the Home
| Screen?
|
| I believe it's Netflix that prefers that users use the app.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Off the top of my head, mobile Safari can't handle push
| notifications for new content or downloading videos to
| watch later. I'm sure there are other problems with it as
| well.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| Good points.
|
| Being able to download/cache content reliably would be
| welcome, on all browsers. However, I haven't seen a good
| example of using PWAs' storage APIs to cache video
| content, Safari or otherwise.
|
| Lack of push notifications in iOS Safari is a giant
| shortcoming. It's especially baffling since it exists for
| Safari on macOS. That being said, I can't say that
| Netflix's push notifications (in the app) are
| particularly useful (to me). They always spam me with
| newly released yet irrelevant in-house produced titles.
| nguyenkien wrote:
| iOS browser is just Safari reskin (with different sync)
| floatboth wrote:
| Yes, "Apple Silicon" is the marketing name for macOS/ARM64.
|
| (Why did 3 other people interpret this comment as saying
| something about iOS?!)
| glandium wrote:
| > (Why did 3 other people interpret this comment as saying
| something about iOS?!)
|
| Because originally, the comment also said "Firefox already
| works on apple silicon, on iOS".
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > Yes, "Apple Silicon" is the marketing name for macOS/ARM64.
|
| Source?
| brundolf wrote:
| > 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 security liabilities?
| I thought we didn't do that anymore?
| Gaelan wrote:
| 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.
| padenot wrote:
| The above is correct. The CDM is very heavily sandboxed, a
| signature is used, and therefore it can't really do anything
| apart from what it's supposed to do (which is very little,
| taking encoded data, a key, decode media).
|
| Source: I'm on that team, but I don't work directly on this.
| azalemeth wrote:
| 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.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Worth mentioning is that this is also solving a different
| problem from the old browser plugin ecosystem. Rather than
| enabling third parties to extend browser functionality, this
| exists exclusively to partition the open-source Firefox
| codebase from closed-source DRM code, a workaround to enable
| DRM playback in an open-source browser.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| This is correct. These binaries are downloaded from specific
| update servers.
|
| EDIT: I stand corrected thanks to a colleague on the media
| team: the EME CDM update servers are known Google servers.
| hoten wrote:
| The site is not making any such request, it is simply using a
| browser feature. The browser, on demand, downloads a known and
| trusted binary.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| I wonder if this means there will finally be a way to use
| things like spotify and netflix on ARM linux machines.
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| does firefox use llvm to compile ?
| sylvestre wrote:
| Yeah, clang for all platforms for a couple years now
| vetinari wrote:
| Some Linux distributions, like Fedora, build their Firefox
| binary with gcc.
| sylvestre wrote:
| Yeah but this will probably change too.
| Vogtinator wrote:
| I hope not, we need diversity. (Yes, also more rust
| compilers)
| sylvestre wrote:
| 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...
| gspr wrote:
| Yes. There are essential Rust components in Firefox, and the
| only serious Rust compiler uses LLVM. (This has nothing to do
| with clang as someone else suggests)
| floatboth wrote:
| "does firefox use llvm to compile" is a very weird question
| that can be interpreted in a variety of ways :D
|
| Seems your interpretation is "does Firefox require any LLVM
| based compiler to compile?" and yeah. But "does Mozilla use
| clang for official builds?" is another valid way to parse the
| question.
|
| (Mozilla does use clang, and they even do cross-language LTO
| thanks to that: https://blog.llvm.org/2019/09/closing-gap-
| cross-language-lto...)
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