Comments on: Firefox 3 Mac performance gains due to undocumented APIs

By: Trevor

Trevor — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:04:42 +0000

The problem I have with all of these arguments, of course, is that Apple (and Dell and MS and any other equipment manufacturers, optical media distributors, and other tech industry manufacturers) is doing far worse than EEE, and the arguments that [insert tech corporation here] is evil and like some mass murderer because they are badly supporting people’s programming workâ€”rather than because they’re poisoning thousands of people, and very commonly imprisoning for the purpose of enslaving (or sometimes using imprisoned workers even in the US, but minimally) thousands of people to minimize profits. “Saddam Hussein” might be irresponsibly using the KHTML source, but the banality of evil of maximizing profit by slavery and toxification of untermenschen in backwater countries first worlders don’t care about (or backwater prisons in the first world, which first worlders also don’t care about) is a much bigger deal, and a great deal more frightening.

I have a hard time stomaching arguments that MS or Apple is evil because of their treatment of the GNU crowd, when they’re genuinely destroying lives without any objection being raised. You know, it’s like complaining about the religious views of certain ATF members while they burn children alive in Waco.

[I figure since Godwin's Law was near invocation a few posts back, I might as well keep the analogy around and even it out some.]

By: polterguy

polterguy — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:32:01 +0000

@Trevor
You are of course right in your saying, and the fine-grained arguments of my comment became far better with these minor adjustments. Sorry for being fussy with the details, though thank you for supporting my main claim which still stands tall as a mountain which is that Apple are doing bad, bad business. I just find it sad that so few are able to see it… :(

By: Trevor

Trevor — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:13:19 +0000

@polterguy:
I’m really curious how “onscreenflipped” could “extinguish” KHTML. In fact, given Apple’s eventual contributions to KHTML and the fact that the KHTML codebase switched to WebKit, I’m curious how you can make an argument at all that Apple is trying to extinguish it.

As far as the iPod, it can play songs in all kinds of standard formats, including MP3, AIF, WAV. I’ve never bought a song from the iTunes Store, and my iPod works just fine.

I never said Apple was any better than MS. Their differences at the moment can be attributed exactly to marketshare. Other than that, they’re both approaching market dominance in strategically different but morally equal terms. Apple and MS deserve criticism for a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean they deserve poor criticism on a poor logical foundation.

For instance, a better argument than Webkit might be (or might have been a few months back) the use of various BSD frameworks but the closing of i386 Darwin source for, what, 2 years? But then, they opened the source again. LOL. A better argument than the iPod might be simply the iTunes Store, which is definitely about lock-in. Apart from Apple’s free software, what does the iPod lock you into?

By: Carbon43

Carbon43 — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:17:44 +0000

Uhh…Zealot much? ;)

Both FF and WK are A OK in my book. I Use WK at work, and FF at home. I think I’m satisfied by the explanation given for the lack of availability of the APIs.

While it may be true that MS does the same thing with not releasing their proprietary APIs, Apple is not doing it for monopolistic purposes, has openly stated that it prefers to keep the documentation open, and has backed those comments up with actions.

By: polterguy

polterguy — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:33:05 +0000

@Mozilla
…continued…
And for God’s sake; DO NOT LOOSE FIREBUG!
It’s basically the foundation of your existence now…

By: polterguy

polterguy — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:30:26 +0000

@Trevor
Your logic sounds reasonable, the problem is that this is just a drop in a long chain of EEE from Apple, the last time I read about EEE from Apple it was about some “onscreenflipped” JavaScript event handler they had built for the Safari iPhone version.
Fits right into the “Extend” phase of EEE if you ask me…
I remember when I was first made aware of EEE from Apple, it was just after Steve took over and the iPod was launched chemically cleansed for the opportunity of interacting with songs from other sources than apple in addition to that the “apple songs” could also not be played on other HW. If that ain’t EEE then I don’t know what EEE is…
Safari has turned out to be a *great* browser feature wise and in regards to performance, and I think it’s great to have competition, I just don’t want to have one dictator changed for another one, where the new dictator even have a *WORSE* track record in regards to EEE than the previous one… :(
Apple is *not* better than MSFT, in fact on most parts they’re worse, people just don’t see it that way since we’re used to think of MSFT when someone mentions EEE, but if you study their business you’ll pretty soon have to acknowledge that Apple is by far worse than MSFT. The perfect world would have them “equal out” each other with *nix and FireFox having a third of the market. The problem is that Apple won’t settle for a third and they’re in the position to outperform MSFT in market shares within the next decade…
Apple is one of the “bad guys” and I think it’s time for people to notice that fact, before we get “Idi Amin” exchanged with “Saddam Hussein”…
Go FireFox…!
You have a graph at apple.com/safari to beat!
Go Mozilla…!

By: Trevor

Trevor — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:23:34 +0000

@polterguy:

Yep. Sometimes unfinished/unstable internal APIs perform better. This is nothing new, not for Apple, not for MS, not even for the Linux community. The difference in the FOSS community is that instead of not documenting unsupported/unfinished/unstable APIs, they simply mark it as unstable and you install it at your own risk with the understanding that it might get broken if one of its dependencies changes.

And as the APIs become stable, they become documented and find their way into other projects. Go figure.

Webkit does, as D Hyatt mentions, a bunch of stuff against undocumented APIs as a necessity, but they try to resolve that as Apple makes the APIs’ functionality available. The same is true at MS, and the same is probably true of many large third party applications that run on those OSes (notice Mozilla Corp had no problem adopting Webkit’s non-standard API calls!).

By: Steve Roussey

Steve Roussey — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:48:24 +0000

If IE on Windows used private API’s that they told eveyone else not to use….

By: urandom

urandom — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:51:43 +0000

this post should go hand in hand with the recent news about javascript performance boost in ff3b4:
http://cybernetnews.com/2008/02/25/firefox-3-performance-gets-a-boost/

By: polterguy

polterguy — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:48:22 +0000

Here we go again, EEE…
No wonder they can keep the comparisons at apple.com/safari so brilliantly towards their incentives as they do ;)

By: Carbon43

Carbon43 — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:33:19 +0000

Its nice to see how frank and upfront the WK devs are when discussing the code.

Good to hear that they are trying to move away from this sort of specialized code. With WK being adopted by so many companies (adobe, et al) it’s important to limit the private APIs as much as possible.

Keep up the great work!