Mac OS X Secretly Cripples Non-Apple Software

spikedLemur writes "Vladimir Vukicevic of the Firefox team stumbled upon some questionable practices from Apple while trying to improve the performance of Firefox. Apparently, Apple is using some undocumented APIs that give Safari a significant performance advantage over other browsers. Of course, "undocumented" means that non-Apple developers have to try and reverse-engineer these interfaces to get the same level of performance. You really have to wonder what Apple is thinking, considering the kind of retaliation Microsoft has gotten for similar practices.

Comments

first post!

[Anonymous Coward]

first post!
i cheated though, i'm using safari.

Re:first post!

[FF0000 Phoenix]

It's even more incriminating that all the undocumented APIs are under the "Firefox_Sux" namespace.

Re:first post!

[GregPK]

I'll bet Apple is still experimenting with the new API and the only reason its not published is because they can't tell if its fully effective or not.

Re:first post!

[dgatwood]

Or the SPI (System Programming Interface, the private equivalent of an API) takes advantage of inside knowledge of how some data structures are designed but which could change in the future as functionality is added to the class in question. For example, Apple might decide to change CFString to always convert data to BADC-byte-order UTF-32 under the hood for better efficiency on Vax. Not likely, but I never thought I'd see Macs using Intel CPUs, either, so you never know. :-D They could make such a change and still support the public APIs, but if they had an API that allowed you to arbitrarily manipulate the bytes under the hood, they'd be stuck.

The thing about Safari is that it is effectively insulated from SPI changes because it comes out with OS releases. If Apple needs to change an internal data structure in CF, Foundation, etc. in a way that would break an SPI, all they have to do is rev Safari to not use that SPI. Thus, it is safe for Safari to use any API or SPI. If Apple publishes the SPI as API, FireFox uses it, and Apple changes the data structure, Firefox breaks, and with "luck", so do Photoshop and Word.... :-(

So you see, Apple has only three choices: A. don't publish that portion of the API, in which case some people complain because they're not able to get that extra 1% from being able to walk inside private data structures of the HFS+ Extents B-tree or whatever, B. publish that portion of the API, in which case they're stuck with that internal architecture and can't ever change it to improve performance, add features, etc., or C. publish the API and break it later, in which case developers scream again. It's a no-win.

The only thing one could possibly argue is that Safari shouldn't be using the SPI, either, to put them on equal footing. That said, since it's safe for them to do so, where's the harm? There's no monopoly involved, certainly. :-) And as you noted, many of those SPIs that Safari is trying out might become APIs at some point in the future. Having an app like Safari exercise them allows the engineers to figure out what works and what doesn't so that they don't get stuck supporting an API that isn't scalable, is hard to enhance, or isn't easily maintainable. In the long run, everybody benefits.

I'm certain that Apple doesn't do this to cripple Firefox or to make its own software look better. It's not a vast fruit-wing conspiracy.... Apple limits its public API exposure to ensure that the APIs are sustainable so third-party code doesn't break. If you don't care about that, use the SPI... just don't come crying when your app crashes on launch after a software update or whatever.... :-)

Re:first post!

[dhavleak]

Great post.

I've been in product cycles where we've gone through exactly the dilemma you pointed out: where making an API public means supporting it until kingdom come, when the scenario is too new for the API to be stable, or you have definite long-term plans that will cause breaking changes in the API and you don't want the burden of having to be backwards compatible with applications designed for the older API.

The only part I didn't agree with was this:

The only thing one could possibly argue is that Safari shouldn't be using the SPI, either, to put them on equal footing. That said, since it's safe for them to do so, where's the harm? There's no monopoly involved, certainly. :-) And as you noted, many of those SPIs that Safari is trying out might become APIs at some point in the future.

I think it should either be ok for all players to have internal APIs or not ok for all players. I mean, if we say that right now it's ok for Apple to do this because they are not a monopoly, what happens if they do become one? At that point do they get penalized for these internal APIs (using which they designed the products that helped them obtain the monopoly)? At what point will Apple cross a threshold at which they need to change this practice and how will they know when they have crossed it? And when this threshold is crossed, is it suddenly ok for MS to start this practice again (of having undocumented APIs).

Re:first post!

[supermansuper]

The thing about Internet Explorer is that it is effectively insulated from SPI changes because it comes out with OS releases. If Microsoft needs to change an internal data structure in CF, Foundation, etc. in a way that would break an SPI, all they have to do is rev Internet Explorer to not use that SPI. Thus, it is safe for Internet Explorer to use any API or SPI. If Microsoft publishes the SPI as API, FireFox uses it, and Microsoft changes the data structure, Firefox breaks, and with "luck", so do Photoshop and Word.... :-( So you see, Microsoft has only three choices: A. don't publish that portion of the API, in which case some people complain because they're not able to get that extra 1% from being able to walk inside private data structures of the HFS+ Extents B-tree or whatever, B. publish that portion of the API, in which case they're stuck with that internal architecture and can't ever change it to improve performance, add features, etc., or C. publish the API and break it later, in which case developers scream again. It's a no-win. The only thing one could possibly argue is that Internet Explorer shouldn't be using the SPI, either, to put them on equal footing. That said, since it's safe for them to do so, where's the harm? There's no monopoly involved, certainly. :-) And as you noted, many of those SPIs that Internet Explorer is trying out might become APIs at some point in the future. Having an app like Internet Explorer exercise them allows the engineers to figure out what works and what doesn't so that they don't get stuck supporting an API that isn't scalable, is hard to enhance, or isn't easily maintainable. In the long run, everybody benefits. I'm certain that Microsoft doesn't do this to cripple Firefox or to make its own software look better. It's not a vast fruit-wing conspiracy.... Microsoft limits its public API exposure to ensure that the APIs are sustainable so third-party code doesn't break. If you don't care about that, use the SPI... just don't come crying when your app crashes on launch after a software update or whatever.... :-) Do you still feel the same way?

Re:first post!

[k8to]

They have a fourth option - don't make large apps that use internal APIs themselves. Hey, free cleaner seperation of code batman!

Re:first post!

[Guy Harris]

Do you still feel the same way?

Yes, I do.

And, quite frankly, if, for example, KDE were to implement a special set of calls that Konqueror could use to make it run faster, and that the KDE developers didn't consider "good enough to release", and that they didn't document because they didn't consider them "good enough", and somebody else wrote an application that used them, and KDE 4.1 or 5.0 replaced those calls with something the KDE developers considered more sustainable, and that broke that other application, my sympathy would be entirely with the KDE developers and not at all with the developer of the application in question.

Re:first post!

[Fweeky]

The thing about Safari is that it is effectively insulated from SPI changes because it comes out with OS releases *Looks at his WebKit nightly builds*

No, not it doesn't. Well, unless they pick seperate code paths for every OS revision and fall back to public APIs if I try using an old build on a new OS. Ugh. I'm wondering why the fuck the public APIs are so terrible that it's worth all that effort on a large codebase like WebKit; surely if they're experimental you want to be using tools that can easily isolate and measure them. You don't make a better API by saying "hey, it feels smoother today!".

since it's safe for them to do so, where's the harm? There's no monopoly involved, certainly. If it's safe for Safari, it means it's documented sufficiently that they can conditionally use them on the right OS revisions, and it's safe to let anyone else use them with the same caveats.

Re:first post!

[tacocat]

That's what Microsoft said, for 12 years they were testing API's...

Re:first post!

[bytesex]

Your point is well made, albeit a bit obvious to the average product developer. The point that stands is this: this, too, goes for Microsoft and their 'internalization' of Word and MSIE, doesn't it ?

Re:first post!

[darthflo]

What about the other option?

"The SPI namespace is subject to change with future OS releases, minor as well as major. Changes will be made public on this site at least two weeks prior to shipping an update with any SPI modifications. Enter your e-mail address to be auto-notified about all changes, grouped into two e-mails per week at most."

Developers have documented access to the additional performance those libraries might give them while knowing they might change. For safety's sake, the versioning could be included into the interface, allowing thoughtful devs to fall back to the (slower) API on a version number update. Also, the documentation could include some sort of discussion plattform allowing qualified devs to propose changes that might, after approved by the Steve and his Turtleneck, improve Apple's SPI (and, trickling down, the "stable" API).

Re:first post!

[dhavleak]

Dead right -- and a very sensible and fair option to implement -- this would be an easy one to enforce for all player irrespective of market share etc.

Re:first post!

[LKM]

The problem with third-party apps using internal APIs is that it hinders OS development. If Photoshop uses some undocumented API and Apple changes the API, everyone is going to whine about how Apple breaks Photoshop.

So should Apple simply not use its own internal APIs? That's not such a great idea, either. Somebody has to iron out the bugs. In OS X, traditionally, APIs started out as internal APIs that were used by Apple's apps. As the individual APIs started to settle down, Apple documented and published them.

So this is a pretty hard issue. It's obvious that nobody intended to do anything wrong here, though, so the /. article is laughably false.

Re:first post!

[LKM]

No, not it doesn't.

Yes, it does. Mac OS X is updated via OS X's update mechanism. So is Safari. Every time the internal APIs change, so does Safari, and the update to both is delivered automatically.

The fact that you can also get Safari outside of OS X updates does not mean that Apple doesn't deliver Safari with OS X updates.

Re:first post!

[Yetihehe]

YES! Thank you for the fine post. This article almost made me think that apple is bad. But no, apple makes everything for its customers. Just think what would happen if ALL apps, not only apple apps would start to work fast (the horror). It's not like microsoft, who uses hidden api features so only microsoft apps work faster and look better.

Re:first post!

[obarthelemy]

D- not use it for their Apps. Or... is the browser really an integral part of the OS ? MS was right then ?

Re:first post!

[kapoios]

This exactly what Microsoft tried to convinces us when the same issues raised in the Windows platform. But they didn't manage to convince anyone, and now they have to publish most of their API. You are confusing two different concepts. You confuse the API that expose the kernel and the libraries of Apple, with the internal API, eg. of kernel, or Aqua. The internal API is logical to be close and private, since it changes by version to version, and is the private property of Apple. After all, we don't need to know how and which data structures are exchanged into the kernel. But when they build a library and give it to developers they can't have 'undocumented' functions or arguments. This is a try to limit thirds developers to bring software that compares with the bundled software of OS.

Re:first post!

[Jesus_666]

Actually, wasn't this pretty much how Apple handled the kernel module interface prior to Tiger?

Re:first post!

[Goaway]

In addition to this, as the article itself states, you can turn this feature on by editing your apps metadata. That is what you are supposed to do, and that is entirely documented.

What is not documented is how to turn it on programmatically, which you don't need to do, unless you are an embeddable component like WebKit and want to override the app settings.

Once again, per the article, Firefox just needed to turn this feature on in Info.plist, and it worked just as well as Safari.

Re:first post!

[Goaway]

Please at least try to read the linked article. There is a documented way to turn this feature on, which Firefox can easily use, and which the article tells you about.

There is also a hidden API to do this programmatically, which is not of use to anybody except embeddable components which want to override the app settings. Firefox does not need this. WebKit opts to use this, instead of forcing every app developer who uses WebKit to turn on this feature themselves.

Re:first post!

[HumanEmulator]

I think it should either be ok for all players to have internal APIs or not ok for all players. I mean, if we say that right now it's ok for Apple to do this because they are not a monopoly, what happens if they do become one?

People are getting very confused because they are equating WebKit with Safari. They are not the same.

WebKit is a system framework that any application can use to render html, xhtml, css, etc. (Think system library like QuickTIme.)

Safari is a web browser application built using a number of system libraries including WebKit. (Think QuickTime Player.)

WebKit is the part that's accessing undocumented APIs. To complain a system library can access internal parts of the system is ridiculous-- most system libraries wouldn't be very useful if they couldn't. Anyone is free to use this system library in their application.

I think the author of the article and David Hyatt's response were written assuming people understood this distinction, probably because neither were written to be posted on Slashdot.

Re:first post!

[sqlrob]

Then I assume you don't have a problem with IE doing the same, since it's embeddable in any app?

Re:first post!

[shadow349]

Do you still feel the same way?

Sure... once you point me to the public repository that contains the source code to IE's engine. You know, the code that contains these "unpublished" APIs?

Re:first post!

[MyDixieWrecked]

You've sorta sidestepped the main issue, though.

The issue is that Apple created the OS and Product-A, that comes bundled with the OS, with whatever performance enhancers because they have access to the SPI and detailed knowledge of the internal data structures. Competing Product-B doesn't have access to said performance enhancers and therefore, have a harder time getting their application to achieve the same level of performance.

You make good points on why they do this, but at the same time, it really is stifling a competing product. If they take advantage of these performance enhancements in all of their applications, bundled or not, then they really have an unfair edge over other developers.

Re:first post!

[betterunixthanunix]

I'll bet you are full of it. Apple built Safari on an open source codebase, KHTML. This isn't a question of experimental APIs (which would be tested in a beta version anyway), this is Apple slapping the entire open source model right across the face. It isn't the first time, it won't be the last time. Apple is not some shining light in the dark world of anticompetitive business practices, or some beacon of morality, and the way they managed OpenDarwin is entirely indicative of that.

Re:first post!

[0123456789]

2 weeks notice to 3rd party developers??? It took MS 2 years to update Office to run natively on Intel Macs.

Re:first post!

[Mister Whirly]

"I'm certain that Apple doesn't do this to cripple Firefox or to make its own software look better. It's not a vast fruit-wing conspiracy...."

You are correct. It seems on Slashdot that Microsoft has a monopoly on vast fruit-wing conspiracies.

Re:first post!

[weg]

So you see, Apple has only three choices: A. don't publish that portion of the API, in which case some people complain because they're not able to get that extra 1% from being able to walk inside private data structures of the HFS+ Extents B-tree or whatever, B. publish that portion of the API, in which case they're stuck with that internal architecture and can't ever change it to improve performance, add features, etc., or C. publish the API and break it later, in which case developers scream again. It's a no-win.


Option four would be not to release Safari as part of the OS. Microsoft has been criticized and fined for doing that, so why should Apple be allowed to do it?

Re:first post!

[Gizzmonic]

Competing Product-B doesn't have access to said performance enhancers and therefore, have a harder time getting their application to achieve the same level of performance.

In this case, yes they do have access to the same performance. RTFA.

Re:first post!

[Pope]

Ha, like that's ever stopped Adobe! Adobe Type Manager used some file system call that Apple explicitly told developers not to use, in case it went away or changed in the future. An update to prepare the system for HFS+ came out, and ATM broke like you'd expect. It took over a year for Adobe to come out with the fix for ATM. Meanwhile, Extensis just updated their Suitcase software, since they heeded Apple's developer notes, and gained a large number of customers rather quickly.

Re:first post!

[MyDixieWrecked]

In this case, yes they do have access to the same performance. RTFA.

I did read the article. Being able to glean how to implement an undocumented feature is not the same as having access to the same feature. Although it's not quite as big a deal as completely blocking access, it's still an obstacle to implementation.

Re:first post!

[Sancho]

If Apple publishes the SPI as API, FireFox uses it, and Apple changes the data structure, Firefox breaks, and with "luck", so do Photoshop and Word.... :-( It's worse than that--if they publish the SPI and then change it, breaking these applications, they get called out for intentionally breaking Firefox.

Nonetheless, Microsoft does it and they get tons of people crying foul. Apple does it, and people defend them. Is the fact that Microsoft is a monopoly really enough of a mitigating factor to preclude them from using their own SPI?

Re:first post!

[drinkypoo]

Microsoft does it and they get tons of people crying foul. Apple does it, and people defend them. Is the fact that Microsoft is a monopoly really enough of a mitigating factor to preclude them from using their own SPI?

I struggle with the same question myself. Probably the most cogent arguments I've read against Microsoft are within The Court's Findings of Facts in cases 98-1232 and 98-1233, the U.S. D.C. for the D.C. :) In summary:

Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's actions have conveyed to every enterprise with the potential to innovate in the computer industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, IBM, Compaq, Intel, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's core products. Microsoft's past success in hurting such companies and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and businesses that exhibit the potential to threaten Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft's self-interest.

On this particular occasion all I can say is that it remains to be seen if Apple will act honorably. I regurgitated my Apple Kool-Aid and now I just think they're "pretty neat" and "great as long as Linux works nicely on them". I hope my next laptop will be a quad-core MacBook Pro, but I plan to mostly run Linux (Apple does have some neat apps.) Right now I have a Compaq nw9440 EZ901#ABA which is kind of like an ugly MacBook Pro with superior graphics.

Re:first post!

[PitaBred]

Of course not. Even with that edge, IE still sucks ;)

Re:first post!

[PitaBred]

Except if Firefox wanted to start using the Gecko engine as an embeddable HTML renderer like WebKit is... then the whole thing falls apart, and what they're doing makes sense again.

Re:first post!

[ahabswhale]

It's unfair since it's not safe for anyone BUT Apple to do it. It should be noted that Microsoft pulled the same crap with Office apps on Windows going all the way back to the OS/2 days. It gave them an unfair performance advantage. They could also have their apps division collude with the OS division to put in APIs that would improve performance even further or to provide features that other apps just cannot get.

Lets be honest here...you and I both know that if this were Microsoft we were talking about there would be this huge uproar (and rightly so). Lets try and keep the playing field equal and call a spade a spade.

Re:first post!

[pestilence669]

apple used secret hooks for spotlight in 10.4. In leopard, they've managed to release the much better fdevents API. With XP, your apps used to die UNLESS you used secret calls. Very different.

Re:first post!

[kelnos]

Sure... once you point me to the public repository that contains the source code to IE's engine. You know, the code that contains these "unpublished" APIs? Unfortunately the situation in the case of WebKit is pretty much the same. In the publicly-available source code, a WebKit user can set a particular preferences key and value to tell WebKit to enable these performance optimisations. The actual undocumented Apple API that's triggered by these preference keys is used in code that's closed-source, and is provided in binary blobs along with WebKit (TFA and links provided there say all this, if you're interested).

Re:first post!

[kelnos]

No, that's not really true. In the case of Firefox the application, yes, the Firefox developers can set this plist key to enable the behavior they want. However, any other application that embeds Gecko (Firefox's rendering engine) cannot take advantage of this optimisation without *also* knowing about this "hack" and adding the key in *their* plist.

The reason WebKit does it programmatically is so apps using WebKit to embed a browser control can benefit without having to add the plist key. One might say that this gives WekKit an "unfair" advantage over Gecko. Let's compare apples to apples here: Firefox to Safari, and Gecko to WebKit. Because WebKit takes care of this programmatically, Safari doesn't need this special plist key set.

Re:first post!

[Overly Critical Guy]

Good point. They did the same for most every new API introduced in new versions of Mac OS X. For example, OS X Tiger was using CoreText, but the APIs were not made public to developers yet.

Re:first post!

[dgatwood]

FSEvents, but yeah.

Re:first post!

[dgatwood]

In which case the API never gets adequately tested, thus ensuring that the first version of the API is thoroughly broken and/or never ships at all.

Re:first post!

[dgatwood]

Apple publishes information about how to do it! The only difference is whether you do it in a property list key (the public way) or through a function call (the way WebKit does it).

This is much ado about nothing.

Re:first post!

[dgatwood]

There's a huge difference between WebKit and Gecko, though. The WebKit engine ships as a framework as part of the OS, and therefore is used by thousands of applications (even if it is usually just to display their help documents or an about page). The Gecko engine, by contrast, ships inside the application bundle of an individual application and has very limited potential for use by any other application since developers can't assume that the Gecko engine is installed on a user's system, much less assume its location.

If a developer is going to include Gecko in an application, there are so many other things they would have to do (starting with building their own private copy of the libraries) that adding one more requirement is inconsequential. Adding a requirement to set property list keys when all the developer did was #include the WebKit framework and call a couple of methods, by contrast, is a relatively large developer impact.

Re:first post!

[dgatwood]

No, I recognize Microsoft's need to do the same thing for the same reasons. The only folks who can get away with the cowboy development model of making everything public API are open source projects because when open source APIs break in incompatible ways, people download new versions of everything that broke, recompile if necessary, and move on with their lives. In the closed source world, that doesn't work because updates cost money. Thus, ensuring a reasonable degree of backwards compatibility is far more important.

Microsoft's actions were wrong for one reason and one reason only: they had a monopoly and abused it to try to gain a monopoly in other areas.

Re:first post!

[kapoios]

[flame]
Actually i dont really care about Apple and its software, so i am not going to give the 5 minutes to read the article.
(I dont even care about firefox, it just s**s)
[/flame]
My first post was actually to answer to its parent, that tries to give a excuse to Apple for hiding APIs.

Re:first post!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I think it should either be ok for all players to have internal APIs or not ok for all players.

You seem to failing to understand why antitrust abuse is "bad" and hence illegal. You say it should be okay for all players or not okay for all players. In this, you fail to understand antitrust law, so I will try to enlighten you.

First, an analogy: It is legal to fire a gun. Bob goes to the target range and practices his marksmanship in hopes of getting on the olympic team. Barry goes to the mall with a shotgun and starts murdering people wearing hats. Should it always be illegal or not illegal to fire a gun? It is the exact same action, just in different circumstances. Is Barry's action illegal because he is different person, or is it illegal because it is a different situation with different results? Hopefully this shows you logically, why you can't ignore the surrounding circumstance as to what is happening. ...on to the specifics...

Tying two products from different markets together is generally a legal business strategy. You can sell product A in market A and product B in market B or sell product A and B together in the hopes of attracting buyers who want both products. This is like shooting a gun at the shooting range... all well and good. The problem comes when a market is monopolized. That is to say, when a company has so much influence in one market, that many consumers have no other choice for their needs. If pretty much everyone in market A has to buy from you, what happens when you stop selling product A, but only offer a tied together bundle of product A and product B? In general what happens is regardless of how good your product B is, you sell it anyway, because you are forcing buyers to buy it because they need product A... even if they don't want product B at all. This is like shooting people at the mall.

In the first scenario the free market continued to operate because even though you were tying your two products, consumers could just select different suppliers if they have a better offering. In the second scenario the free market is undermined. No matter how crappy your product B is, people still have to pay for it, even if they just throw it away and buy a different one from another vendor. In order for you to undermine the market B, however, you have to have monopoly influence in that market A. The laws that ban this behavior are called antitrust laws, because they were first used to stop large business trusts that were undermining the free market and ruining the economy.

I think it should either be ok for all players to have internal APIs or not ok for all players. I mean, if we say that right now it's ok for Apple to do this because they are not a monopoly, what happens if they do become one?

When Apple becomes a monopoly, then they are banned from tying that monopoly to any product they offer in a different, existing market. For example, Apple does not have a monopoly on desktop operating systems. They don't have a monopoly on any given type of software (like Web browsers). Thus, if they give their Web browser advantages that people who don't also produce Mac OS X don't get, they are not undermining free trade or breaking the law.

On the other hand, Apple has close to 70% of the portable, digital music player market. Right now they are being investigated by the EU to see if their influence in this market is sufficient to qualify as monopoly influence. If the courts decide it is, then they will be banned from tying anything to that monopoly product (iPod) which vendors in other markets cannot do. This means if they support FairPlay DRM, they must either let other music sellers use FairPlay or they must support the DRM of the other music seller. If they bundle a copy of iTunes with every iPod, they must also bundle a copy of any other music playing software other vendors want to offer. If they have protocols for putting music on iPods, they must publish those protocols so that others can

Re:first post!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I'll bet Apple is still experimenting with the new API and the only reason its not published is because they can't tell if its fully effective or not.

Nope. Apple (or more specifically Apple's Webkit team) are using a hack. It isn't documented because no one who can't guarantee Webkit is updated at the same time as OS X should be using it (and that means just Apple). Basically Apple put in new code that optimizes things. They put in a published API for applications that want to use it. The problem is, every application that calls Webkit also would want to use it, but in order to do so all those apps would need to be updated individually by their respective developers and all of them would have to learn about the new feature. So Apple used a hack one time so that all applications that use Webkit also use this optimization. In order to do that they had to make a second way to do it, but not one they would want anyone else using in the long term. So they told everyone else to use the public API, but one guy did not understand it and just looked to see how Webkit did it instead and then posted about the "secret" API that Apple was using and soon found out that it was "secret" because it was likely to go away as soon as Apple decided enough apps that call Webkit had been upgraded. So he realized his error, but by that point some other person with even less understanding had posted his blog to Slashdot with a really, obnoxiously misleading title. He then updated his blog so anyone who RTFA would figure out what was really up.

Re:first post!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If you're really confused about why replacing the company name "Apple" with the company name "Microsoft" changes the situation both practically and legally... read this post I put in this thread all the way through.

Re:first post!

[dhavleak]

...In this, you fail to understand antitrust law, so I will try to enlighten you

Don't patronize me man.. Let's keep it civil..

First, an analogy: It is legal to fire a gun. Bob goes to the target range and practices his marksmanship in hopes of getting on the olympic team. Barry goes to the mall with a shotgun and starts murdering people wearing hats...

Murder is illegal -- for all players, whatever the circumstances. People know when they are committing murder -- so they know when they violate this rule. I hope you see my point. Circumstances are indeed important. But their importance is in determining if someone actually committed murder or not (or some lesser offence like manslaughter) -- they never determine whether the murder they committed was legal or not. The rule itself is crystal clear, and applies equally to all.

Note, I'm perfectly aware that ignorance of the law is never a valid excuse. That's immeterial here. Knowing in this case is the ability to logically determine whether you are in violation or not. Antitrust law fails to meet this bar.

<Your paragraph on products A and B; the various scenarios and their effect on free markets>

Acknowleged -- I understand the purpose of antitrust law -- to protect free markets. I'm saying that: A) They actually don't do that B) They unfairly penalize companies that are successful (thereby biasing what was a free market), and C) they would be unnecessary if law was to actually keep pace with technology and treat the disease (file formats, internal APIs, etc) instead of the symptom (market share).

For example, Apple does not have a monopoly on desktop operating systems

Apple has a monopoly on Macs, so it depends on how you define the market and that can be very subjective. Say software company ZZ makes s/w only for Macs, and Apple decides to integrate some competing feature into OS-X which now threatens ZZ's existance. Now is Apple exempt regulatory oversight over this feature (similar to MS) because they don't have a monopoly in desktop s/w, or are they not exempt because they have a monopoly on Macs? Apple will argue one way, and the software maker will argue the other. Both are correct from their world view. Applying antitrust law one way will penalize Apple unfairly, and the other way will cripple ZZ's competitiveness unfairly (and other exclusive Mac shops as well).

Antitrust law is utterly useless here - regulators won't step in until Apple is a behemoth and the entire industry is spending their lobbying money on getting the DOJ to investigate Apple. By the time the dust settles all the little guys are already extinct. What was needed, was clear rules of engagement from day one. Can Apple have use undocumented OS internals of any type, to give their competing feature an advantage, or is that forbidden? Simple as that. No need for antitrust/marketshare-related bullshit.

Stuff about iTunes, DRM, MS, etc.

Apologies if I sound dismissive here. Disagreed with many things you said, but don't have the time to refute on a case-by-case basis.

Apple is not confused by this topic and their business executives and lawyers on staff know exactly what antitrust laws state and if what they are doing is likely to be ruled an abuse. Microsoft is even less confused.

It doesn't work like that (at least in my company). Whenever a product team (developers/testers/mamagers/architects) think that a particular point in their design can cause antitrust issues, they will ask the legal department what they think. The best legal can do is offer opinions and a confidence-level in said opinion. In general legal is consulted whenever there is any doubt whatsoever. Legal of course can't scan API design docs for timebombs, and the product team obviously doesn't understand antitust nuances so

Re:first post!

[kelnos]

The Gecko engine, by contrast, ships inside the application bundle of an individual application and has very limited potential for use by any other application since developers can't assume that the Gecko engine is installed on a user's system, much less assume its location. Just because it isn't now, doesn't mean it couldn't be in the future. I find it a bit ridiculous to require that an app author include an "unbreak my application" preference in their properties file...

Re:first post!

[k8to]

Stupid moderators, dicussing possible choices of internal and external APIs is not offtopic.

Have a nice day.

Article is a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh give me a break, if you use an undocumented API for something that does not mean you "cripple" other pieces of software. It's not like OS-X says "oooo Firefox, quick make it run twice as slow". Grow up.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Architect_sasyr]

And I thought that the Underhanded C Contest would never have come in handy......

Re:Article is a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

if you use an undocumented API for something that does not mean you "cripple" other pieces of software If the only difference is the performance, then that's *exactly* what it means.

Try pulling your head out of Steve's ass long enough to make an objective assessment before you post next time.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the article is a troll at face value. Apple has every right to keep its API secret from 2nd and 3rd parties. It is true however that Microsoft has been widely criticized for not opening up its APIs that give Office, IE, etc. and advantage. What the article is doing is predicting that Apple will be given a pass by the development community, thereby allowing the author to scream "hyprocrisy!" Of course none of this has happened yet, except for your comment. So yeah, the article is a troll.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Brian Gordon]

No, it's reporting on Apple being evil just like microsoft-- and anticipating that Apple fans will defend it anyway. Nobody's vindicating Microsoft and slashdot still reports on MS's evilness, how is this a "HIPOCRISY!" trap?

Re:Article is a Troll

[MouseR]

Foreword: I pulled my head out of Steve's ass when I unlocked my iPhone.

Now...

Maybe he's on to something though. You see, published APIs are APIs that are generally tested and well engineered (although that's sometimes arguable). The idea is that a published API can be relied upon for the foreseable future as being available and to do what it's documented to do.

Now, if Safari is using yet-unpublished APIs, it does so at a possible cost of futur compatibility and, even perhaps, worse performance down the line.

Now, obviously, Apple is in a rather sweet spot to use this because they have some inside info as to when things might get changed. Or at least, access to engineers that can fix it.

Using Cocoa/Objective-C for any APIs makes any framework (libraries) easy to dig into. There are THOUSANDS of unpublished methods in Cocoa classes. They're unpublished because they are not meant to be normal entry points for various reasons. They might be some internal data munger routines that end up being used by some public API but it's not to day that accessing this one directly wouldn't be a performance boost for something else, used in a different context.

There are tools you can use to find out what method Cocoa classes implement and if you really want, you can dig right into them. The cost, though, is that you risk futur incompatibilities.

That's probably what's going on in this case.

FYI: I also make use of some undocumented methods. There. let me give you one:

@interface NSScreen (_NSScreen_screenNumber)

- (int) _ScreenNumber;

@end

@implementation NSScreen (_NSScreen_screenNumber)

- (int) _ScreenNumber
{
        return _screenNumber;
}

@end

Oh noes! I gave you access to a method wich may give you an unfair advantage to a poor sap who'll have to traverse an array using an interator to get screen numbers!!!

For a counter argument, Apple is now as evil as the company it fought all these years. So, maybe they're just guilty of this one too.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Swampash]

True. It would have been much more accurate to say that Apple cripples every piece of software equally, and then secretly uncripples its own.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not that Apple is using an undocumented API. Safari is just a browser that people are trying to clone or weaken before it stomps IE and Firefox into the ground.

Re:Article is a Troll

[udippel]

Yes and no. You are correct, using some new shiny and undocumented features for my own good does not primarily and automagically cripple others' products. But as secondary effect, those other products, in comparison, though effectively running at the original specs, look pale in comparison.

Since this is exactly one of the reasons how Microsoft came to dominate the software market, and had all major third parties kowtow to them (and pay) to get the information, the Free Market was distorted. It would not be the best/fastest application that grabbed the market, but the one with knowledge about and rights to the secrets.
I'd have to seriously disappoint you on this one: This is exactly not what the term 'Free Market' means, especially if you are already the monopolist.

You yourself might already have grown up, now try to work on your thinking abilities.

Re:Article is a Troll

[truthsearch]

Possibly confirming your post is this comment on TFA:

The programmatic disabling of coalesced updates should not be public API. It's actually a very dangerous thing to do. We aren't really happy with that code in WebKit, but we had to do it to avoid performance regressions in apps that embedded WebKit. Technically it's wrong though, since we turn off the coalesced updates for any app that uses WebKit! This includes drawing they do that doesn't even use WebKit.

As for the window display throttling, that was a pref designed for Safari (that we don't even use any more). It's not private or magic. It's nothing more than a pref that we can examine from Safari-land, so linking to that is just silly. ;)

Many of the private methods that WebKit uses are private for a reason. Either they expose internal structures that can't be depended on, or they are part of something inside a framework that may not be fully formed. WebKit subclasses several private NSView methods for example, and it cost us many many man hours to deal with the regressions caused by the internal changes that were made to NSViews in Leopard.

As you yourself blogged, there was a totally acceptable public way of doing what you needed to do.

For any private methods we use that we think should be public, we (the WebKit team) file bugs on the appropriate system components. Many of these methods have become public over time (CG stuff in Leopard for example). Be careful when you dig into WebKit code, since we may continue to use the WK method even though it's not public API just because we need to work on Tiger.

Re:Article is a Troll

[dfghjk]

"Now, if Safari is using yet-unpublished APIs, it does so at a possible cost of futur compatibility and, even perhaps, worse performance down the line."

Funny, that's just what Microsoft said about their apps. What a risk Apple is taking!

Re:Article is a Troll

[smittyoneeach]

If there is any value in this for either company, it's highly tactical.
Keeping all sorts of APIs around is a maintenance nightmare.
Strategically, byzantine designs become their own punishment.
Maybe a Brit can weigh in, but I think it's ironic that Apple's external emphasis on design doesn't seem to carry through at the API level, at least in this case.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

So when will the editors be debuting the Borg Steve icon? :D

Re:Article is a Troll

[MouseR]

There is a slight difference in this case though. Unlike compiled C or C++ libraries, Objective-C (/Cocoa) frameworks can be easily turned inside out. The strong method signature nature of the language actually makes it easy to figure out the parameters being passed. If in doubt, just ask at runtime!!

Introspection makes this easy, as in java (and c# I suppose--I'm just guessing for this one).

Also, given Apple did mention it into a post (see above reply) and that although there wasn't documentation per say, the functions were in a published API (in this particular case), one could say "the plans where on display".

Re:Article is a Troll

[MarkvW]

I hear you. You're saying that the company with the operating system deserves to be able to slant their OS to work better with software from their company. I could see how that would be good for a masochistic consumer.

Re:Article is a Troll

[gVibe]

I agree with the coward. This is complete BS. My Firefox (both 2.x and 3.x beta) run great. I've never experienced any sort of slow down using a non-Apple app of any kind on my Macbook Pro. Vladimir needs his mommy.

Re:Article is a Troll

[hairyfeet]

Well,I would save my judgment on whether it is a troll until I learn exactly HOW these API secrets are working. Question: Are they keeping the safari API running in the background like MSFT did for IE and Office? I don't know if MSFT still does it,but they used to keep a hidden OSA*.exe running as a process at startup which gave them the advantage over other office apps.And of course explorer.exe is always running(unless you do as I did and replace the shell&file manager) which gives them a startup speed boost over other browsers.

Now if they aren't keeping these secret APIs running in the background for safari I would say it is a troll.While if they are,it smells a little to much like a page from the MSFT playbook.But as always my02c,YMMV.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because preventing software from redrawing more often than the monitor can possibly display it is crippling.

This story is really dumb. Basically, the developer is clueless about OS X and isn't aware that the OS throttles drawing. Then instead of doing the right thing and drawing less, he discovers that Safari has an ugly, ugly hack wherein it just does tons of useless drawing but disables the throttling to make it fast. From this he fails to make the right conclusion, that Safari is ass and should be fixed, and instead draws a completely ridiculous conclusion.

Re:Article is a Troll

[rolfwind]

It's not in Apple's best interest to cripple all the software out there equally -- otherwise it means that they intentionally want to give the average Mac user gets a slow experience unless they are the 1 in 1000 using Apple only software.

There's too much OS competition to allow that. Even if Microsoft is doing a great job of crippling all software equally with Vista, including their own.

I would conjecture is that it's not a plan from top, it's just a result of there being a nice, proper way to do things and a quick n' dirty way and Apple engineers have the quick n' dirty way down in the few parts due to access to the code. That's all.

Re:Article is a Troll

[clang_jangle]

I get so sick of reading ignorant comments like that, why are you so angry at Apple users anyway? Here's a clue for you: A lot of us use Macs because they actually work best for what we do, not because we think Jobs is a saint or we want to be his sex slaves. Many of us are well aware that Jobs is a bit of an asshole, but he's a conscientious asshole with enough ego to do his best to put out a great product. And there lies the big difference between Jobs and Gates -- Gates is happy to charge exorbitant prices for something he knows sucks, Jobs won't sell it to you until he's sure it rocks.

If I had to do my multitrack recording and mixing in Linux, BSD (other than OS X), or Windows I'd just go back to recording on tape. I happen to love FBSD especially, but just try using jack, OSS, or ALSA to do any serious multimedia production and it is truly fucking horrible. I tried it for literally years (and still do give it a whirl every few months to see if it's ready yet) but in the end I gave up and bought a Mac. Now I am aware that some of that is because of the difficulty of writing drivers for hardware which is undocumented, but still -- I need results. So the next time you feel the need to abuse someone just because they use a Mac, ask yourself instead why you hate that they use the Mac. What difference does it make to you?

Are you just envious, or are you displacing anger over something else?

Oh screw it, I'll just say it in terms you can understand:
If all you Linux fanbois spent half the energy fixing things like ALSA drivers and Xorg you spend to bitch about users of other OSs Linux would be the only choice by now. But that would require you to actually admit that Linux still sucks for some things (ooh there goes my karma...).

In a nutshell, why don't you pull your head out of Torvald's ass long enough to get a clue about why everyone doesn't use Linux for everything?

DISCLAIMER: I do use FBSD and several Linux distros on a daily basis, but they aren't ready yet for professional multimedia production.

Re:Article is a Troll

[pavera]

The difference here is that the "problem" that firefox was hitting is a completely documented FEATURE and has been around since 10.4.

Also, There is a 100% documented, public, and simple way to disable the feature. The Firefox dev found this configuration, added 2 lines of XML to firefox, and bam, done, speedy. So I really don't see the comparison to MS at all.

Also one of the comments on the blog is from a webkit developer at Apple who says "yeah, these APIs basically suck, and they are here for backwards compatibility with Tiger, and they aren't stable, and cause us hundreds of hours of work dealing with regressions, so don't use them, use the perfectly acceptable and documented configuration setting, if there is anything in these APIs that should be made public, it will be once it is stabilized and reliable" He then gives examples of other APIs that have gone through the same process.

In the end this is 100% open to the public, any software can use this configuration setting to get around this potential performance bottleneck. The reason FF3 was "suddenly" slower than FF2 is they changed from Carbon to Cocoa (2 totally different frameworks) and the new feature is only applied to Cocoa apps. So in short, FF changed hundreds (probably thousands) of lines of code to use a new framework, and found a performance bottleneck, and then found the documentation about it, and changed configuration to avoid the bottleneck... How this is news at all baffles me, that sounds like a normal day in my life.

Re:Article is a Troll

[joeytmann]

AHAHAHA.....If I only had mod points....

Re:Article is a Troll

[Swift2001]

Given the number of Mac users who run Firefox instead of Safari, I'm sure this will come as news to them.

My only objection is that Firefox 2, on my G5, seems prone to crashes on first startup. Firefox 3, no.

I don't know. If a given browser doesn't use webkit, doesn't use the Mac java, but instead puts other software on my Mac, are they crippling other software? I doubt it, but I'll leave it open.

Does Safari use some custom APIs? Maybe. What do they do?

Re:Article is a Troll

[Hamsterdan]

Gotta love /. Microsoft used non-documented APIs with Word and Excel (and blew Lotus & Wordperfect out of the water). Now, Apple is doing the same thing? It's their OS, they have access to their code, and they wouldn't the same to give Safari an advantadge over other browsers? Steve Jobs is not a god, just a money-hungry capitalist like all the others. Isn't he the one who tried to rip off Woz when Wozniak had his plane accident? Please people, get real... (and go ahead, mod me down...)

Re:Article is a Troll

[piojo]

I have a policy of never modding anybody up that says "here goes my karma", but I appreciated that post. (And I use linux for programming/fun, and it is quite ready for my purposes.)

Re:Article is a Troll

[uvajed_ekil]

Oh give me a break, if you use an undocumented API for something that does not mean you "cripple" other pieces of software.

Yes, it does mean you cripple other software if you do this on purpose (somehow fail to document significant APIs, that is) so you can tout the speed of your own software. And yes, they have bragged about how "superior" Safari is, including that it is faster, so this is not just about people being Firefox fans. Instead, it appears to be a fine example of Apple using the same shady, under-handed techniques to stifle competition that Microsoft is so known for.

I move for adoption of the "applosoft" tag.

Re:Article is a Troll

[flyingfsck]

"Me failed English"

There, I fixed your sig for you.

Re:Article is a Troll

[hxnwix]

it's reporting on Apple being evil just like microsoft Get real. Apple not only documented the issue the article author is complaining about, but Apple also offers a work around. The author even links to it! I'd like to say that he's ignorant, but he clearly knows better. Perhaps he wants to sell advertisements. Who the fuck knows? In any case, I'm comfortable labeling this particular article a troll.

Re:Article is a Troll

[kestasjk]

Oh give me a break, if you use an undocumented API for something that does not mean you "cripple" other pieces of software. It's not like OS-X says "oooo Firefox, quick make it run twice as slow". Grow up. Developing your platform in a way that gives you an advantage over the competition? Yeah, that seems perfectly fair. It's not like the EU just sued another company 1.4 billion dollars for doing exactly that.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Al_Lapalme]

That's unpossible!

Re:Article is a Troll

[alc6379]

Introspection makes this easy, as in java (and c# I suppose--I'm just guessing for this one).

C# can do it, too-- it's just called "Reflection" there...

Re:Article is a Troll

[clang_jangle]

Well I don't blame you for withholding mod points, karma whoring is kind of ugly. But when I feel compelled to express what is most likely an unpopular opinion, I do hope to soften the blow a bit -- gets the message across better. :)

I agree you can't beat Linux or BSD for programming and they really are a lot of fun. In fact the bit of programming I do is *nix-oriented rather than OS X-oriented, because I do look forward to the day I no longer need any proprietary software.

Re:Article is a Troll

[ILuvRamen]

yeah, that's exactly what I was expecting! I thought it would be like the imfamous Vista network connection limited to 10% while playing a song thing or whatever. And then I read it and was like oh whatever.
So they wrote some code for Safari that makes it fast and didn't share it. Cry me a river. Let me tear this apart piece by piece. It's not secret. Obviously someone just found out about it and could have at any point. All you'd have to do is run some utilities that analyze a program while it's running, except who the hell makes utilities like that (or any software really) for Macs? And obviously it's not the OS making it slower, it's the OS and the programmers of the disadvantaged software not making it faster. Next, there's the fact that someone could potentially use their own technology to make a browser faster instead of whining about not being able to use someone else's code. I don't remember having to disclose all your APIs in great detail being a common practice with non open source stuff, especially operating systems! And then there's the fact that the article is actually complaining about Apple making something in their OS faster by using their own shortcuts. Holy shit. You know what, then let's slow Safari on down to the level of the other browsers so it's fair so the article's author can be happy.

Re:Article is a Troll

[JebusIsLord]

Although i haven't delved into it myself, my intro to OO professor (whom I regard highly) mentioned cocoa as an example of good design (he was contrasting it with Java Swing, which is -ahem- not).

Re:Article is a Troll

[piojo]

Fair enough. Mostly, I hate seeing +5 comments that start or end with, "there goes my karma...", because it just seems pretentious. I suppose sometimes you just don't know, though.

Re:Article is a Troll

[jeremyp]

From this he fails to make the right conclusion, that Safari is ass and should be fixed, and instead draws a completely ridiculous conclusion.

He can't make that conclusion because Firefox 3 exhibits similar symptoms. If he assumes Safari is ass, he must also assume his own baby, Firefox, is ass. It's much easier and more emotionally satisfying to accuse Apple of some conspiracy.

Re:Article is a Troll

[shotgunefx]

I still remember when you needed at least a few reference books on "Undocumented DOS".

On the plus side, unless it's really going out of it's way to hamper others, the effect should be less threatening than it was back when hardware and software was so meager.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Antique Geekmeister]

Well, the lack the tools in open source is partly because Apple fills that niche reasonably well with some decent hardware and well integrated software. MacOS *is* now a UNIX variant, so they're getting those benefits as well. They also pay a lot of attention to making their tools well integrated, which is not a strongpoint of open source tools.

Also note: Linus wrote the kernel, not the OS. So don't get too confused about whose got whose head up whose ass when you make statements like that.

Re:Article is a Troll

[totally bogus dude]

I'd guess that if both browsers are doing ass-y things, there's a good reason for it. Apple seem to work pretty hard to make Safari as performant as they can, so it seems unlikely they'd come up with some trick to let it waste cycles doing useless drawing rather than simply making it draw less often.

Re:Article is a Troll

[gnasher719]

If the only difference is the performance, then that's *exactly* what it means.

Try pulling your head out of Steve's ass long enough to make an objective assessment before you post next time. Either you didn't read TFA, or you didn't understand it (which is quite possible, because it is a performance trap that you need to be aware of).

MacOS X usually uses "display throttling": A very useful technique to safe power. If your monitor can only display 60 frames per second, then it is absolutely pointless to draw more than 60 fps, because nobody can ever see the frames in between. That's why MacOS X will only update the screen 60 times per second, unless you somehow tell it idfferently.

For most things, that is absolutely fine. In this case, someone tries to scroll a frame up one pixel at a time. Because of display throttling, this will scroll only 60 pixels per second. Without display throttling, it might scroll say 300 pixels per second. On the other hand, Firefox could produce exactly the same effect by scrolling five pixels at a time. When scrolling 300 times per second, the user can actually only see every fifth frame, so the display would be absolutely one hundred percent the same. So if Firefox wants to make that scrolling twice as fast as Safari, no problem, no undocumented APIs needed, just scroll 10 piexels at a time.

And remember that as the article said, the Firefox team found _one_ way to disable display throttling that is documented, and one that is undocumented. Both achieve the same thing. So what is the complaint? And one thing that is hard to judge: Has anyone asked a question on the Apple developer mailing lists, which would be a sensible thing to do? If you read through the comments to TFA, posting a question on the Carbon dev mailing list would have got the answer. People working on WebKit commented to the article, I don't think they would have kept anything secret if someone from FireFox had asked them.

Re:Article is a Troll

[IamTheRealMike]

Yeah, but that's exactly the same sort of rationale that Microsoft used to use for making IE depend on all kinds of internal stuff. I mean, the APIs usually were available for others to use, they just weren't properly documented, or they were crappy APIs to begin with, or just not all that significant, or IE was released at the same time as the API (thus giving them an advantage over competitors that wanted to use them).

I mean, it's not like the IE devs were cackling evilly to themselves over what a huge advantage having access to some poorly documented interfaces in Explorer would give them. They had exactly the same engineering tradeoffs to make as Apple did. So either it's OK for Apple and Microsoft to do these things (and to be honest, given how mundane most undocumented APIs actually are, I'd say it is) or you decide you do care, and it's not OK for either of them to do that.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Ilgaz]

Oh give me a break, if you use an undocumented API for something that does not mean you "cripple" other pieces of software. It's not like OS-X says "oooo Firefox, quick make it run twice as slow". Grow up. Firefox developers have no right to speak about OS X too.

On my Quad G5 with MS Virtual PC 7, I noticed something by accident. I clicked "Yahoo Mail Beta" in IE 6 while emulating X86 and Windows XP same time. You can guess that my hand was on Apple to force it quit since that monster Ajax thing can bring natively (!) running Firefox 2 on OS X down to its knees.

Guess what? It loaded FASTER on IE 6 running on emulated x86. First thing I did was trashing Firefox.app in my Applications and installing Opera 9 as a old favorite, alternative browser.

I wish I was a OS X developer knowing OS internals and possible reasons for that scandal performance. First of all, I heard they don't use OS X native Text Rendering to begin with. It can't display Turkish chars right no matter what you do too. I mean, Apple actually purchased licenses of MS Fonts from Microsoft and they are included in Leopard now. "Evil MS fonts" is not excuse anymore, Opera 9.2.6 or 9.5.beta can display them fine. Guess what else displays them fine with total 3% CPU on a site like Digg? KDE Konqueror 3.5.8 installed by Fink project running under unstable OS X Leopard X11! Is it another Apple conspiracy? (!) :)

Re:Article is a Troll

[Amiga Trombone]

This is exactly not what the term 'Free Market' means, especially if you are already the monopolist.

Tell it to Coca-Cola. Since when has making use of trade secrets to secure a competitive advantage been contrary to a free market?

Re:Article is a Troll

[Goaway]

One more time: Read the goddamn article. There is a public API to do this. Firefox can use that, and the article says they did, and it works just fine. There is also an undocumented private API, which is only useful to embedded components like WebKit, and is also pretty dangerous and a bad idea to use in the first place.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Goaway]

Because there is a goddamn public API to do this thing, and the article itself mentions it, and the comments mention that the undocumented one, which does the same thing, is a bad idea and dangerous and should not be used.

Re:Article is a Troll

[intheshelter]

Damn you man! How dare you expose the Linux fanbois!

Re:Article is a Troll

[FuzzyDaddy]

The summary is a troll, not the actual article. He added an addendum saying he never claimed malfeasance on the part of Apple.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Microsoft started doing it? I dunno, I'm new here.

Re:Article is a Troll

[revscat]

So either it's OK for Apple and Microsoft to do these things (and to be honest, given how mundane most undocumented APIs actually are, I'd say it is) or you decide you do care, and it's not OK for either of them to do that.

Or you could come back to reality and realize that here Apple crippled nothing and documented everything. TFA even linked to the documentation. And there's even source code from WebKit containing a working example.

This is utter bullshit. There's no "there" there.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Lars T.]

Right, because preventing software from redrawing more often than the monitor can possibly display it is crippling. Hey, I bet this complaint comes from the same people whining that the bouncing icon in the dock "wastes cycles".

Re:Article is a Troll

[Lars T.]

True. It would have been much more accurate to say that Apple cripples every piece of software equally, and then secretly uncripples its own. Well, then Apple must be pretty stupid to tell everyone how to uncripple every app without a change to the code.

Re:Article is a Troll

[pavera]

Look, all software has undocumented APIs (even open source software). They are left undocumented intentionally for the following reasons:
a) you cannot rely on the methods to return the "right" answer all the time
b) the methods are not stable yet (IE, next week the devs might add a new parameter, completely breaking all existing code using that API)
c) the methods in question are only usable from a specific code path, and any other use would be wrong

In the case of MS they added a 4th reason:
d) To bypass a bunch of system overhead, and give our internal programmers a huge performance advantage
I would add to that the fact that I'll bet you anything the MS APIs in question are 100% documented for internal eyes only. The APIs in question in MS are fully stable, usable, and well documented, they just won't release that documentation to the rest of the world.

In this case, it is quite clearly a case of Apple having some APIs which fall under a, b, or c and therefore should not be used at all. Even the Apple dev says its a huge headache using these things cause they aren't stable and cause regressions.

Further, in this specific case there is public documentation of a work around, and the work around is the right way to fix this problem, because the API is not stable, may change in the future, and would then cause huge headaches for the Firefox devs to deal with the regressions.

Re:Article is a Troll

[lpangelrob]

Firefox 3 is now stable enough and faster enough to justify using it as a primary browser (in spite of the warnings, and in my opinion.) Safari 3 is nice, but in my experience Firefox 3 is faster. I don't use Camino any more because I think Safari 3 had begun to make speed gains on Camino.

I have more problems with Firefox 3 on Windows 2000 than I do on OS X. Nasty redraw bug that I think has its origins in the W2K drawing subsystem somewhere.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Ilgaz]

Firefox 3 is now stable enough and faster enough to justify using it as a primary browser (in spite of the warnings, and in my opinion.) Safari 3 is nice, but in my experience Firefox 3 is faster. I don't use Camino any more because I think Safari 3 had begun to make speed gains on Camino.

I have more problems with Firefox 3 on Windows 2000 than I do on OS X. Nasty redraw bug that I think has its origins in the W2K drawing subsystem somewhere. How many years it took for them to use native OS X controls? Colorsync? Firefox has some focus issues and they also think the loudmouth minority in their community makes wise choices/suggestions. If you check the journal's comments (from the article), you will understand what I try to mean.

Re:Article is a Troll

[IamTheRealMike]

Please prove point (d). I worked on Wine for several years and not once did I ever see an undocumented API that would magically speed up somebodies program. Ever. They just don't exist. It's an urban legend, please don't spread it.

Re:Article is a Troll

[Architect_sasyr]

Tanks :)

Re:Article is a Troll

[clbyjack81]

I can't find a soundbite to quote here, but your post makes me regret having used my last mod points earlier today on that airline boarding story.

Thank you for expressing why so many of us use Macs. We enjoy platforms that do what they are advertised to do, and they do it well.

The thinking is really quite simple:

[Valacosa]

You don't really have to wonder what Apple is thinking, considering the kind of marketshare Microsoft has gotten for similar practices.

Fixed.

Re:The thinking is really quite simple:

[holophrastic]

Nice! Wish I had the mod points to give you a most deserved boost.

the difference

[mincognito]

You really have to wonder what Apple is thinking, considering the kind of retaliation Microsoft has gotten for similar practices.

That they're not a monopoly.

Re:the difference

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but this is how they became one.

Re:the difference

[spoco2]

And is that the answer to everything is it? They can do anything that they feel like purely because they are not the dominant player... so all of Microsoft's underhanded playing early on when they weren't the dominant player is all excusable too is it?

It's ridiculous to try and use this insane rationale in regards to any company that's not Microsoft. At what point do you then start going 'well, actually I've decided they have enough market share now, NOW they should be ethical'

Bar and truly humbug

Re:the difference

[urcreepyneighbor]

That they're not a monopoly. <sarcasm>And Fidel Castro is a Freedom Fighter because the US is Evil - right?</sarcasm>

Microsoft simply did what any sane company would do. Apple's doing it now - probably have copied MS's tactics in a million other ways, because it makes sense.

Condemn Apple, too, or lose any creditability you ever had.

Re:the difference

[Valacosa]

Monopoly or no, it's undeniable that using secret APIs to give your own software an edge is anti-competitive. Not having a monopoly on the desktop market might mean that it's not illegal, but the legality has no bearing on the ethics.

Re:the difference

[Anonymous Coward]

That they're not a monopoly.

Microsoft has about as much monopoly on Windows operating system as Apple has monopoly over OSX systems. It's funny like that.

You may start talking market share and pull out silly car comparisons or what not, but the fact is, not many people care about the OS they use, they are instead forced to use a certain OS because of the applications they need.

I have Mac and a PC, and I have no particular love or hate for any of them. I didn't buy the Mac because it's superior, but because I need to work with files I can open and edit reliably only on a Mac.

As such when Apple pulls old tricks like those, I'm being hurt. I can't run and cry and move to Windows or Linux, since I'm locked in because of the apps I use.

It's really ridiculous that someone would call Microsoft more of a platform monopoly than Apple is.

Re:the difference

[Hemlock Stones]

If you buy an Apple computer they are the monopoly.

Re:the difference

[Anonymous Coward]

You really have to wonder what Apple is thinking, considering the kind of retaliation Microsoft has gotten for similar practices.

That they're not a monopoly. Funny. An Apple browser that runs only on an Apple operating system that runs only on an Apple computer. You forget that half the definition of a monopoly is the scope of the relevant market.

Re:the difference

[Otter]

And is that the answer to everything is it?

When it's a question of antitrust law? Yeah, it pretty much is.

In any case, I'm not sure what "the kind of retaliation Microsoft has gotten" the submitter has in mind. What "retaliation"?

Re:the difference

[cyfer2000]

From David Hyatt's reply, it seems that the webkit team as a whole somehow doesn't like this practice too. David Hyatt was one of the original developers of Firefox and now he is working for Apple.

Re:the difference

[Brian Gordon]

How about everyone hates shelling out money for their products, if they do at all.

When it's a question of antitrust law?

It's a question of the only way Apple makes any money of their macs is word of mouth love and what we think of them on slashdot. If Apple turns into a big evil corporation, why not just buy Microsoft?

Re:the difference

[dfghjk]

So that means Apple is ethical?

Re:the difference

[MightyYar]

How is the use of an API in an open-source project "secret"?

Re:the difference

[iminplaya]

Apple's doing it now - probably have copied MS's tactics in a million other ways, because it makes sense.

Wag the dog. Microsoft copied Apple's tactics of the 80's. But with software, not the hardware. Apple's lock-in has always been much more severe and still is. But I still like using it more than any other.

This post is fair and balanced

Re:the difference

[pembo13]

Well, the US government isn't good.. not sure I would say it is evil since I don't really believe in such absolutes. And Castro surely helps with the freedom of the Caribbean in some ways.

Re:the difference

[node 3]

Condemn Apple, too, or lose any creditability you ever had. Apple didn't do what the article headline states, nor did they do what Microsoft has done. In fact, if you read what the actual situation is, you'll find that Apple "secretly" makes non-Apple software *faster*.

And, I know this is difficult for some people to understand, but being a monopoly severely restricts what you are allowed to do. This is for a very good reason, as monopolies generally have the ability to bypass the aspects of the free market that make capitalism the generally superior market system that it is.

Re:the difference

[Solra Bizna]

Safari runs on Windows. Has for some time, too. (Not necessarily well.)

-:sigma.SB

Re:the difference

[onefriedrice]

Monopoly or no, it's undeniable that using secret APIs to give your own software an edge is anti-competitive. Sir, I believe you are perfectly correct. In the event that this terrible act is ever performed by Apple, I think we should discuss it.

Re:the difference

[falcon5768]

only too bad that if people read the comments, the whole story was completely debunked as horseshit.

Re:the difference

[Anonymous Coward]

<sarcasm>And Fidel Castro is a Freedom Fighter because the US is Evil - right?</sarcasm> Fidel Castro was a Freedom Fighter because the man he overthrew (remember Batista?) was a torturous & repressive dictator... so I'm not really sure what you are trying to get at.

Re:the difference

[naoursla]

I guarantee you they are doing it out of laziness and convenience -- not maliciousness.

It probably goes something like this:

The guy who wrote the unpublished function is just down the hall, overhears the problem you are having and offers a suggestion. But the company doesn't want to support that function for the next ten years so they don't publish it. But it solves the problem so into Safari it goes.

Re:the difference

[Anonymous Coward]

By having the API be wrapped in a binary blob?

(How is the Nvidia Linux video driver "secret" if the kernel-side stub is distributed as source?)

Re:the difference

[mikael_j]

The media player in windows is complete shit but atleast you can use alternatives. In OSX.. Quicktime is the only game in town. iTunes comes with OSX... It doesnt come with windows.

There are no restrictions in OS X preventing you from using another media player such as Cog, VLC, mpg123 or really anything else that will compile and run on OS X. You also state that iTunes comes with OS X but not with Windows yet Windows comes with WMP but it doesn't come with OS X, oh wait! that's completely irrelevant!

The Dock in OSX is built in... In windows, you can dl docks made by various developers. Windows still could benefit from a dock feature being apart of a standard install.

So somehow having a default UI feature that doesn't even come with another OS means you're a monopoly? Most 3rd party dock software I've seen for Windows has had some interesting bugs (haven't really used Windows in 1-2 years though).

OSX's disk imaging backup time machine thing... It beats the crap out of the Vista one, which is crippled due to the fact that MS would be sued in court for putting the competition out of business.

Well, that's because MS is a convicted monopolist and Apple isn't, personally I use rsync+ssh to mirror data across drives and machines so I don't really know too much about their offerings but I've definitely heard of a couple of annoying limitations of Time Machine.

Vista has a terrible graphics viewer, where as OSX previews just about all file types right in the os.

If anything that implies that Vista is the OS that is selling because it's based on abuse of a monopoly situation.

Apple makes the hardware, sells you the computer, and the OS. It is a monopoly, more so than Microsoft. Microsoft doesnt insist you buy their pc hardware direct from their own stores and then charge you for their os.

Only if you're using some weird twilight zone definition of a monopoly, on the desktop computer market MS has a pretty steady grip of the market, Apple OTOH produce a complete system where they control both the hardware and the operating system, but saying that's a monopoly is like saying GM has a monopoly on the Chevy market.

Apple controls the distro of their hardware, software, and even f'n accesories. Apple Store anyone? iPod liscensed accessories....

Once again, we're in the realm of Apple hardware/software, as for iPod licensed accessories that's just the typical "guarantee" that an accessory will work with the Apple product at hand and is something lots of manufacturers do.

Apple has had their end of things locked up for a while. They have a monopoly more than MS has. MS may have more installs, but Apple is an entire entity that is in complete control of its hardware, software and sales. They dictate prices to you. There is no competition with Apple hardware, or software. You have one place to buy it, and It's from Apple.

Selling a complete system with hardware and OS tightly integrated is not a monopoly any more than selling a truck that comes with seats is a monopoly just because some other guy is selling just seats. Using this analogy may also help illustrate the idea that you're not allowed to run OS X on non-Apple hardware, it would be like telling people who buy extra seats for their trucks that those seats have only been verified to work with your trucks (while also using specials fittings for the seats to make it harder to just stick the seats in any old junk car).

/Mikael (IHBT IHL HAND)

Re:the difference

[Crayon Kid]

It's debatable whether Safari as a whole is open-source. They use KHTML and post various changes they make back to the KDE source base, and WebKit is open, but that's just the core. Nobody said that the API changes we're talking about here are in WebKit, in fact I suspect they aren't, otherwise there wouldn't be any fuss over it.

Re:the difference

[gnasher719]

I guarantee you they are doing it out of laziness and convenience -- not maliciousness.

It probably goes something like this:

The guy who wrote the unpublished function is just down the hall, overhears the problem you are having and offers a suggestion. But the company doesn't want to support that function for the next ten years so they don't publish it. But it solves the problem so into Safari it goes. In this case, the situation is somewhat different: Safari developer says: "Safari slowed down because of something in WebKit". WebKit developer down the hall says: "No problem, follow the publicly available documentation and add these two lines to the plist file, and Safari will be quick." Safari developer says: "Fine, it works. But when I thought about it: There are these dozens of applications that use WebKit, and each one will slow down if they don't add these two lines of code". WebKit developer thinks about it. Goes down the hall, and asks the Quartz developers. And they tell him an undocumented method that will make WebKit fast for everyone who uses it (most help files are displayed using WebKit, for example), so everyone using WebKit is happy; that is Safari and dozens of other products.

Firefox can be made fast using just the same documented method. If the Firefox team created a library that they offer to other applications to use, they would have to tell them to use the same two lines of code. So the effect is not an unfair advantage of Safari over Firefox, it is Apple helping WebKit users who are too stupid to find the documented method to be fast.

Re:the difference

[Lumpy]

Apple is not getting an "edge" anywhere. having your free browser run better than another free browser by doing tricks? come on. Maybe if FF did not crash, have nasty memory leaks (crash related) or at times runaway and consume all of one of my processors until I kill it things may be different. but it's daily I have to kill FF and completely restart it on my G5 editing machine. I keep using FF because I like it better than Safari.

In another note, the last update to Final Cut blew performance out the window. I had to reinstall and back it to an earlier revision to regain the performance. Apple is happy to degrade performance of their most expensive apps quite happily it seems.

Re:the difference

[MightyYar]

They are talking about WebKit, but someone else pointed out that the troublesome call is hidden in a binary blob - so my argument is completely destroyed :)

Re:the difference

[urcreepyneighbor]

Apple: Think Different
Microsoft: Don't Think
Linux: Think you can handle it? BSD: Thinking is a prerequisite.

Re:the difference

[Glonk]

Read the article and the subsequent comments. There is no public API to programmatically do this, it was obscured in a binary blob and not released publicly. A workaround which does something similar -- but not the same thing -- was public.

Re:the difference

[prockcore]

If the Firefox team created a library that they offer to other applications to use

You mean like Gecko?

Re:the difference

[MightyYar]

Yep, I'm an idiot.

Re:the difference

[naoursla]

Now imagine the same scenario at Microsoft. At the step with the undocumented API the developer is told that due to antitrust regulations he can't do that even though it would make everyone's life easier. The Quartz team doesn't want to publish that API since it means supporting it for 10 years. Now there are two "secret lines" that everyone needs to use to make their applications run as fast as Microsoft's products.

This would have been a First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

... but I used a non-Apple browser.

<sigh>

Really?

[Ctrl-Z]

This leaves me scratching my head, because I don't really see any significant performance improvement of Safari over Firefox. Sorry Safari fans.

Re:Really?

[starwed]

If you read the article, there are two ways of doing this: Safari uses an undocumented API call, and Firefox 2 uses a documented config option which (apparently) isn't as flexible.

Firefox 3 wasn't using the config option (oops) and so was pretty slow. The blog writer noticed that Safari wasn't using the option either, and did some poking around to find out why.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

> This leaves me scratching my head, because I don't really see any significant performance improvement of Safari over Firefox. Sorry Safari fans.

Which version of Safari are you running?

"Safari 3.0 WIPES THE FLOOR with Firefox 2.0.11. It is SO much faster on my Mac than Firefox that it's not even funny. In fact, it's almost as fast as Firefox is on my AMD 5600+ (on either XP or Linux)!"
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=429183&page=8

Re:Really?

[Ctrl-Z]

If you read the article...

You lost me there.

Re:Really?

[dal20402]

The Safari performance improvements are coming in Safari 3.1, not yet available to the public. To see them today, you have to be running current WebKit nightlies. The difference between the new WebKit builds and vanilla Safari 3.0.4 is pretty dramatic.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 2 uses a documented config option

Wrong. The config option was effectively set automatically because Firefox 2 is a Carbon app.

Not quite the same as crippling now is it?

[thebrieze]

So Apple uses some undocumented OS features in their own products... how is that crippling other software?

Re:Not quite the same as crippling now is it?

[Freaky Spook]

how is that crippling other software?

Everyone knows that Apple is the cool kid in the school ground, and everyone knows that when the cool kid brings a new shiny API to school every other program wants to use it.

These other poor little browsers are unable to use the new API and feel depressed, because they know they are not cool enough to use it. You know what happens to depressed programs, they work slower and tend to rebel against their users.

Depressed Firefox App: "HTTP request? HTTP request? Stuff you! Here's a friggin 404!! I hate myself!" *starts cutting self*

Re:Not quite the same as crippling now is it?

[Maestro485]

You're absolutely right! Steve Jobs is finally taking a page out of Bill Gates' book!

This has been going on since at least System 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Another form of this is when the engineers keep the API's undocumented then leave Apple and start their own company selling this great new software that is only great because it uses this still-private API.

It sucks and it's one of the reason I love working with Linux today.

Fuck Apple.

what they are thinking

[hildi]

"dude, what is this call?"

"its undocumented.... "

"what? why is it undocumented?"

"well, i mean, i have submitted the form like 3 times to 3 different people. one said they would get back to me. the other said
it was in process. the third one said they had approval but they got fired last week"

"wow, thats ... ok. so wh... so how do we get it documented.... "

(interrupted by someone else coming in) 'hey did you guys get the memo about the server migration, we all need to be off at 3.07
and jim ... i need you to brief me on this change you made ... tom can i get that report on the thing you were working on last week?

"yeah but i finished that report and gave it to susan... she said shed give it to you asap"

"well she has been out with the flu.... normally that stuff goes to janice... but she is on vacation"

"well i left it on her desk..."

"well, i went by her desk but i didnt see anything... maybe she put it in her folder though, sometimes she does that'

"i could just email you a copy"

"well my machine is out for the rest of the day because of the upgrade...

"oh really? what are you upgrading to?

"well im getting another g of ram, just to work on that new thing from last month..

"oh so they decided to go ahead with that?

etc etc et c

Round Number?

[cobaltnova]

We're capping at 30.77 frames per second here. That's way too round of a number.

The author must be a mathematician.

It IS their right...

[hackel]

They are thinking that they are developing a proprietary operating system and they can do WHATEVER THEY WANT. Do not complain about this. It is Apple's right to do this. That's what you get when you make a deal with the devil... Both Microsoft and Apple have the right to cripple other people's software or make their proprietary operating systems run in any way they choose. Just accept it. If you don't like it, I've heard a rumour that there are a few alternatives out there...

Re:It IS their right...

[holophrastic]

I agree whole-heartedly. I too own a business, I write software and provide solutions, and I'll be damned if anyone were to tell be what I can and cannot do with my own products.

That said, if I ran Apple, and this came across my desk, and I wanted to be civil about it, I'd say something like:

ah, that's not an undocumented feature, it's a bug in the documentation. It's a low-priority bug and will get fixed in a future version of the documentation.

By which point, of course, the feature would be renamed.

Re:It IS their right...

[that this is not und]

By which point, of course, you'd have either no customers left, or only staggeringly stupid customers.

Re:It IS their right...

[PrayerlessApostle]

I agree whole-heartedly. I too own a business, I write software and provide solutions, and I'll be damned if anyone were to tell be what I can and cannot do with my own products. That said, if I ran Apple, and this came across my desk, and I wanted to be civil about it, I'd say something like: ah, that's not an undocumented feature, it's a bug in the documentation. It's a low-priority bug and will get fixed in a future version of the documentation. By which point, of course, the feature would be renamed. So, if Microsoft had makes it so that every other browser on XP run slower compared to the evil monstrosity called IE6, then it would be fine? I really don't think so. You'd have people saying ranting and raving with the usual diatribe: "This is the last straw! Microsoft had better wake up or else everyone will buy a Mac or switch over to Linux!" But when Apple does it it's fine. It's there right. When Microsoft gives IE or WMP an unfair advantage by packaging it with their OS, then they get fined a couple billion. But when Apple does it it's fair game because they make trendy products.

Re:It IS their right...

[Bitsy Boffin]

No all they need to say is

"It's an undocumented feature. We're not going to document it because we don't want to support it. Feel free to use it, but don't bother complaining when it breaks sometime in the future."

Re:It IS their right...

[SilentChasm]

The comparison with Microsoft making browsers other than IE6 on XP slower isn't valid. Apple isn't making the other browsers slower. It's making it's own browser faster by using some undocumented features. If it deliberately slowed down other browsers access to needed APIs or files or such then it would be slowing down the competition and it would be unfair. One of the major benefits of developing both the applications and the desktop environment is that you can customize both sides of any interactions needed and speed things up considerably and integrate things more easily. It seems like the whole point to publishing APIs is to have them be a stable way to interface with the system for all those who need to. If it isn't published then it might not be as stable or implemented for as long-term as a program developer should want for compatibility reasons.

Hmm....

[mouko]

Apple has been biting into M$'s market share. Are we really surprised that they've contracted a disease in the process?

you think they are wondering...

[linuxpng]

how the mozilla team is keeping up with speed in the nightlies w/o access to the hidden APIs?

Re:you think they are wondering...

[Jesus_666]

They use the public one*, which actually do exactly the same. The "hidden API" is actually just a hack to allow Webkit to be used in legacy applications that don't support the proper way of disabling coalesced updates. Apple doesn't support it because it's prone to break whenever they change anything in the lower-level rendering code.

It's quite sane and not malicious. The submitter overreacted (as even TFA points out in an update).


* Actually, there is no public API per se - it's a setting you make in the app's Info.plist. Any app can have coalesced updates turned off by having the setting made.

As a programmer...

[PetriBORG]

I don't think this is the first time Apple did this... Especially if you wanted to develop a "plugin" that would override the default Apple behavior for windows borders or other things... At least for a while. It seems likely that Apply may just not be 100% ready to release these features?

This could happen anywhere really, even on Linux (think Ubuntu's graphics drivers), that isn't to say that Linux doesn't try to be 100% freedom.

Please keep in mind I run only Linux and OS X machines at home and program professionally on the Linux/Unix platform.

Re:As a programmer...

[RiotingPacifist]

The difference is that if something CAN be done on a linux system it CAN be done by you, but here they're hiding stuff that CAN be done.
It doesn't matter on this particular case but the comments admit there is a hidden API, hell its coming from guys that took khtml and used horrible commit tactics to cause a fork (novel got so much stick for the graphics stuff they did that they did properly open it up in the end, but everybody ignores that apple made horrible commits (like an entire product cycle)).

Um, is this an emulation thing?

[pedropolis]

From tfa: "The reason why Firefox 2 wasn't affected was that Fx2 was not a Cocoa app"

So writing this from a native perspective introduced new APIs found in tech notes you should have read in the first place before writing and running into performance issues?

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[PJ1216]

i'm pretty sure "undocumented" means it's *not* in the tech notes... though, i don't write stuff for macs, so maybe you guys use a different definition...

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[Goaway]

The function to turn this on programmatically is undocumented. You're not supposed to do that, you're supposed to set a flag in the app metadata to turn it on. WebKit does it programmatically because it can be embedded in any app.

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and WebKit's source is available, is it not?

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[Midnight Thunder]

The function to turn this on programmatically is undocumented. You're not supposed to do that, you're supposed to set a flag in the app metadata to turn it on. WebKit does it programmatically because it can be embedded in any app.

Yup. At the same time, one of the developers from Apple working on Webkit even stated that he is not happy with the current state of affairs. They open up bugs asking for these APIs to be made public, but this doesn't mean that they will have these APIs made public.

If you have used ever used Unsanity's APE, you will know about third party applications using undocumented APIs and suffering because of it.

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[Glonk]

Gecko can and is also embedded in any app. Both WebKit and Gecko are possible to be embedded, though Gecko is more popular for such use.

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[OrangeTide]

WebKit is more popular on Macs. And in appliances, WebKit is quickly catching up Gecko in terms of popularity.

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[pestilence669]

And I thought bloat was why Firefox had performance issues.

That whole claim of a non-programatic way of setting a flag is bullshit. He has no need. This stuff is all published, but homeboy wants every key to the kingdom, all Apple internal documentation, the end of intellectual property, people to read API documentation for him, people to listen to him whine when he screws up, etc.

Is this really an indication of the best open source has to offer? Teenaged girls don't exaggerate and bitch so much... Especially in the face of their own lazy incompetence.

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[Swift2001]

In the case of APE, Apple said, "Don't use those calls. They will break in future releases." They broke, repeatedly, and often in ways that didn't make you think, "Ah, APE did that." It is not on my system anymore. You can't say they weren't warned.

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[kelnos]

Not all of it, no. Apple provides a couple binary blobs with their source code drops. (This is all in TFA, not that anyone reads it.)

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

That whole claim of a non-programatic way of setting a flag is bullshit. He has no need.

It is true he does not need to use anything but the public API, however, he mistakenly thought the public API applied to all cocoa apps or none, not on a per application basis. So he thought he needed to use the internal, unpublished way Webkit does. In a way, that might even be better since it means other applications that embed Gecko (like Camino) would also gain the optimization even if the developer did not know about the flag... and pretty much anything embedding Gecko would want this. That is the same reason Apple used the hack for Webkit, so developers that just call Webkit, would not have to update their apps to get this optimization.

Everyone screws up. Vladimir admitted his mistake and has even tried to help correct the misunderstanding of people on Slashdot who did not read or understand his post, but just read the inflammatory title of this article and started gibbering about things with no real understanding of what they were talking about. Personally, I prefer to work with humans who can screw up and admit it, rather than arrogant jerks who screw up and try to conceal that fact and fool as many people as possible into thinking it was someone else's fault somehow.

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[tyrione]

What the hell are you talking about? The over 10 GB of WebKit Trunk I've got from subversion says otherwise.

They aren't blobs.

Re:Um, is this an emulation thing?

[kelnos]

RTFA. Done yet? No? It's ok, I'll wait.

Inflammatory Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

The editors should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this inflammatory and wrong headline through. The summary and article says nothing of the sort, it's a conclusion and opinion reached by the submitter. The "secretely cripples" part is nowhere to be found in the article.

This site just continues to scrape the bottom of the barrel for yellow journalism and sensationalism. Do you guys have any shame?

From TFA...

[djupedal]

"Some of you may have noticed that the Firefox 3 nightly builds have felt a lot snappier since a few weeks ago. There's an interesting story in that, one that I finally have time to write up. We've had a number of bugs on the Mac where people were complaining of bad performance compared to Firefox 2,...
However, I'm glad that there was a workaround for this issue for us on OSX, because the performance benefits are huge -- Firefox 3 on the Mac (everywhere, really) is going to be a kick-ass release!"

So, there was no issue w/F'fox v2, and 3, already 'snappier', will be a k-a release when it comes out of beta.

So, where does the crippling come in? And why does it seem like a dev w/beta software is shifting the blame, especially when the dev admits X contained a workaround?

After all, just what % of Leopard was written in-house by Apple.

Re:From TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

ACRONYMS! THE GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING!
Seriously though, your post was really hard to read. When you referred to OS X as "X", I was thinking "X Windows". Please, for the sake of everyone here and Slashdot reputation, declining or not, refrain from using such atrocious techniques. Really, who uses "%" instead of typing "percentage"? It's not that hard.

Re:From TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! There definitely needs to be a -5 learn to fucking type mod.

Re:From TFA...

[fl65]

I do, but what do I know, I'm just an AC. Ta ta.

Re:From TFA...

[ROMRIX]

Really, who uses "%" instead of typing "percentage"? It's not that hard.

LOL, I read TFA and I was like WTF? Who uses "%"?
Probably anyone who can read what I just wrote...

Re:From TFA...

[Kyro]

I must say, I've been using Mac OS X since 2002 and have been a part of various mac forums etc.
That is *the* first time I have seen anyone refer to OS X as 'X'.

Very confusing.

Re:From TFA...

[dwater]

Actually, I'm quite familiar with X, but when I read the post, I didn't read it to mean 'X Windows', 'X Window', or 'OS X'. I thought it just meant, "insert something here", like a wildcard in the sentence or something - kind of like, Mr X.

Re:From TFA...

[thephotoman]

Along with several other minuses, such as "Just Plain Wrong", "Talking Out of His/Her Ass" (yes, there are women on Slashdot, and yes, there are naked pictures, too), and "Obvious Fanboy/Hater". On the other side, there really ought to be a [+5, IAWTC].

Re:From TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Along with several other minuses, such as "Just Plain Wrong", "Talking Out of His/Her Ass" (yes, there are women on Slashdot, and yes, there are naked pictures
[citation needed], too), and "Obvious Fanboy/Hater".

Re:From TFA...

[loganrapp]

I just thought people were trippin' balls on X.

Re:From TFA...

[unfunk]

(yes, there are women on Slashdot, and yes, there are naked pictures, too),. I demand proof!

Re:From TFA...

[Ilgaz]

ACRONYMS! THE GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING!
Seriously though, your post was really hard to read. When you referred to OS X as "X", I was thinking "X Windows". Please, for the sake of everyone here and Slashdot reputation, declining or not, refrain from using such atrocious techniques. Really, who uses "%" instead of typing "percentage"? It's not that hard. Speaking about "X", Apple X11.app on Leopard has some amazing performance level, it seems it uses every single evil undocumented , secret API to make Konqueror 3.5.8 (not 4 even) draw even faster with less CPU than Safari on some cases. Until this massive scandal uncovering, I had no clue about its reasons. Now I know, Apple also hits Firefox via superfast X11 Konqueror, Opera 9.x and 9.5beta which is Qt4 application itself.

Oh wait! It is open source ;)

Re:From TFA...

[david@ecsd.com]

Really, who uses "%" instead of typing "percentage"?

Well I use it about 50% of the time.

Re:From TFA...

[timster]

Just a correction -- OSX uses no code or design from X Windows, and the X in OSX has nothing to do with the X Window System.

There is an X server included to run X applications, but Aqua/Cocoa are not similar to X.

Re:From TFA...

[neomunk]

Ahem.... goatse is a naked pic fellas.

Context is important. Using Gestault mind and running 'slashdot' and 'naked pic' through the rinse cycle... *POP* into my brain goatse comes. Actually, it popped in more vividly than even the most ingenious goatse link can do. Stupid mental block vulnerabilities. I've just now learned what 'too smart for your own good' really means.

Thanks guys. Oh yeah, one more thing... I've been in the tubes for over a decade now, and feel it is my duty to tell you, the mother lode you're looking for is carried by the nntp protocol not the http (well, that's only SLIGHTLY true(read: it's a lie) but it's true enough for THIS post). Usenet is your friend, but practice safe cybersex; here is neomunk's guide to safe strokin' on the usenet:

1) Virus scan everything, and I mean everything, even if YOU don't think the file format isn't vulnerable, scan it anyways.
2) Report the child fuckers and their ilk (may they burn in every hell ever conceived by Man and All Others) to http://www.cybertipline.com/ .
3) Drink plenty of clear fluids and stock up on Kleenex/Jergens/other material aids.
4) (as per There's Something About Mary) Dispose of wastes properly, be conscious of your fluids.
5) (as per Lewis Black) Take care not to squeeze the doorknob too hard when you DO finally leave your room.

Follow these simple rules and you're sure to have hours, days, or even years of disease* free biological satisfaction.

* Disease in this context means viral infection, bacterial infection, pregnancy, human social interaction, emotional connection, emotional growth, real life experience and fresh air.

Re:From TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Mac users are used to using shortcuts.

Bullshit

OSX doesn't allow you to tab between buttons in message boxes and dialog windows.
Used to shortcuts my ass - OSX users can't use shortcuts that are 20+ years old.

Re:From TFA...

[Tore S B]

IATWTC? I Ate the World Trade Center?

Re:From TFA...

[M-RES]

That's because you don't NEED to tab between buttons when you have global shortcuts for certain standard functions (cmd-. for Cancel), Return/Enter for default gadget, D or Cmd-D for 'Don't Save', N or Cmd-N for 'No' etc etc etc.

Don't blame your own shortcomings on the OS ;p

Actually - this is a good point. These are well known shortcuts to anyone who's been using a Mac for a while, but most newbies (anyone switching in the last 15 years is a newbie in my book - hehe) don't find them, because they're not documented AFAIK - at least not by Apple. Because of this, it's one of the more common sorts of FUD I see bandied around about OS X, that it's mouse-centric.

There are actually very few occasions where you have to reach for the mouse - most things can be done purely with the keyboard, and for those things that don't appear to be possible with the keyboard may well be utilised by adjusting settings in Universal Access and Keyboard System Prefs, including setting up your own global and application level kbd shortcuts.

Oh, and if you think you have to use the mouse to open menus, think again. Try hitting Ctrl-F2. That'll highlight the Apple menu (Esc to exit menu highlighting), then either cursors to navigate or start typing menu name and it'll jump to it, and same within menu items. Hit return to select highlighted item.

There are many undocumented shortcuts. Hitting Option-{special key} (where {special key} is one of the media keys such as volume/brightness/expose etc) will open that particular function's System Pref Pane. And then, of course, you could always opt out of the GUI altogether if you really are that hardcore and live your life in the Terminal... heh! So there you go... hope it proves useful :D

Re:From TFA...

[BlackSnake112]

Maybe Apple should document these keyboard shortcuts. It'll help more people new to OSX. Which could get more people using OSX.

Re:From TFA...

[Tim Doran]

Come on, those acronyms were, like, totally k-a!

Re:From TFA...

[beckerist]

One of my friends started messaging me the interjection "wtc?" at work, her definition being "what the crap?" I didn't understand what she meant at the time so when she came to actually talk to me I said "World Trade Center your FACE!" ... So now that's our insult of choice
</offtopic_anecdote>

Re:From TFA...

[TheRaven64]

OSX doesn't allow you to tab between buttons in message boxes and dialog windows. Really? Because I do all the time. The default button is pressed by hitting enter and the selected button (always initially the leftmost) by hitting space.

Re:From TFA...

[cbackas]

It actually does, and has for awhile. You just have to enable it. Check out System Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shortcuts, under "Full Keyboard Access". The setting you want is probably "All Controls". The only applications this doesn't work for are those that implement custom controls (badly), and those are few and far between.

By the way, I took the location from a Tiger (10.4) machine. I know the setting existed in 10.3, and exists in 10.5, but the precise location/wording might vary.

Re:From TFA...

[cbackas]

They actually are documented. If you go to the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab in the Keyboard and Mouse preference pane in System Preferences, there's a pretty long list of the default key sequences. You can even globally edit them, and add new ones. (It's even possible to say, globally override something like the "Copy" shotcut in all apps, or add shortcuts for common menu items that don't normally have them)

You can also turn on "Full Keyboard Access" there which enables tabbing between all controls like most non-Mac users expect.

Re:From TFA...

[Starteck81]

On the other side, there really ought to be a [+5, IAWTC].
IAWTC? I'm a white trash computer?

Re:From TFA...

[jacksonj04]

Further clarification to preempt the "what is it for then?" people - the X is "10" as in Roman numerals. OS 10. To replace System 9.

Re:From TFA...

[Archangel Michael]

I also use it 50 percent of the time.

Re:From TFA...

[Darinbob]

What do you expect, he's typing his reply on an iPhone.

Re:From TFA...

[Buran]

The fact that you automatically equated "X" with something else seems to me to indicate that you, too, are guilty of using the shorthand -- or at least tolerating others who do. Do you post the same rant when someone uses X to refer to "X Windows"?

Re:From TFA...

[Buran]

*ahem*

And no, I'm not posting my photo.

Re:From TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Found the female slashdotters picture: http://userpic.livejournal.com/2694168/64905

Re:From TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Max? Is your last name Power?

And since I had to Google it, here's my first hit for Mr. X.

And Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might as well say that Apple secretly cripples their own software on Windows. I wouldn't be surprised if iTunes was crippled to entice users to buy a Mac. It hangs so much that even Al-Qaeda would be jealous.

Bad Engineering

[metachimp]

I never can get this quote quite right, but 'Never attribute to malice that which can be accounted for by stupidity'. These unpublished APIs were probably custom-built for Safari, and since Apple apparently has a wicked case of not-made-here, this is not a surprise. I don't use OSX, but I do use iTunes, and I can only conclude that Apple just does not have a priority placed on well-engineered apps. They look great, but on Windows especially, they are pretty pitiful. I am always amazed at how much memory iTunes takes up for itself considering what it does. If I fire up Windows Media Player, loathsome as it is, it uses up a fraction of the resources. I run a Postgresql database server on my laptopn for development, and it does not even approach the big ol' Homer Simpson ass print that iTunes does. I don't get it. Do they deploy some kind of bottom-up graphics library? A monstrous cache? What? For all the memory that sucker takes up, it sure runs ponderously slow.

Enough of that. Apple just doesn't make applications very well. They put all the resources into the UI, and skimp on the important stuff.

Re:Bad Engineering

[vux984]

Enough of that. Apple just doesn't make applications very well. They put all the resources into the UI, and skimp on the important stuff.

I can fix an application that runs slow and uses lots of ram with ram and cpu upgrades. I'm generally stuck with the UI though, so please, focus your resources there. It really is more important than you seem to think.

Re:Bad Engineering

[Temporal]

It turns out that not everyone who posts on Slashdot is the same person.

Re:Bad Engineering

[metachimp]

Oh yes, don't get me wrong, a good UI is key to any successful app, but it is possible to pay too much attention to cosmetics at the expense of underlying functions. I do people-facing apps for a living, so I pay special attention to UI elements. Truth be told, I don't think that iTunes' ui is anything special.

Re:Bad Engineering

[One Childish N00b]

The thing with Apple apps with Apple aesthetics is they look good and work well... with other Apple apps with Apple aesthetics. As an Apple user who isn't part of the fanboi crowd (I need Final Cut Pro for my job) who also loves Ubuntu and uses Vista on a daily basis, I can say that Apple does not care about the Windows environment, or any environment other than OS X. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up to you, but they just don't.

iTunes for Windows is basically just a gateway to tap into the wallets of all the Windows users who want to use iPods and the iTunes store, and uses that as it's selling point, not it's speed or it's aesthetics in terms of the Windows desktop. If you want a media player that fits into the Vista desktop and uses system APIs to minimise memory footprint, use Windows Media Player. If you want to go crazy and use as little memory as possible, use Foobar2000, and if you want your media player to fit into any desktop you can possibly think of, use Winamp and a skin database. That's what those apps are designed for. iTunes for Windows is really ported as casually as possible without really caring about memory usage or how it integrates into the Windows desktop (it doesn't), because it's just there so Windows iPod users can buy iTunes songs.

On OS X, it's a different story. iTunes really doesn't hog a great deal of memory on my MacBook, and it integrates into the desktop beautifully. That's no great feat by the Apple devs, they've just made all the apps stick to the same theme, and iTunes looks a lot sleeker without the badly tacked-on menu bar that the Windows version has. It's widgets are native, which means they're faster and take up less space in memory. I've used iTunes on Windows and have noticed how much of a hog it is, and how dog slow it is when scrolling through a large (10,000+ track) library, but that doesn't mean that Apple can't make good applications, it just means that, when I'm on Windows, Apple doesn't really care about you or me, unless we're somehow giving them money via the iTunes Store. On OS X, iTunes scrolls just fine through the same library, so it's just a lazy port, not bad programming across the board.

From the fucking comments

[norkakn]

David Hyatt
Feb 28th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
The programmatic disabling of coalesced updates should not be public API. It's actually a very dangerous thing to do. We aren't really happy with that code in WebKit, but we had to do it to avoid performance regressions in apps that embedded WebKit. Technically it's wrong though, since we turn off the coalesced updates for any app that uses WebKit! This includes drawing they do that doesn't even use WebKit.

As for the window display throttling, that was a pref designed for Safari (that we don't even use any more). It's not private or magic. It's nothing more than a pref that we can examine from Safari-land, so linking to that is just silly. ;)

Many of the private methods that WebKit uses are private for a reason. Either they expose internal structures that can't be depended on, or they are part of something inside a framework that may not be fully formed. WebKit subclasses several private NSView methods for example, and it cost us many many man hours to deal with the regressions caused by the internal changes that were made to NSViews in Leopard.

As you yourself blogged, there was a totally acceptable public way of doing what you needed to do.

For any private methods we use that we think should be public, we (the WebKit team) file bugs on the appropriate system components. Many of these methods have become public over time (CG stuff in Leopard for example). Be careful when you dig into WebKit code, since we may continue to use the WK method even though it's not public API just because we need to work on Tiger.

Re:From the fucking comments

[oldhack]

Many of the private methods that WebKit uses are private for a reason. Either they expose internal structures that can't be depended on, or they are part of something inside a framework that may not be fully formed. WebKit subclasses several private NSView methods for example, and it cost us many many man hours to deal with the regressions caused by the internal changes that were made to NSViews in Leopard.

Bear with me, I'm not familiar with Mac OSX development.

So WebKit is tightly integrated with the underlying OS service like Internet Explorer is alleged to be with Windows. So, if you use WebKit, you benefit from the private, "better" linkage to the OS service, but if you don't, your performance (or perhaps other qualities) will suffer. Am I getting that right?

Re:From the fucking comments

[kisielk]

Thanks for posting this, I was just about to post it myself. This whole story stinks of sensationalism. Do people really think that the webkit and OS X developers sit together in a room and say "Ah.. how can we screw all those 3rd party application makers?". These types of APIs are usually undisclosed because you shouldn't depend on them. Anyone who reads The Old New Thing knows that it's a big problem for Microsoft as well, where developers go digging for some "hidden" APIs only to have their applications break in a future revision of the OS because it wasn't meant to be used.

Re:From the fucking comments

[norkakn]

There is a public way to do the same thing. They just added a total hack to the API to automatically do something by default when WebKit is embedded, instead of requiring a configuration value to be set. They didn't want it to be publicly available since they want the call to die as soon as they figure out a better way to do it. This isn't MS style stuff. There is no hidden feature. You can run the exact same code in a public way, and the it won't break when your user upgrades WebKit.

So, no, you aren't getting it right.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Part`A]

Correct, at the cost of it breaking all the time, it's an ugly hack which they probably shouldn't have bothered with, do what they do at your own risk! The difference between them and MS, besides MS being a monopoly was the intent with which APIs were made private or not.

Re:From the fucking comments

[norkakn]

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly why I posted it. IMHO, Apple has been quite good with private APIs. In a major upgrade, they tend to all either become public (often after changing), or die. MS has had a less open history, and I think there are some very valid complaints there, but some are certainly overstated.

Re:From the fucking comments

[roca]

Hyatt's comment is fair but it doesn't really help. "This is why we don't want to expose the APIs", well great, but the fact remains that Webkit can use them and we can't.

People embed Gecko on Mac, and we want to work on Tiger too, so those needs apply just as much to us as they do to Webkit.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Anonymous Coward]

no matter how respectful he might be, i wouldn't take webkit first developer's word 100% when all said and done, its an unhealthy culture from apple.

Webkit now is bigger than gecko, do you call that super bloat?

maybe its time to move webkit out of apple's control. or stop pretending to be OSS.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Nimey]

It's a natural consequence of object-oriented design.

I don't know if you've ever programmed an OO language, but the idea is that the program will have these things called classes, which are wads of code with associated functions and data (an object does certain things, and has certain attributes). Contrast to a C struct, which is just a wad of data.

Some of the functions and data will be public (though it's better practice for all the data to be private) and thus accessible by functions outside the class. Other bits will be private, and accessible only within the class. The reason is that it restricts the ways in which things can go wrong, e.g. a certain variable can only be modified by calling the class's changeVar() function, which has validation and error-handling built in, rather than letting any function put any old data in. Only exposing certain functions means that everything else in the class is an implementation detail, and programs using the class only need to maintain compatibility with a limited number of APIs (data X goes in, data Y comes out).

So Hyatt's explanation sounds quite reasonable.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Cameroon]

Actually no, if you read that the WebKit/Safari team have to suck it up and deal with tons of maintenance problems ('many many hours of regressions'). They aren't getting anything _better_, just using non-public stuff to work around things that would otherwise cause problems within Safari/WebKit.

Which is basically the same thing that every other 3rd party developer does who finds a non-public call/api that meets some need or solves some problem. The only bit that, to me, is a little 'off' is that the Safari/WebKit team have better access to see what those hidden bits are.

Re:From the fucking comments

[norkakn]

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2005/tn2133.html

Turn it off in the application that embeds the engine, but be warned that "by disabling coalesced updates your application can suffer from issues ranging from visual correctness to tearing during window updates." I really don't want to know how many hours the WebKit team spent trying to limit the things that broke by their hack.

Re:From the fucking comments

[oldhack]

There is a public way to do the same thing. They just added a total hack to the API to automatically do something by default when WebKit is embedded, instead of requiring a configuration value to be set. They didn't want it to be publicly available since they want the call to die as soon as they figure out a better way to do it. This isn't MS style stuff. There is no hidden feature. You can run the exact same code in a public way, and the it won't break when your user upgrades WebKit. So, no, you aren't getting it right.

If the public interface allows you to do the exact same things the WebKit does via private linkage, it should be simple to remove the linkage within WebKit. Why the impliedly tortous wait for the call to die out? What else is calling these private methods, and why aren't they using the public API instead?

The gist is: is the private methods provide some advantage over the public ones?

Btw, the question of Apple apps on Mac having advantage over 3rd party app is a separate issue, Apple not being a convicted monopoly, but the main question remains.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Graff]

So WebKit is tightly integrated with the underlying OS service like Internet Explorer is alleged to be with Windows. So, if you use WebKit, you benefit from the private, "better" linkage to the OS service, but if you don't, your performance (or perhaps other qualities) will suffer. Am I getting that right? No, you have it wrong.

Webkit is a framework that is open for anyone to take and put into their own application. Safari and some components of Mac OS use WebKit for their own rendering of html. There is no private, "better" linkage to WebKit, there is just a hack within the WebKit framework that is there so that other applications using WebKit will not have problems with it. The Apple developers knew the internals of the operating system well enough to do this semi-safely but even they aren't happy with themselves doing it because it can still cause problems.

There is also a public, safer, more documented way of doing the same thing for applications that don't use WebKit. This public method is not perfect either but it is much safer. The Apple developers are keeping parts of the operating system under wraps which could cause major problems if you don't know EXACTLY what the internals are doing. This is a very common thing for responsible developers to do, you don't want to expose API that could fail catastrophically if something isn't set up just exactly correctly.

In short, nothing to see here, the public API is the safest bet to use. If you choose to use undocumented methods for a bit more speed then you risk bringing down your application in a hard and messy way. The WebKit developers weighed that in their own minds and decided that the risks were worth it, since they had a hand in developing the undocumented methods and could account for the quirks in a semi-safe manner.

In the case of Internet Explorer, Microsoft had a separate set of completely safe API that were optimized versions of methods other developers got to use. If you were an internal Microsoft developer you could do more with the internal API than anyone could with the external API. This was done deliberately so that Microsoft products could get preferential treatment on the Windows operating system. Microsoft also made it so that you couldn't easily use Windows without having some part of Internet Explorer as part of the system. Under Mac OS X you can remove every mention of WebKit and all that will happen is a couple of programs won't work until you re-install them with their embedded versions of WebKit.

Re:From the fucking comments

[MightyYar]

The other big difference is that WebKit is open source, so it's not exactly the same thing as MS using an undocumented API in Explorer. Nothing is "hidden".

Re:From the fucking comments

[iluvcapra]

I think you're reading too much malignancy into this, and searing about it and dropping the I-E word doesn't help :).

So WebKit is tightly integrated with the underlying OS service like Internet Explorer is alleged to be with Windows.

It totally is, nothing up our sleeve there, though you don't need webkit to run Finder.app, though under Leopard I bet the QuickView system will break. I think the main complaint about IE was that you can't actually delete Internet Explorer.exe from your Windows system, and it was a finagle to keep Windows from favoring IE for content. Safari.app can be deleted from a Mac with no effort, because Apple actually separated the web rendering system into a library, like the MS people were supposed to.

So, if you use WebKit, you benefit from the private, "better" linkage to the OS service, but if you don't, your performance (or perhaps other qualities) will suffer. Am I getting that right?

You put "better" in quotes because you probably anticipated where the issue is. The OS throttles display updates to the framerate of the display when you run a Cocoa application; this was done to make the drawing to the framebuffer look cleaner and for efficiency reasons (you can read about it here, it's from TFA). If you are building a Cocoa app and want to opt-out of the beam sync, you have to set this option in your Info.plist, which is just a setting built into your deployment (it's really easy, and documented, but they suggest you not do it because it might leave you with a faster-rendering but ugly result). Setting the option in the Info.plist is global for your app, from launch to exit.

WebKit makes use of beam sync on/off, but uses a call into the system to turn it off only at certain times (this is my understanding of Hyatt's explanation). Hyatt, a former Firefox dev himself we might add, himself says this is a hack, and that if you actually expose this functionality to vendors you're totally going to be loading the gun and pointing it at peoples feet.

So what do you do if you're Apple? You can offer people a function that'll turn this efficiency feature on and off, and a few devs might like this, but a ton won't care, and if you do decide to support this, you've gotta make sure it works forever for everybody and perfectly.

Re:From the fucking comments

[oldhack]

Actually no, if you read that the WebKit/Safari team have to suck it up and deal with tons of maintenance problems ('many many hours of regressions'). They aren't getting anything _better_, just using non-public stuff to work around things that would otherwise cause problems within Safari/WebKit.

I thought I read in the comment (presumably by someone close to/in the WebKit team) that the reason for not simply swapping out the private linkage with equivalent public API is the performance. So WebKit does not have performance edge over 3rd party app/library through private linkage to the OS service?

Re:From the fucking comments

[fireylord]

not correct. Apple are clearly using the same workaround until they can implement a better solution in Safari as well. Firefox and Safari are using the same API function, but neither should be really. nothing to see here, move along.

Re:From the fucking comments

[goombah99]

because as he plainly said, they wanted the old apps using web kit not to suddenly run slower. As those apps are updated to set the public defaults then they can remove the behaviour from WebKit. that's what he said.

Re:From the fucking comments

[QuoteMstr]

Then why does WebKit come with the binary-only blobs TFA mentions?

Re:From the fucking comments

[oldhack]

Replying to my own post. :-)

What I'm reading is this. WebKit team, an Apple team, makes use of info available only to Apple people, and not to 3rd party development houses.

Apple not being a convicted monopoly, this may be an acceptable practice, but technically, this is exactly the same thing (actually, one of many things) people accuse MS of, regardless of the underlying motive, and to argue that this is somehow different is dishonest.

That's that - I'm not trying to read too much into it. Carry on. :-)

Re:From the fucking comments

[crislevin]

1. then stop calling itself open source 2. don't assume other 3rd party developers don't know if its dangerous. get it public, people will decide for themselves.

Re:From the fucking comments

[kisielk]

The webkit source is under a BSD-style license, so it's totally within their right to have components which do not have the source available. It seems like all the non-Apple-specific code is open source anyways, so it's not like it impedes your use of the code elsewhere.

As for point 2, there's already lots of developers using dangerous hidden APIs. I'm sure if the APIs were disclosed, there'd only be more who used them, and more applications which would break.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

So basically they couldn't figure out a better way to do what they do in webkit without relying on a bunch of hacks based upon internal api's and structures. I understand that in the technical sense, and I've been in the same situation before myself.

However when you translate that to the realm of ethics, it sounds absurd. Imagine an trader accused of inside trading using a similar defense

"Well, yes I did make large trades on inside information that was not released to the public, because it was still subject to change and took a lot of work to understand it in the proper context. We do find private information from time to time and decide that other investors should know this information and release it as a quarterly earnings report.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Graff]

What I'm reading is this. WebKit team, an Apple team, makes use of info available only to Apple people, and not to 3rd party development houses.

Apple not being a convicted monopoly, this may be an acceptable practice, but technically, this is exactly the same thing (actually, one of many things) people accuse MS of, regardless of the underlying motive, and to argue that this is somehow different is dishonest. You seem to be repeating yourself and you got it wrong again.

The WebKit team has created a framework which is free and open for anyone to use. In order to make this framework as compatable as possible they used some undocumented methods in Quartz, the drawing layer of Mac OS X. Yes, they are also Apple developers and they have intimate knowledge of the internals of Mac OS X. This is why they feel reasonably safe in doing something as unsafe as using undocumented methods for means which they were never intended. They didn't do it because it provided some sort of advantage to WebKit over other applications, they did it because it kept WebKit from breaking some applications that embedded WebKit.

The Mac OS X developers also have a documented, public way of doing this very same thing and the Firefox developers used it. It worked well and everyone is happy now. In fact when you compare the public way of solving the problem and the behind-the-scenes way of doing it you find that the behind-the-scenes way is much more difficult to work with and more likely to have problems down the road.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has a history of developing two different layers of its API, both of which are equally safe. The private API is only shared with internal Microsoft Developers and is much quicker/easier/more efficient than the public API. This is what has gotten Microsoft in hot water before.

It's a far cry to say that Microsoft's dual API is at all comparable to Apple's public API and the undocumented methods being used here. If Apple was truly doing the same thing as Microsoft then the undocumented methods would do the job more easily and efficiently than the public API. They don't, they are just a hack that only an internal developer could come up with to make sure OTHER people's applications keep working well. If you look at the developer's (David Hyatt's) comments he even says that they don't use this hack in Safari, Apple's own web browser. It's meant so that other people's browsers can work well.

I'd say the dishonest thing here is your feigned innocence over your comments. "I'm not trying to read too much into it." - yes you are! All of this was explained to you by several people in several different ways and yet you still came back to try to further muddy the waters. Just admit that either you have no clue about the whole situation or that you do understand the difference between Microsoft's and Apple's behaviors and you are just trying to stir up trouble.

Re:From the fucking comments

[oldhack]

It doesn't look like I've got it "wrong".

You are claiming that, unlike MS, Apple did this so that it doesn't f*ck up older apps performance-wise, that linked to WebKit, not to f*ck up 3rd party developers in general. And I'm persuaded.

But the point about internal Apple developers making use of non-public information and the associated advantages stand. WebKit developers had and have advantage over 3rd party developers on Mac platform. I ain't "feigning" no innocence.

Re:From the fucking comments

[noidentity]

Maybe not the case here, but consider this: Say Apple is working on some new services with an interface that hasn't stabilized yet. Then they use this in some of their programs, knowing they might have to make changes to keep compatible. Not a problem for them, but if others were using thuis unfinished interface, their code would break some time in the future. Do they publish this unfinished interface and have people complaining that it's not stable, even though it was clearly stated that it wasn't, or do they wait until it's finalized?

Re:From the fucking comments

[ratboy666]

But... using this functionality for webkit, obstensibly to not affect performance of some apps...

Setting the control globally for the app (the approved approach) results in fast UGLY drawing, and the controlled setting is a private API, allowing for: nice drawing, with a speed bost when needed.

What is not available is the combination of features.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Anonymous Coward]

"Technically it's wrong though, since we turn off the coalesced updates for any app that uses WebKit! This includes drawing they do that doesn't even use WebKit."

Re:From the fucking comments

[Angostura]

You can use a setting in a preference file, which is functionally identical. WebKit cannot use a setting in a preference file because the apps that embed Webkit would not pick it up.

Re:From the fucking comments

[RiotingPacifist]

Erm, so your saying non apple apps should always be one release behind? that's not much better than the MS policy.
Sure they shouldn't depend on it, you mark it unstable and then let them decide, either that or you keep a rolling API over a reasonable timescale (there are many reasons linux hasn't taken off, but you cant blame the unstable API).

"Ah.. how can we screw all those 3rd party application makers?"

"Actually its more like, how do we keep people on our os?...Ah we stop them using cross platform apps"
Im not sating this is the case, but that's what Microsoft did, and once somebody switches to mac osx it would be useful to lock them into using apple apps so they don't switch to an alternative!Ever wondered why safari was ported to windows but not to freeBSD/Linux, which would have been much easier? I wouldn't put it past mac os x to try the same tricks to keep thier user, as windows does, especially as if you switch to mac you show that your willing to 'learn'* a new OS.

*I say 'learn' because using a preinstalled windows/linux/mac box is pretty much point, for most users.

Re:From the fucking comments

[bestinshow]

Wow, how can someone be wrong so many times despite having it explained to them?

This use of an undocumented API was to ensure that third party developers who incorporated Webkit into their applications didn't experience slow-down issues with Webkit due to frame rate syncing.

So this is meant to ensure that third party applications perform better, with less effort for the developers, when using the Webkit OS level component. This is hardly Apple making sure that their own applications have an advantage over the third party applications, which is what Microsoft did, with EXTENSIVE private but safe-to-use APIs. Webkit is using a private UNSAFE API, but it can do that because it is an OS level component.

Are you thinking that Webkit is an application? Safari is an application that uses Webkit. Remember that the Slashdot article is inflammatory flamebait that purposefully misleads about the entire issue, so you do need to actually reassess it disregarding that.

Where this may become an issue is if people wish to incorporate the Firefox rendering component into their own applications. Either the end applications have to use the whole two lines of XML to disable the syncing themselves (which Firefox can document in their embedding Gecko on MacOSX page) or Firefox will need to implement the same hack, or Apple will have to expose a stable version of the API method call via one of their libraries.

Re:From the fucking comments

[CTho9305]

That doesn't solve the problem. Also from the fucking comments:


> For this case, there is a public way of doing what we needed to do, and it works well.

It actually doesn't work all that well because all our embedders (Prism, Songbird, etc) have to add this option to their plists. If they forget, they'll just mysteriously get crappy performance.


Firefox runs into the same problem that caused WebKit to use the undocumented API. Anybody embedding it will get crappy performance unless they add the option to their plists.

Re:From the fucking comments

[mgblst]

Why not?

Apple want people to use Safari over any other browser. Firefox has a lot of momentum. This is something for them to use to their advantage. It is not illegal, or even, in some sense, immoral.

It is the equivalent of using internal mail rather than Royal Mail to send some of your documents.

Re:From the fucking comments

[MightyYar]

There goes my snarky comment... sorry, I was wrong.

Re:From the fucking comments

[norkakn]

So tell people who embed FF to use the plist option.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Jesus_666]

WebKit makes use of beam sync on/off, but uses a call into the system to turn it off only at certain times (this is my understanding of Hyatt's explanation). Hyatt, a former Firefox dev himself we might add, himself says this is a hack, and that if you actually expose this functionality to vendors you're totally going to be loading the gun and pointing it at peoples feet.

Actually, from what I've gathered it seems that WebKit always turns off coalesced updates in any application that uses it. The system call seems to replicate what the plist setting does, just without the plist.

Re:From the fucking comments

[CatOne]

He doesn't care. He has an agenda, and arguing on the internet won't convince him otherwise, despite any evidence provided.

Guess who runs Linux on his desktop? Yep, oldhack.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Phroggy]

Under Mac OS X you can remove every mention of WebKit and all that will happen is a couple of programs won't work until you re-install them with their embedded versions of WebKit. Since WebKit is included as part of the operating system, applications should not embed their own versions of it, unless they have a very good reason to. If your app embeds an older version of WebKit, then your app won't be able to take advantage of the security, stability, and performance improvements in the next version of WebKit, unless you put together a new version of your app that embeds the new version of WebKit and all your users download the update from you.

Obviously, if Apple somehow changes WebKit in a way that breaks compatibility with your application, then you'll have a problem, but Apple is aware of their responsibility to application developers, and this scenario is quite unlikely.

Re:From the fucking comments

[Graff]

Since WebKit is included as part of the operating system, applications should not embed their own versions of it, unless they have a very good reason to. If your app embeds an older version of WebKit, then your app won't be able to take advantage of the security, stability, and performance improvements in the next version of WebKit, unless you put together a new version of your app that embeds the new version of WebKit and all your users download the update from you. True enough. That being said there are a couple of applications out there that do embed their own versions of WebKit. OmniWeb is one of them, they embed their own versions of WebCore and JavaCore because they had some customized bits that they needed for their own use. I just figured I'd cover all the bases by mentioning there might be multiple versions of WebKit somewhere on your computer.

The fact remains that although WebKit is used by software on your system, it probably won't kill your system to remove it. The only major thing that will happen is some applications will complain or won't work at all. This is a far different situation than with Windows where if you removed the Internet Explorer libraries major parts of the system would stop working altogether.

Indeed, where's the advantage?

[Foerstner]

In Microsoft's case, the goal of keeping "secret" APIs was pretty clear: whoever controls the Windows browser market, controls the browser market, period.

I can just see Steve Jobs rubbing his hands and gloating to his minions..."Yes, and with Firefox handicapped, we will have five percent of the browser market all to ourselves! Ours...all ours! Muahahahaha!"

Re:Indeed, where's the advantage?

[RetiredMidn]

I can just see Steve Jobs rubbing his hands and gloating to his minions..."Yes, and with Firefox handicapped, we will have five percent of the browser market all to ourselves! Ours...all ours! Muahahahaha!"

"And at $0 per copy, we'll make... Oh, never mind..." ;-)

Re:Indeed, where's the advantage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, nowadays it's over 32 percent.

WebKit Engineer's Response

[Anonymous Coward]

The programmatic disabling of coalesced updates should not be public API. It's actually a very dangerous thing to do. We aren't really happy with that code in WebKit, but we had to do it to avoid performance regressions in apps that embedded WebKit. Technically it's wrong though, since we turn off the coalesced updates for any app that uses WebKit! This includes drawing they do that doesn't even use WebKit.

As for the window display throttling, that was a pref designed for Safari (that we don't even use any more). It's not private or magic. It's nothing more than a pref that we can examine from Safari-land, so linking to that is just silly. ;)

Many of the private methods that WebKit uses are private for a reason. Either they expose internal structures that can't be depended on, or they are part of something inside a framework that may not be fully formed. WebKit subclasses several private NSView methods for example, and it cost us many many man hours to deal with the regressions caused by the internal changes that were made to NSViews in Leopard.

As you yourself blogged, there was a totally acceptable public way of doing what you needed to do.

For any private methods we use that we think should be public, we (the WebKit team) file bugs on the appropriate system components. Many of these methods have become public over time (CG stuff in Leopard for example). Be careful when you dig into WebKit code, since we may continue to use the WK method even though it's not public API just because we need to work on Tiger.

-- Dave Hyatt (from the blog's comments)

Yes they are

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you tell me who else sells Apple compatible hardware?

Hell, those monopolists even went after sellers of roms to kill emulators.

Display Throttling?

[Talez]

Duhhhhh...

Mac OS X 10.4 introduces a new behavior of coalescing updates that enables Quartz to more efficiently update the frame buffer during each display refresh. In addition to increasing system efficiency, Coalescing updates improved visual consistency and eliminates "tearing" during scrolling and animation. To coalesce updates, the Quartz window server composites all window buffers into a single offscreen frame buffer before flushing it to the screen. When your application issues a command to flush, the system doesn't actually flush that content until the next available display refresh. This allows all updates for multiple applications to happen at the same time. Window server operations (window resize or move, for example) are handled in the same manner--coalesced into a system-wide screen update.

I would assume Apple would be thinking this makes a lot of fucking sense.

They give app writers a way to turn it off if need be. What the hell are we crying about again?

Re:Display Throttling?

[johne_ganz]

You are bang on.

Display coalescing was introduced way back in 10.4. This was well documented, and as the Firefox developer points out, there's even tools provided to enable and disable this behavior to see if you're being limited by it.

While I don't know all the details, I would venture to say that far from Apple "Secretly Crippling Non-Apple Software" (which they conveniently provide release notes and debug tools with the stock Xcode tools for this secret behavior), this has exposed a serious performance problem in Firefox.

To put it another way, display coalescing will effectively penalize apps that are rendering more updates that are physically possible to display. As an extreme example, this roughly equivalent to rendering / writing 60 frames of video to the display in 1/60th of a second, which can only possibly display one of those 60 frames. The rest are just wasting CPU, GPU, and bandwidth resources which could be better spent doing other things. Display coalescing will cause an application to "stall" if it's forcing too many updates, the call to flush the buffer just won't return until the the current frame has fully rendered.

Mac OS X prior to 10.4 did not enforce this, and so as one of those compatibility trade-offs, display coalescing is turned off by default when certain conditions are detected. I believe anything linked prior to 10.4 will trigger it, and carbon apps. Carbon is essentially for those who are unwilling to (almost literally) join the 21st century.

Just how secret can it possibly be with publicly available release notes published years ago?

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2005/tn2133.html

Re:Display Throttling?

[Jade E. 2]

The performance hit appears to be from the way the coalescing is implemented. Specifically, a fully coalescing solution would have to handle the case where one app makes multiple updates between frames, and use all of them (or only the latest if it's a full window flush). This shouldn't really be much harder than coalescing the updates from all the running apps, essentially an app updating 4x per frame is no more complicated than 4 apps updating once per frame.

That doesn't seem to be how Apple implemented it though. Instead it seems they implemented it in such a way that when an app requests a flush while it's already made one during this frame, it blocks the app until the next full display flush. So if Firefox does a bit of rendering that takes 10ms then flushes, it's blocked for the rest of the current ~32.5ms frame. Repeat that for a while (only running 10ms out of every 32.5ms), and you've got an app that's spent over 2/3 of it's runtime waiting on the OS to flush the screen.

Those numbers aren't just random either, that's the top end of the benchmark in the article. That roughly 69% performance hit is why the red line is a bit over 3x the result of the blue line at the 10ms render mark. That's also why the 'elbow' in the performance graph is around 32ms. If you take longer than that to render before each flush, then you're making less than one flush per frame, and you don't run into this issue.

Re:Display Throttling?

[Glonk]

Just how secret can it possibly be with publicly available release notes published years ago?

You are completely missing the point. There is no way to programmatically disable this with public knowledge, something Webkit did manage. All of the excuses on why no one else needs to do this except Webkit since it's embedded is nonsense -- Gecko is also embedded and can be used in other applications (and is used in other applications).

There's an API that is hidden in a binary blob to accomplish this. Apple chose not to make it public.

Yes, the /. story is sensationalist (when are they not?), but that doesn't mean there's not an issue here. WebKit is using internal Apple knowledge of undisclosed functionality in OS X and not telling others about it. Hyatt's excuse that it's hacky and not something they'd prefer to do misses the point completely as well -- why does Apple get to choose to use this functionality and not other developers?

No matter how people try to spin this, Apple leveraged internal knowledge and kept it to themselves to implement a feature into Webkit. That's wrong. Not "take you to court" wrong, but something they should address in the future.

*sniffle*

[Serenissima]

Awwwwww... our little system is all grown up now! Who's a good system? Who's a good system?

Re:*sniffle*

[networkconsultant]

And soon it will be getting hair in weird places and the bootup sound will be at least 1 octave lower than it used to be, and it may start drinking and smoking.

Tag "alreadyfixed"

[The Iso]

The submission is an exaggeration, and this "secret API" nonsense is speculation on the part of the submitter. Firefox's performance has already been brought up to snuff.

Re:Tag "alreadyfixed"

[ahaile]

Tag "alreadyfixed" No, tag OMGWTFFIXEDSOHARD.

So?

[sigzero]

The issue with Microsoft was not really about the API. It was about the integration. According to Microsoft you couldn't rip out IE and still have a functioning Windows. I can happily delete Safari and it affects nothing.

Re:So?

[dedazo]

You try that with WebKit and get back to us. After all, IE is nothing more than a thin UI shell around MSHTML and a few other components.

Re:So?

[morgan_greywolf]

The issue with Microsoft was not really about the API. It was about the integration. According to Microsoft you couldn't rip out IE and still have a functioning Windows. I can happily delete Safari and it affects nothing.

While there are integration issues, there really have been many API issues with Microsoft. One example is that back in Windows 2.x and 3.x days, Microsoft Word (and other applications) used an undocumented Windows API that allowed for background printing. This was a real issue back then because Windows itself had no apparent, documented support for it. And it's one reason why other office suites never were able to compete well with Microsoft Office. Word could do background printing, but WordPerfect for Windows, and (Lotus) AmiPro couldn't, at least not until Microsoft eventually exposed those APIs -- well after Office had already gained a dominant market position, though.

Re:So?

[MightyYar]

You mean WebKit the open-source project? Yup, just like Microsoft...

Re:So?

[dedazo]

You mean WebKit the open-source project? Yup, just like Microsoft...

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/02/platform_tilt.html

Disassembly shows these WK functions are mostly just wrappers around undocumented framework functions. The source to the WK wrappers is not available; the implementations are in a binary blob library that you download with the Webkit sources. It appears the sole purpose of closing the source to this library is to conceal the signatures of the undocumented framework APIs used by Webkit, presumably so that ISVs like us can't use them.

Yup.

Re:So?

[MightyYar]

Oops. There goes my argument... it even goes into why they don't just link against the blobs... I will retreat back into my lair only to emerge the next time I have an opportunity to sound stupid.

You Had Me Until "Sh*tfari"

[pippadaisy]

As I was scanning submitter's prose in my feedreader on my MacBook Pro, I was seriously gasping aloud. Apple! Messing with my apps! Until I read the giggle about hobbling Firefox in favor of Safari.

I use Safari for one thing and one thing only: Pogo games, mainly because EA's developers can't figure out how to execute Java apps in FF for Mac and appear to have never heard of Camino. Aside from that, even Firefox 2's huge memory leaks pale in comparison to the RAM hog and crashtastic Safari, which has been known to bring down OS X in its entirety here. In my circle, only the most diehard Mac fanboys open Safari as anything but an accidental click (it does look a lot like the NeoOffice icon in the dock).

Pull the other one. It has bells on it.

We don't need your undocumented APIs.

[actionbastard]

Apple doesn't document some APIs that they use to make their software faster.
Mozilla guys bust their asses and STILL come up with a browser that is faster than
Apple's Safari and every other browser on the platform without those APIs.
So, what does that get Apple?
A slower browser and the disdain of their own developer base, again.
I use Macs at work and at home and have admin'ed a large network installation
of Apple servers and workstations for the last 12 years and I am never surprised at
Apple's attitude toward their customers. They make BillG and SteveB look like saints
by comparison.

The time is coming for Apple with their large Ed customers -especially in California-
that if they don't wise up, they're going to be replaced with the Asus' and Everexes
with their low-cost laptops and desktops.

When that day comes, I won't miss Apple even a little bit.

Re:We don't need your undocumented APIs.

[falcon5768]

If you RTFA and the comments left, you would find out the guy who wrote the article took two and two and made 5. There are no "secret" APIs, just unrelased ones because they are very crippled and not fully formed.

And Safari it's self doesnt use them, and the Firefox team has already made 3.1 much faster than Safari.

It was a non-story that has been picked up by slashdot days late.

another over the top headline

[Anonymous Coward]

how does improving the performance of built in applications = crippling non-apple software. really editors, I should read Slashdot why ?

Call it,, a Customer Retention Program

[Bullfish]

The when MS does something, it is a malicious bug, when Apple (or damn near anyone else) does something, it's a feature!

That said, when you buy something from a company these days, they want to bag and tag you and keep you there. Computer hardware and software companies have a large business advantage in that their products lend themselves particularly well to this game. Apple is (like MS) is notorious for lock-in.

Re:Call it,, a Customer Retention Program

[Jesrad]

Let's try to summarize all this:

Apple added a "coalesced updates rendering" method of displaying the windows on the screen, back in MacOS 10.4. This display gizmo was documented, publicised and all, back then - litterally years ago. It's meant for economy of resources and not speed, for all I can gather and understand (it avoids untimely repainting of the screen buffer).

Now, it happens that this technique *may* cause window-updates-happy programs to run slower if they try to refresh their windows faster than the display rate, so Apple conveniently provided, back then, a simple method for bypassing it entirely just in case it was degrading performance. And Firefox, one such program that is degraded by it, has started using this bypass too, in its more recent versions - so it is NOT "crippled".

The whole uproar here seems caused by one thing Apple devs did in Webkit, to automatically bypass the coalesced-thing for all applications that use Webkit in a way that does not break them. The submitter apparently thought this was some kind of secret "uncrippling" feature, which it actually is, but also invented a whole conspiracy around it JUST BECAUSE FIREFOX DID NOT, at some point, MAKE USE OF THE BYPASS YET. Even though it has been documented for years !

The "secret uncripling feature" was not publicised because the Apple devs would rather find a different, more elegant way to disable the coalesced stuff in Webkit-using programs, and plan to delete the current fix in the near future.

Thank you for your attention.

RTFA!

[edman007]

If you look at the article its just stating that the proprietary library has a lot of undocumented functions, and that one of these functions accomplishes a task in a manner that is contradictory to what the Apple docs say to do. The speed gained can be had by sticking a few lines in the .plist, safari happens to use an undocumented API for this, but the end result is the same. Nothing in the article says that the same results cannot be had by third party libs. The rest of the APIs may be useful, but there is nothing indicating that they do something that a third party app cannot do.

reason for "secret" APIs?

[TRRosen]

ya think think maybe this is a new unsupported API that is subject to change that Apple doesn't want to support yet.

PS using undocumented APIs is bad programing (unless your writing the APIs too) that can cause significant problems. Doing such is really against the whole idea of a standards compliant browser...we want everybody to follow standards on the web but we wont follow standards on the OS???

PPS this is nothing like MS's practice of having private API's that give functionality not available elsewhere.

Re:Dtrace

[byjove]

I can't speak to the rest, but you think it's "almost impossible ... to replace apple programs to default to other ones"? I just changed PDF's to open in Adobe Acrobat instead of Preview by going into Get Info and under "Open With" I selected "Change All". Are you calling this "almost impossible", or am I missing something?

Article points finger in wrong directoin

[goombah99]

The Slashdot summary is accusing Apple of reserving the tasty bits for safari, but the article shows that it's webkit not safari that knows the shorcuts. Anyone is free to use webkit. it's apples optimized interface for applications. If Firefox chooses not to use it well I can understand why but they need to accept that their interface may not be as optimized.

Indeed what apple is doing does not seem that out of whack. They have an interface that is optimized for stability not speed. That's the proper way to do it. and they figure out how one can tweak it for speed. Do you make that the defaults or do you put those in a container like webkit where one can manage the tradeoffs better? duh...

Re:Article points finger in wrong directoin

[Goalie_Ca]

The undocumented part means that firefox developers can't use it.

Re:Article points finger in wrong directoin

[RodgerDodger]

More to the point - there is a public API that can give the same effect (which is used in Firefox 3). Yes, it turns out that WebKit has a similar, but different method - but it's not an advantage that's just for WebKit.

The FTA even makes it clear - FF3 got the speed advantage they wanted, using the public API. The FTA even has an addition making it clear that the Slashdot article is taking the wrong slant. 'nuff sad.

Re:Article points finger in wrong directoin

[chubs730]

The FTA even makes it clear Well no wonder the submitter missed the point of the article! He probably didn't develop that close personal relationship that you seem to have made yourself. If you've gained any other insight from The "Fucking of The Article" then please enlighten us.

Re:Article points finger in wrong directoin

[Angostura]

As I understand it, the "it" part is a hack that allows the functionality to be set without reference to a preference file - this hack is needed because Webkit can be embedded in apps that don't look at that preference file.

Exactly the same functionality is available to Firefox though a publicly available preference setting.

Re:Article points finger in wrong directoin

[Lars T.]

The undocumented part means that firefox developers can't use it. The "undocumented" part means that its use is there in publicly available code for everyone to see (else the author wouldn't have found it) and in fact use it. The "you are so stupid it hurts" part means that there is no need to use the "undocumented" API, because the documented way to do it does the exact same thing - and doesn't even need any changes to code.

No longer an object of scorn!

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

Well, I'm glad that from now on, Apple Fanboys will stop mocking me for buying a PC and using sony MP3 players. I mean, now that apple has jumped on the "screw the consumer bandwagon", they're basically sleeping in the same bed as Microsoft and Sony ... right? Yes, this topic was my motivation to make a slashdot account!

Re:No longer an object of scorn!

[bigstrat2003]

No they won't. Level-headed Apple users weren't mocking you, so they'll probably continue to not mock you. Apple fanboys, like all fanboys, lack the capacity for rational thought, so they'll continue to mock you just as much.

Sorry bro, bad break for you. You're still gonna get mocked.

Re:No longer an object of scorn!

[Anonymous Coward]

And he still bought a shit PC and MP3 player.

Re:No longer an object of scorn!

[bigstrat2003]

See what I mean, PC and Sony Fanboy? No rational thought there whatsoever. :(

It doesn't do them any good...

[Jane Q. Public]

Unless and until Safari starts doing all the things Firefox does, as well as Firefox does them, I will stay with Firefox as my primary browser anyway.

Re:Dtrace (wrong topic name)

[auzy]

PDF's aren't hard.. Just saying, there is no single program to do it. In windows you can just select default email client, default webbrowser, etc. In OSX, you gotta go mess around with dozens of file extensions, go in and out of programs to do it. Your average crowd wont know how (it was one of the most common questions I had while working in sales, and with email program for instance, for a lot of people, it didn't stick for some reason, and many programs used OSX mail still). So no, maybe not almost impossible, just painful to do, and not obvious.

Sorry, But Not So...

[superdan2k]

Okay, I call bullshit! I use Safari and Firefox both on a very regular basis. Why? Because Safari grinds to a halt and gives me the spinning pizza of death on a regular basis. That's with an Intel Mac Mini, 2GB RAM, all the latest software update. Bottom line, Firefox SMOKES Safari (the only reason I use Safari is for its RSS reader). So don't give me this crybaby shit about "crippling non-Apple software" -- that would be the ticket right back to "Macs Suck Island"...

Proprietary software is monopoly software.

[jbn-o]

All proprietary software developers are monopolists. You can't get MacOS X from any other developer but Apple. Similarly you can't get Windows from anyone but Microsoft. Sure, many distributors will sell you a copy of either operating system but they are merely passing on a copy of what Apple or Microsoft published. Along the same line, users of non-free operating software are never in a position to fully control their computer. As someone recently pointed out, the users are never in the same class as the proprietor. When you run non-free software you put the monopolists in control.

Re:Proprietary software is monopoly software.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would most people care about fully controlling their computer? They just want it to turn on and work. You need a different argument. Anyone who cares about that reasoning is already in your camp.

Although it's lovely to preach to the choir, it's akin to masturbation.

AC to avoid making enemies with a larger store of emotion than logic.

Re:Proprietary software is monopoly software.

[murdocj]

By this reasoning anyone who sells anything is a monopolist. I can't buy Starbucks coffee from Dunkin Donuts. That doesn't make Starbucks a monopoly.

Re:Proprietary software is monopoly software.

[onefriedrice]

All proprietary software developers are monopolists. When you run non-free software you put the monopolists in control. I think you misunderstand what a monopoly is. Under a free market, the success of all products is based on merit, and that has nothing to do with whether it is propriety or Free. You may personally believe in and buy (or use) only software which is Free, but that does not make vendors of propriety software monopolies. That doesn't even make sense at all.

Don't confuse terms. A monopoly occurs when a company or group uses their market position (rather than the product's merit) to cause people to buy their product. Technically, it is quite possible that a Free software vendor could be guilty of monopolistic behavior. Believing that all propriety software vendors are monopolists is a clear logical fallacy as I have demonstrated, so please stop spreading misinformation. The merits of Free software do not increase because you post an irrational rant against propriety software.

Re:Proprietary software is monopoly software.

[cyphercell]

Why would most people care about fully controlling their computer?

While I get your point, I still think you're an abysmal idiot. People care about having control over their computer the instant it does something they don't want it to.

Re:Proprietary software is monopoly software.

[p0tat03]

Really? By your logic Sony is a monopolist also. Hell, by your logic the Dole fruit company is also a monopolist. I can't get a Bravia TV from anyone other than sony! And surely the only place to get a Dole Pineapple is *gasp* Dole!

You can't get MS Windows from anyone but MS, but you can get alternative OSes from everyone else. That's not a monopoly. Not until MS is actively preventing you from purchasing competing OSes.

Garbage!

[Jane Q. Public]

Microsoft did NOT do "what any sane company would do"! Most sane companies do not deliberately engage in monopolist practices in order to cheat and delude their customers. Microsoft did. There is no argument about that... they have been CONVICTED many times now of doing just that, in both U.S. and European courts!

"Most sane companies" do not do that. MOST companies at least make some effort to engage in Good Business, which involves both parties walking away feeling they got a good deal. That is a far cry from Microsoft's practices, which have largely been "Great! They're in the store! Now, quick, lock the door behind them before they can get away!"

Those are two very, very different approaches. It gained Microsoft a lot of marketshare... at first. But as anybody can see today, those tactics do not keep customers. It pisses them off. And once they find a way out, they tend to stay out.

Re:Garbage!

[KillerBob]

Microsoft did NOT do "what any sane company would do"! Most sane companies do not deliberately engage in monopolist practices in order to cheat and delude their customers. Microsoft did. There is no argument about that... they have been CONVICTED many times now of doing just that, in both U.S. and European courts!

Sure they would. If they thought they could get away with it. Corporations are *not* benevolent. They're really only accountable to their stockholders, and will do anything they think they can get away with if it helps their bottom line. You should read your Adam Smith.

Re:Garbage!

[Jane Q. Public]

First, you have confused "companies" with large (or at least moderate-sized) "corporations". They are not necessarily the same things.

Second, I do know just a little about Adam Smith, thank you very much. There is a difference between free trade and "corporate lock-in". And there is a difference between a free market and a market in which monopolies and oligopolies exist. (And some economists even argue that such could not exist at all if it were not for Government collusion, to some degree.)

Adam Smith was an enemy of monopolies, not an apologist for same. Have you really read about it yourself?

Re:Garbage!

[xenocide2]

If all companies were as you claim, then IBM would never have lost leadership to Microsoft. Instead, IBM had lawyers making sure they were not engaging in anticompetitive and monopolistic behaviours. It's part of why they lost out to Microsoft in the end. Microsoft, you see, has no such balances in place.

But Microsoft is a bad company for many reasons, not just competitiveness and monopolistic market shares. They've negotiated in bad faith with patent holders, they hire programmers by the bucketload just to keep them from working for competitors. They've even screwed the people who made Internet Explorer by negotiating a percentage of each sale billed and then giving it away for free. If I was a shareholder (I'm not), I'd be pissed that they've let this shit go on to the point where the Microsoft brand is a liability. You scream "Developers!" over and over again, and it's pretty clear you mean "Marks!"

Re:Garbage!

[bogjobber]

Microsoft did NOT do "what any sane company would do"! Most sane companies do not deliberately engage in monopolist practices in order to cheat and delude their customers. Microsoft did. There is no argument about that... they have been CONVICTED many times now of doing just that, in both U.S. and European courts!

Yes, they did do what any sane company would do. You really don't think most companies would break a (relatively speaking) minor law to become one of the most profitable companies in the entire world? Hell, a huge amount of companies would rape and plunder to reach the position Microsoft is in if they could get away with it. Most companies salivate at the opportunity to abuse a monopoly.

Re:Garbage!

[Jane Q. Public]

They did NOT "lose out to Microsoft in the end". I've got news for you: IBM is still going pretty strong. Microsoft has been fading lately. IBM is also about 60 years older than Microsoft, more or less, and just maybe they had REASON to watch out for those "little laws". Seems to me that Microsoft has been running into them more and more lately.

Let's wait until one is gone and one is not, THEN talk about who has "lost out" to whom.

Re:Garbage!

[Jane Q. Public]

Having said that, I did not mean to be advesarial. In general, I agree with what you have to say. You have to take the IBM thing in perspective, though. They have run into those little anti-competitive laws again and again in their history. I think it is likely that they are concerned about them actually being enforced again at some point. And when they are, they do not want to go down the tubes, like some corporations probably will.

Re:Garbage!

[Jane Q. Public]

Actually, that is part of my point. Companies that do that typically do not do well in the long run. For a while they may enjoy the profits from throwing their weight around, but eventually people will catch wind and avoid them like the plague. If you are talking about staying power (someone else mentioned IBM), Microsoft's has not demonstrated it. They have consistently grabbed the short-term profit, even at the expense of their users, who are now staying away in droves now that they have (the inevitable) alternatives.

Re:Garbage!

[Anonymous Coward]

they hire programmers by the bucketload just to keep them from working for competitors.

Yes, and those programmers have gladly taken the jobs, too.

Re:Garbage!

[petermgreen]

MS did practically kill the PC divison of IBM (with the exception of the thinkpads which held a nice niche for many years before finally being sold on to lenovo, probablly to reduce IBMs leverage over IBM in preperation for thier linux moves) so in that sense IBM lost to MS and the clone makers they supported.

However you are right IBM has many other divisions and while the destruction of the PC division was almost certainly a major blow the company as a whole doesn't look in any danger.

Re:Garbage!

[keineobachtubersie]

"Most sane companies do not deliberately engage in monopolist practices in order to cheat and delude their customers."

It's amusing to see this level of naivety get modded to +5.

They don't do it because they can't, not because they don't want to. Make no mistake, most of them would if the market conditions allowed it. And no, exclaiming otherwise repeatedly wont change history, which shows quite clearly that you are wrong.

Re:Garbage!

[keineobachtubersie]

"Companies that do that typically do not do well in the long run."

Finally, a claim I can make you source. So, any evidence, or just more chest thumping and exclamations?

Re:Garbage!

[Catiline]

Most companies salivate at the opportunity to abuse a monopoly.

Allow me to chime in with a "ditto" type remark, by noting the following correction: You are anthropomorphising a legal fictions; companies do not have a unified vision, nor saliva glands, as you present. Executives do, and with that one correction I would agree with your statement.

Re:Garbage!

[Jane Q. Public]

You can't make me "source" anything. Where did you get that idea? I respond out of courtesy, or not at all. But I really have to ask: can you name some that have?

I would like YOU to point out some private-sector companies that have done well in the long run (more than a few decades), all the while engaging in blatant anti-competitive practices. I don't know of one. You can call that "chest-thumping" if you want, but it's really just honesty. If you know of some, please point them out, because I do not know about them.

There are plenty of counterexamples, though. Here's one: Ma Bell (broken up for the same kind of anti-competitive practices that Microsoft has been caught at and conviceted of). Kaiser Aluminum, which liked to throw its weight around, is another. (Still around, sort of, I think. At most a shadow of its former self.)

How about companies that DON'T do that, but have been around a lot longer? IBM has already been mentioned several times. It is a LOT older than Microsoft, and pays more attention to antitrust issues. (Hmmmmm, could it be there is a REASON?)

I have tried to think of other old, private-sector companies that have continually tried to cheat their customers, and are still around. And I am coming up blank.

Re:Garbage!

[Jane Q. Public]

Microsoft also arguably cheated IBM out of participating in most of the PC revolution, by telling them that they would put full support behind OS/2, then pulling out after IBM had put all the effort into making it a viable product. Typical Microsoft practice, that: "We will support the new standard!" Until they get enough customers using it, then they change it so it is not longer the "standard" standard, but a Microsoft standard.
And that worked for them, for a long time. These days, it is often known as "corporate lock-in". But many new alternatives have arrived, and now that people DO have alternatives, have you noticed that many of them have been staying away from Microsoft in droves?

Re:Garbage!

[keineobachtubersie]

"But I really have to ask: can you name some that have?"

I'll be happy to respond to your request as soon as you respond to mine.

So about that source...

Re:Garbage!

[bogjobber]

Ma Bell is actually a pretty bad example. It was broken up into smaller companies, all of which are profitable and are re-consolidating, causing little or no harm to the actual company or investors. Standard Oil was the first big antitrust case, and was broken up into Exxon, Mobil (later merged to form the world's most profitable corporation), Amoco (now owned by BP), and Chevron. You seem to think that Microsoft is somehow hurting since the antitrust case, but they actually had a record profit in the third quarter of last year and their stock is doing better than any time since the crash. General Electric, which is arguably the most successful corporation in the world, has been hit with antitrust lawsuits throughout its history, including in the past decade.And IBM has been hit with many antitrust cases, just nothing as dramatic as the Microsoft case.

Even when lawsuits occasionally becomes a public fiasco like the Microsoft or AT&T cases, it's still just viewed as a cost of doing business. Even when convicted, the penalty is rarely greater than the profits made.

So yes, if you would like your point to stand, you need to provide examples. Otherwise you're just talking out of your ass.

Re:Garbage!

[rtechie]

Most sane companies do not deliberately engage in monopolist practices in order to cheat and delude their customers. Microsoft did. Microsoft got where they are today largely because other companies dropped the ball, especially IBM, Xerox, and Apple. The Mac was a nice system, but it was too expensive and Jobs wouldn't compromise the design (further, the Lisa was REALLY expensive). Windows would run on commodity crap from Compaq and elsewhere. Jobs wrongly assumed that business would pay a price premium for superior usability. Business went with Windows because it was cheaper. Business buys the vast majority of desktop computers. Windows won.

Mac fanboys can whine all they want about this, but it's reality. Microsoft won because Macs were too expensive. Period.

Re:Garbage!

[Jane Q. Public]

No, Ma Bell is an excellent example. It was, in fact, broken up for exactly the same kind of reasons that Microsoft was brought to court, more than once. But... I'll bet you don't even know why Ma Bell was actually broken up (the reasons for the court case in the first place). Most people don't. But in any case, the fact that subsidiaries were later able to consolidate -- after many decades and Presidential administrations, and during one that has been extraordinarily friendly toward mergers -- has very little bearing on the issue. If Microsoft were broken up, do you think it would be able to do the same? Don't be silly.

As for market share, Microsoft has exaggerated its "sales" of Vista enormously (this should be looked into by the FTC). Their stock may be doing okay -- today -- but if they were confident about the future of their business model, as they once were, then why have they been trying to adopt major principles of Open Source in such a panic? I mean, My God, recently they even tried to retro-fit MVC into .NET because of the threat from Rails, but the fact is they can't do it well, because it just doesn't fit. Microsoft has been saying "we can do that, too!", but they haven't been able to. That cannot last for very long. And they used to be able to pretty much dictate standards... but they were recently shot down for trying to buy votes for themselves in the very judging of the open standards they promised to be "open" about.

So... why did they do it? Because, plain and simple, they are trying to copy something that works, even when it doesn't fit, because that's almost all they know: copying from others. And their own product is losing market share to "free" products, so that is what they are trying to copy. But they don't understand the paradigm, and they aren't getting it right.

This is their nightmare, and it is coming true. If you don't believe me, bring the subject up again in about six months. :o) You can call me an ass all you want, but let's talk again in about six months.

But anyway... back to topic at hand: "Companies that do that [cheat their customers regularly] typically do not do well in the long run."

Pardon me, but I have to repeat: you are asking me to prove a negative. Are you asserting that most companies that DO cheat their customers actually do well in the long run? That seems to be what you are saying. (Another repeat: by "long run" I was referring to more than 3 decades or so.) In fact I did give you two examples of companies that suffered -- in the long run -- from cheating the public. [Also, you cannot honestly argue that the current incarnation of AT&T is "Ma Bell"! They are entirely separate entities, with different business models, in a much different industry than it was during the breakup, and even then AT&T was only a small subsidiary.] So... do you want a complete list, or what? If so, then who is being ridiculous, you or me? Obviously my statement was general, but I did give a couple of examples.

I ask again for a counterexample. I have given you more than one example, and I am asking from you even one. One company that has consistently cheated its customers for decades on end, and is still doing well. One good example. I doubt you can.

That is the way it works: you asked for examples, I gave you some. If you cannot come up with GOOD counterexamples, then you lose. Hey, man, I am just playing the game that you asked me to play. And if you can't, then it is not me who is talking out of my ass.

This whole conversation reminds me of something. Are you familiar with the psychological concept of "transference"?

Re:Dtrace

[Alos]

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307208

Mac Firefox Gripes

[Nova Express]

I'd be more inclined to lend a sympathetic ear if they hadn't removed the "click-and-hold to bring up the Save-As Menu" from the most recent builds of Firefox, which has made it a notably less user-friendly browser.

I'd also be a lot more inclined to sympathy if the "Restore Previous Session" function weren't broken so badly that it tries to restart every download I've ever cancelled in the Download manager (including those from months ago).

And I'm a mac user who still uses Firefox because I've got the vast majority of my website passwords saved in it...

David Hyatt response

[powermacx]

If instead of conspiracy theories you are interested in an answer from one of the co-creators of Firefox and who is currently working at Apple's WebKit team, here it is: http://blog.vlad1.com/2008/02/28/finding-the-os-x-turbo-button/#comment-573

Re:David Hyatt response

[The End Of Days]

His answer appears to be "sure, we're using secret APIs, but it's cool cause once you catch us we'll fess up."

My interpretation may be considered unfavorable, depending on how religiously you love Apple.

Re:David Hyatt response

[pavera]

I didn't read it that way at all. He said "we're using APIs that are secret because they aren't solid yet, and in reality, we hate the secret APIs because they cause regressions and waste hundreds of man hours, as soon as the APIs are stable, we'll make them public".

As for the specific problem encountered in firefox, there is a perfectly acceptable and PUBLIC way of achieving the same thing, so why use the API? Especially since as he mentions in his post, it is the WRONG way to do it.

Re:David Hyatt response

[noidentity]

This kind of total lame spin on things is almost a reason to make all program development secret! The masses just can't stand being rational and careful about these things.

Re:David Hyatt response

[tgd]

Simple -- because every app that uses WebKit would need to be changed. Every. Single. One.

They added a "hack" to WebKit so they don't screw up the performance of all those apps.

This is a troll article. Apple did the *right* thing here. A Firefox developer screwed up and shot his mouth off before knowing what he was talking about.

Eyes should be on him, not Apple, on this.

Re:David Hyatt response

[cbart387]

Eh. Vladimir (this post) seems pretty civil about it. I'd focus my attention on the internet community for yet again blowing something out of proportion.

Re:David Hyatt response

[Glonk]

As for the specific problem encountered in firefox, there is a perfectly acceptable and PUBLIC way of achieving the same thing,

This keeps being said, but it's not the same thing. The way FF got around it is on a Firefox-level XML-based fix. The way Webkit gets around it is a Webkit-level API-based fix.

Mozilla would like to do the same. Firefox is to Safari as Gecko is to Webkit. Gecko can and is embedded by other applications, and the optimal solution is to have this fixed in Gecko and not the container program.

Re:David Hyatt response

[pavera]

Unfortunately, as the Apple dev stated, that is absolutely the WRONG approach, because then any application that embeds gecko bypasses the throttle, which is there for a good reason. And any drawing that application does (whether related to gecko or not) can flood the machine with requests to draw the screen, even if the screen can't be redrawn that fast.

The idea of this throttle is simply to make screen redraws occur in a controlled and maintainable way which will not run away with all of the horse power of the CPU/GPU updating the screen 200 times a second. If your application needs to refresh the screen more, then put the XML config in, if not, then no problem, even if you write some bad code which tries to update the screen 200 times a second, the OS protects itself and doesn't let you.

so tell me...

[Xenious]

again why do I not like Safari? I'm probably just thick headed with the same reason I run IE7 on XP.

About time Apple starts

[prevajanje]

copying something from Microsoft,....

Sour Grapes

[stewbacca]

Gee, who would have thought that a web browser written by Apple for its own OS running on its own hardware would be faster than a collaboration of sloppy code written by crusader geeks that have been fighting Microsoft for the past decade (and not paying attention to Apple much)?

Using source code developed by your own company doesn't mean you are "crippling" other software. This is the most lame slashdot summary this month.

Re:Dtrace

[Tjp($)pjT]

Ummm... The info screen for a file allows you to change what program opens it by default. allows (or allows context menu "open with" options as well. in the info box for a webloc (url, sort of) on my desktop, Finder is listed as default to open it, but I can change it to any of the instances of Camino, Firefox, Opera, a few other web browsers I have for testing, and even, gasp, Safari. And I can change just that document to always use my new selection or the more common behavior where all documents of that type can be directed to the new choice. So ... Maybe best to know Mac OS before commenting on what it can and can't do. Also anything that is a framework can be explored. The UI can be exposed pretty easily. It would be as if MS used COM interfaces for everything. You can (if you are knowledgeable) look at COM interfaces and play around to reuse them, or for Apple examine the frameworks and derive the APIs needed and play with them. Are we so far gone these days that we expect the APIs to be fully documented on day one and have no work at all to find out what the behavior of the latest and greatest is? Wow. Back in the very dim mists of Time, Digital Equipment Corporation created the RSX-11 M logic manual. It cost a scandalous amount of money and documented the logic of all the application interfaces, kernel mode common code, and a large amount more. A LARGE amount more. It did not last long as it was impossible to keep accurately up to date. And as the OS shipped as source code that was assembled based on conditionals to include your personally selected functionality and as most all the utilities shipped as source as well ... It was a good idea if you wrote applications to be able to read the code anyway and figure out the logic. So cut me some slack. Apple is ahead of the game. Maybe they don't want to support forever some interface they play around with for a OS release or two. Oh, and as the Apple development tools are included on the media with the OS, or can be downloaded even if you have the free Apple developer account (which also gets you a ton of "inside" information for the cost of the downloads), maybe it is best to think who you are comparing Apple's behavior with?

Re:Dtrace

[auzy]

Yes, I know, I'm a developer, AND its a DEVELOPER PREVIEW!!! Means its not ready for prime time, only ADC members can install it and the general crowd cant utilise Java 6 features yet. And it was now released over a year ago. Furthermore, you wanna code Cocoa and use the latest features? You have to pay to get access to the latest Leopard builds (I paid that money, and have just handed away all my ADC assets actually). Microsoft released Vista as a public beta, and Linux is always a constant public beta. Believe me, Apple is not a developer friendly company. Especially for anyone making hardware. Its why companies like Natural point (who make trackIR) will never make native OSX drivers.

Mac OS X Secretly Cripples Non-Apple Software? OMG

[brainfsck]

So that means that the new Firefox 3 beta runs really slowly, right?

Re:Dtrace (wrong topic name)

[Rebelgecko]

In windows you can just select default email client, default webbrowser, etc. In OSX, you gotta go mess around with dozens of file extensions, go in and out of programs to do it. Changing the default email client or web browser is a 4 step process*:

Choosing an email application other than Mail

Open Mail (/Applications/Mail).
From the Mail menu, choose Preferences.
Click the General button.
Choose your desired default email application from the Default Email Reader pop-up menu.
Note: You may need to set up the email application with your email account information. This information is not automatically exported from Mail.

Choosing a default Web browser other than Safari

Open Safari (/Applications).
From the Safari menu, choose Preferences.
Click the General button.
Choose a different browser from the Default Web Browser pop-up menu.

(from http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25566, which is the very first link on Google when searching for Mac OSX default browser.)
* Sometimes it's only a one step process. Apple claims that if you want to change your default browser/email client again you have to still have a copy of Safari or Mail on your computer, but actually most browsers, such as Firefox, automatically let you know if they are not the default browser and give you the option of making them default, which is just a matter of clicking "Yes" at a prompt.

Naw.

[weston]

The real giveaway is when a given figure is a multiple of some well-known irrational number or physical constant.

Re:Naw.

[stephentyrone]

I've been at a talk where the lecturer mentioned that we would, of course, recognize 10.99 as being "approximately seven-halves pi".

No it isn't

[coren2000]

They do not have the right to cripple other software I put on *my* system. A class action suit would come quickly if this is what apple was doing.

However Apple is not crippling other non-apple software. Vlad clearly states that Apple is using undocumented functionality to programatically do something that FFx3 needs to set configuration files to do.... basically apple's contributions to webkit use "secret hidden" code which isn't intended for the uninitiated. Apple *may* have a good reason for this... a specific 'weird' state may need to be achieved to use these functions, or the planets might have to align correctly during compilation... we dont know cause its binary; however Apple isn't *crippling* anything... they just aren't fully documenting everything a programmer is able to do on the OS X platform.

Re:No it isn't

[hackel]

IAMAL, so I don't know whether a class action suit would have any legal basis, but theoretically I certainly see no reason why a proprietary software vendor should be in any way prohibited from crippling other software, or even some draconian measure such as capping software without a special Apple key to 25% CPU usage. This is what you MUST accept when using proprietary software. You have no rights. Why is this difficult to understand? Apple is doing basically the same thing with the iPhone--do you think that a class action suit is going force them to remove the restriction on installing 3rd party applications? I sure don't.

Re:No it isn't

[coren2000]

Crippling other software is anti-competitive and if this can be proven (yes... big if) there will be civil consequences, most progressive countries have laws against anti-competitive practices.

Competition spurs innovation which is good for mankind and is thus protected under law.

However, in this case Apple is not crippling anything, and the story we are debating is rather sensationalistic.

Re:No it isn't

[hackel]

It's only anti-competitive based on the assumption that the system should allow for installation of third-party applications in the first place. Now, I would certainly demand this for any system I chose to run, but I don't see how it could be a legal requirement. There are countless closed systems like this (think embedded systems: routers, calculators, TV's, etc.). They don't get in trouble for not allowing 3rd party applications to be run, so why should an OS vendor? Of course competition and innovation are good, I just don't think it should be expected from a proprietary software company.

I do agree that Apple is not "crippling" anything by doing this. They ARE, however using their proprietary knowledge of their own operating system to gain a technical advantage, which they are perfectly entitled to do. This is why open-source operating systems are always preferred.

Re:No it isn't

[Angostura]

Actually Hyatt makes the reason explicit. Firefox can look at preference files to get the setting. But lots of applications with Webkit embedded will not look at that preference file, so they have to use a rather nasty hack to set the preference internally within WebKit.

Re:Dtrace

[auzy]

Yo dood, you do know I used to work at an Apple premium reseller right? :P Oh, and I'm a paid Apple developer. You obviously dont understand english, because I specifically compared it to Default programs and settings in windows, which allows you to easily, without screwing with extensions, or going between apps to select them as default programs. What you are saying is you need to go program to program to select them as default for basic tasks!!! And yes, Xcode is on the CD's, but then, Java is a year behind, you get NDA'ed for everything you do, so you cant discuss issues with Apple's API to anyone but other developers. Oh, and Apple don't want people to program for the latest and greatest, because unless you pay dearly, you just need to wait for the latest OS to break your APP, and then fix it. What I said is that everyone else provides a free beta to their new os shortly before release. Apple don't. Instead apple choose to disadvantage developers by charging them to release their programs at launch (its the reason why MYOB for instance wasn't fully compatible on launch). And we aren't talking about ancient OS's. Why not bring up Qbasic while you are at it? They charged an enormous amount then too, because hardware was more expensive then, and there wasn't much sell through, its not these days, so there are less overheads designing OS's.

But

[Ice Station Zebra]

The I was told that Apple was better than Microsoft, that they were on our side, that it is ok to use OSX, that Apple gives back to the community. Bullshit, Apple, just another greedy corporation.

Re:But

[argent]

When Microsoft release the source to Interix (their BSD-derived UNIX-on-NT) or Apple starts putting "non-commercial-use-only" restrictions on things like launchd, THEN you can start talking about Apple and Microsoft's support for open source being in any way similar.

Everybody's first mistake was...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Everybody's first mistake was thinking Apple is any more ethical than Microsoft. They're the same beast.

Now lets hope the government steps in and says Apple cant bundle applications with OSX, and cant have secret apis that give performance advantages.

Oh and fine them for billions of dollars... and euros.

Re:Everybody's first mistake was...

[freedom_india]

Exactly.
However Apple fanboys would rather fight it out (using Panzers if need be) with the OSS group rather than saying Apple needed to fined by EU.

I seriously hope Apple is given the same treatment as Microsoft is. Huge fines compounded by denial of access.

However i don't think that would come through because:
1. Apple would whine and cry.
2. Fanboys would rather gut EU HQ rather than allow it to happen.

Re:Everybody's first mistake was...

[gerardrj]

But YOUR first mistake was not reading the article.

Apple is not "crippling" software and the "speedup fix" is documented. Result: false story.

Even if this were a speedup, what's the point of scrolling a window faster than the refresh rate of the physical display.

So why doesn't Camino suffer the same problems?

[lowededwookie]

Camino seems to be a bit faster than FireFox in my opinion so it seems this argument is somewhat flawed. Might the speed increase of Safari be because it is using KHTML instead of the bloated Gecko engine I wonder?

Except it IS documented.

[tlambert]

Except it IS documented. He was looking in the header file that documented the API, rather than the one that defined the manifest constant. If he had looked in the one with the manifest constant, he would have seen this comment:

// CoreGraphics deferred updates are disabled if WebKitEnableCoalescedUpdatesPreferenceKey is set
// to NO, or has no value. For compatibility with Mac OS X 10.4.6, deferred updates are OFF by
// default.
#define WebKitEnableDeferredUpdatesPreferenceKey @"WebKitEnableDeferredUpdates"

If all else fails, use google.

-- Terry

Re:Except it IS documented.

[Trailer Trash]

If all else fails, use google.

We're still trying to get people to rtfa, there's little else to fail.

Re:Except it IS documented.

[42forty-two42]

There are two seperate APIs here. The one you're looking at is the public one, and the one that mozilla is using - you add a preference entry to your program's plist. WebKit however, made a call to an undocumented function to disable it at runtime; they did this because otherwise programs /embedding/ webkit, where they do not have access to the plist, would suffer performance regressions otherwise. And they plan to remove it once the root cause of the performance issues is fixed (the call disables deferred updates for the entire program that uses webkit, not just webkit itself)

Cross platform benchmarks

[kylehase]

If they're hiding other performance enhancing APIs this could really hurt them when people do cross platform benchmarks. For example, IF the Photoshop on Windows outperforms the Mac version because Adobe doesn't know about a secret API then people may lean towards Windows PCs.

Re:Cross platform benchmarks

[WaltFrench]

Yes, performance is good.

But bugs are bad, and after reading TFA, it sounds like this function is likely responsible for lousy screen drawing issues that pop up when I scroll in Safari. Tho I haven't seen them lately... maybe the function finally works right in 10.5.2, or the latest Webkit builds that I've started fooling with are smarter, or I've stopped running Safari in parallel with whatever was interfering with it, or... well Slashdotters are supposed to know software issues like this.

In any case, a mountain out of a molehill, methinks. Idiotic to think that Apple believes it'll gain any advantage by crippling Firefox or anybody else who wants to scroll text/images. Much more likely that their approach to doing same is pushing the envelope in a way that has to be carefully controlled.

Re:Cross platform benchmarks

[gnasher719]

If they're hiding other performance enhancing APIs this could really hurt them when people do cross platform benchmarks. For example, IF the Photoshop on Windows outperforms the Mac version because Adobe doesn't know about a secret API then people may lean towards Windows PCs. This is not _really_ about performance enhancements. The operating system has a new feature (since about 2002) that prevents applications from redrawing the screen more often than the display frequency - redrawing more often is just a waste of energy. For example, if I wrote code that lets you click on an icon and drag that icon around the screen, the icon will be redrawn only 60 times per second, no matter how fast your graphics card is. Redrawing it 2000 times per second would be pointless because you can't see it.

Now if I do something stupid: Instead of redrawing the icon to where the mouse cursor is, I move it one pixel closer to the mouse cursor each time I redraw. Which is stupid. Now redrawing 2000 times per second would make it follow the cursor much quicker. And this new feature slows your computer down. But only because I wrote stupid code. Or if you copy a file, and you update a progress bar after every kilobyte of data copied, which is just as stupid. The file copying is suddenly limited by the speed of the graphics card, and with Apple's change done in 2002 it now copies 60K per second only, because the code is too stupid.

In very, very rare cases both Firefox and WebKit do that kind of stupid thing. What they both should really do is fix the stupid code, instead they both use a workaround to disable a very useful feature.

At least use proper Cocoa naming conventions!

[EMB Numbers]

@interface NSScreen (screenNumber)

- (int)screenNumber;

@end

@implementation NSScreen (screenNumber)

- (int)screenNumber
{
                return _screenNumber;
}

@end

Methods start with lower case.
Apple reserves all symbols that start with '_'.

Re:At least use proper Cocoa naming conventions!

[MouseR]

Just dont want to clash with a possible implementation somewhere. besides, this isn't the exact code I'm using. My employer wouldn't aprove otherwise.

Monopolies? In my Mac?

[NeuroManson]

It's more likely than you think!

From the Article

[xutopia]

"Edit: Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do."

My Wish

[kelzer]

I just wish the Firefox team would discover Apple's secret API to prevent memory leaks. Now THAT would be sweet.

For all the good it's doing them!

[rocker_wannabe]

I've used Safari for quite a while because it looked nicer and was relatively fast. Unfortunately, and maybe this is because I'm still running 10.3.9 (Panther), it crashed way too often in the last year. It seems like most of the news sites (Google, BBC, CNN, etc.) are Safari killers.

The new Firefox (2.0.0.12) seems just as fast now and is much more stable. It seems to work with all the sites I go to and has some great add-ons like NoScript and "Nuke Anything Enhanced". If this is the best Apple can do to make Safari shine I don't think anyone has much to worry about.

I wish more "slashdot-ters" would quit drinking the Cool-Aid and realize the EVERY publicly traded company is about making money and not much else.

Changing APIs

[Jessta]

An API that gives better performance is generally an API that has a more direct access to OS resources.
One of the main reasons to leave these undocumented is because they are probably likely to change as lower level OS changes are made.Apple can use them in safari because they know that they can update that code if the APIs change.

Documenting APIs that are likely to change is a sure way to break 3rd party programs.
Using undocumented APIs is a sure way to make your application non-portable between different versions of the OS.

as much as I like Apple

[rastoboy29]

Even though I'm pleased that the Mac's market share is increasing, because it encourages use of cross platform coding techniques and such, this is an example of why a proprietary OS is less than desirable.  Even if it's cute.

Re:as much as I like Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that WebKit is open source, right?

Bullshit

[mike3k]

I call bullshit on this.

It Doesn't Matter

[YetAnotherBob]

This is totally unimportant for Apple. Jobs will just smile and show some cool looking thing. The Mac heads will swoon, and for Apple, nobody else matters. Those who care don't buy Mac's anyway. Even if true, this will have no impact on Apple. If false, same. See above.

It's a Firefox bug

[Animats]

From the article: "So, we're being throttled by the OS which is forcing us to wait for the next frame time before allowing us to draw again."

Hello? There's no point in redrawing the screen faster than display can refresh it. It won't be displayed. If Firefox's implementation of scrolling does so by redrawing faster than the frame rate, Firefox is doing it wrong.

Apparently this is considered a "problem" because there's some dumb benchmark that measures how fast you can process scroll events when driving scrolling from a script, runs this too many times, and because that benchmark executes during the build process, this "problem" slows up builds.

Some years ago I had a go-round with the NVidia driver developers about this. In an effort to get better Quake benchmarks by not waiting for frame sync, they'd caused major problems for systems running more than one 3D window with OpenGL. That was fixed years ago.

Apple.... no way!!

[moezaly]

There is NO way apple could do something like this.... ever... and I mean it.... just look at Steve Jobs and all the htings he has done with the iPhone.... P.S: Mod funny... lol

Comment By Hyatt

[Anonymous Coward]

Comment by Hyatt: The programmatic disabling of coalesced updates should not be public API. It's actually a very dangerous thing to do. We aren't really happy with that code in WebKit, but we had to do it to avoid performance regressions in apps that embedded WebKit. Technically it's wrong though, since we turn off the coalesced updates for any app that uses WebKit! This includes drawing they do that doesn't even use WebKit. As for the window display throttling, that was a pref designed for Safari (that we don't even use any more). It's not private or magic. It's nothing more than a pref that we can examine from Safari-land, so linking to that is just silly. ;) Many of the private methods that WebKit uses are private for a reason. Either they expose internal structures that can't be depended on, or they are part of something inside a framework that may not be fully formed. WebKit subclasses several private NSView methods for example, and it cost us many many man hours to deal with the regressions caused by the internal changes that were made to NSViews in Leopard. As you yourself blogged, there was a totally acceptable public way of doing what you needed to do. For any private methods we use that we think should be public, we (the WebKit team) file bugs on the appropriate system components. Many of these methods have become public over time (CG stuff in Leopard for example). Be careful when you dig into WebKit code, since we may continue to use the WK method even though it's not public API just because we need to work on Tiger. # 14 Mick

You should know exactly what they are thinking

[wicka]

I don't think this is at all of a surprise. Apple is just as an awful of a company as Microsoft is; perhaps moreso, now that Microsoft may learn from their mistakes (ha!) and Apple is just beginning to make them. People view Apple as this holy grail of corporations and they are just not. They are notoriously proprietary; I don't see why Slashdot doesn't just despise them like they do Microsoft, given /.'s love of open-source. Whenever I look at new Apple products I always have the back of my head the thought that I don't want them just because they are so closed off and limited. And above all Steve Jobs is just a bad guy. I wonder how many products Bill Gates has named after disowned children?

Let's be fair now...

[heretic108]

In the Linux world, there are 'undocumented APIs' everywhere. Unless of course, one considers a .h file to be documentation.

Re:Let's be fair now...

[miffo.swe]

Ill take good sourcecode with reasonable commenting over documentation anyday.

Looks pretty secret to me.

[typicallyterrific]

If the only way to find and use an API is to troll through a hundred thousand lines of code, looking at specific regions, and then reverse-engineer what it does, in my book it's not unfair to call it a "secret".

Uncommented header files shouldn't count as a standard for "public" documentation, you know.

Re:Looks pretty secret to me.

[p0tat03]

Except in this case Apple provided a Technical Note that detailed the exact steps you'd need to follow to implement this feature. The only thing that was undocumented was an *alternate* but *functionally identical* way to do it (i.e. doing it from code as opposed to from program config).

Re:Looks pretty secret to me.

[typicallyterrific]

You'll find in one of the comments, an Apple dev addresses that properly; I don't actually believe that they're doing something evil, just holding up what that undocumented APIs count as being the same as secret.

Re:Looks pretty secret to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not entirely true. If someone embedded Firefox right now (rather than WebKit), the performance penalty would come right back. WebKit uses an API *NOT* documented in the Technical Note because apps that embed may not set the value in the plist. RTFA!

Re:Looks pretty secret to me.

[MightyYar]

Though one would hope that if a new app embedded Firefox, that new app would set the value in the plist. The hack apparently was to avoid breaking old apps that may already be embedding Webkit.

retaliation, Microsoft?

[soward]

"considering the kind of retaliation Microsoft has gotten for similar practices."

Are you talking about the MS that totally dominates the desktop and server OS world, and captures the vast majority of all web users with their browser -- even though both are dramatically sub-par?

The MS with the ~$260B market valuation?

yeah, who would ever want to emulate any of their clearly flawed tactics!

Re:retaliation, Microsoft?

[One Childish N00b]

a) MS does not dominate the server world, as far as I know. They do have a large chunk, but they are hardly dominant by any means.
b) You have a definition of the word 'capture' that differs from everyone else. I've used IE7 and, while it is crap, it didn't throw a net over me and hold me hostage until I promised to use it forever.

interesting comments

[pcruce]

Did the poster add comments to the webkit code he posted? I noticed this comment...lol, seems like it helps settle the issue. // This method uses the secret method _scrollTo on NSClipView. // It does that because it needs to know definitively whether scrolling was // done or not to help implement the "scroll parent if we are at the limit" feature. // In the presence of smooth scrolling, there's no easy way to tell if the method // did any scrolling or not with the public API. I got this from: http://www.koders.com/noncode/fidDD6DE07ED9010D40683E1F1C73DEBB67143E40B8.aspx#L293

Slashdot spreads more FUD

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

It seems quite clear from the comments that this article is a load of crap, yet it still hangs around on the front page, giving skim readers (the majority) false info. Integrity matters, and having user submitted content doesn't change that -- it's still sloppy journalism to let it be published.

Re:Slashdot spreads more FUD

[Jesus_666]

Well, Slashdot doesn't take down articles, but sometimes atricles are updated to reflect new information. I wonder why it hasn't happened here yet.

Re:Slashdot spreads more FUD

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I don't think they need to be taken down completely, as the discussions are often worth keeping, but I think they should go into a "discarded" section where it's made obvious that the story was dumped for some reason. The updates work well for some things, but in these cases it just seems like the site is saying "Oh, wait... Never mind... The sky isn't falling after all." And the main reason I have a problem with that is because I find there is too much sensationalist stuff to begin with, not only on the web, but in print, too. I guess it annoys me more on Slashdot because I think they are more likely to change than some big newspaper who seems more interested in sales figures than journalism.

Re:Slashdot spreads more FUD

[Apotsy]

They probably think that if they just put enough pressure on companies via bad publicity, they'll be forced to be more "open" (read: give away all their shit for free (yes, as in beer, that's what it's really all about)).

Further, they probably think that's such an admirable and noble goal, it doesn't matter if they bend the truth in the process. As long as they get their FREE STUFF!

Techincally ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically it's X Window, not X Windows. :-p

Re:Techincally ..

[PJ1216]

technically, you're subject title should be "technically," not "techincally." =P

Re:Techincally ..

[Machine9]

technically, you're subject title should be "technically," not "techincally." =P And technically, it's "your subject title", not "you're subject title" =)

Re:Techincally ..

[ta bu shi da yu]

You missed a full-stop.

Re:Techincally ..

[Machine9]

Your signature contains a full stop, in a position where a semicolon would be appropriate. In addition, "full stop" does not appear to be spelled with a hyphen. (source: wikipedia.. ahum) ;)

Re:Techincally ..

[ronadams]

Your parenthetical contained no end punctuation, and "source" ought to have been capitalized. I'm now invoking Godwin's law to stop future Grammar Nazis before this turns into the Fourth Reich.

Re:Techincally ..

[Machine9]

I capitulate!

Re:Techincally ..

[Hes Nikke]

Doesn't someone have to make a nazi reference BEFORE Godwins Law can be evoked? O_o

Re:Techincally ..

[AshtangiMan]

you probably think someone has to strike before you can retaliate. noob.

Re:Techincally ..

[Hes Nikke]

noob. says the /. user with a UID almost 3 times as high as mine [facepalm]

Re:Techincally ..

[AshtangiMan]

well played sir.

Re:Techincally ..

[papna]

Your signature contains a full stop, in a position where a semicolon would be appropriate. Its not appropriate to use a comma there.

Re:Techincally ..

[BungaDunga]

It's "invoked", Godwin's Law has an apostrophe, and you need to capitalize Nazi.

Re:Techincally ..

[Hes Nikke]

evoke |ivk|
verb [ trans. ]
1 bring or recall to the conscious mind : the sight of American asters evokes pleasant memories of childhood.
  elicit (a response) : the awkward kid who evoked giggles from his sisters.
2 invoke (a spirit or deity).

point

Capitalizing shows respect, and nazis deserve none.

1 for 3? Ouch!

Re:Techincally ..

[ronadams]

If /. allowed images, this is where I would put the picture of Tony Montoya shooting up his great room.

Re:Techincally ..

[ronadams]

And, for the record, it's "it's", not "its".
*BANG BANG*

Re:Techincally ..

[papna]

The error was intentional. I was participating in a long string of comments correcting others posts with posts with errors in them. You have, disappointingly, broken that patten. (I could argue that your punctuation belong within your quotation marks or your emote was improper, but these seem to be good ways to express one's self.) Unless you did get it and I am missing something.

Re:Techincally ..

[ronadams]

To quote the fantastic text adventure game Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "You stay out of this. You're dead."

The Big Picture.

[gnutoo]

What you say would make sense if closed source software was honest but honest people don't keep secrets. The author correctly notes that this can't happen in the free software world. It's too bad he goes on to write a sniveling apology for noticing and Slashdot's so called missunderstanding. Here's the low down, Vlad, FREE SOFTWARE ONLY HAS PERFORMANCE ISSUES BECAUSE GRAPHICS VENDORS USED TO KEEP SECRETS WITH APPLE AND MICROSHIT. This is a completely intentional crippling of all competitors, free and non free. This is not competition based on merit, it's subjugation that leaves you at the mercy of those who know but won't ever really tell you how your hardware works.

Even the smaller point does not hold water. A good example of non free API abuse was the nasty stuff that Microsoft sold Lotus developers. It was horrible and Microsoft employees hated it and liked the older set better. With full knowledge of this, they sold the new set to their competitors at Lotus and then bragged about how much harm this did.

Non free software is always like this.

Re:The Big Picture.

[Guy Harris]

What you say would make sense if closed source software was honest but honest people don't keep secrets.

Hopefully, honest people also, when they "reveal" an interface they consider to be an internal interface subject to change, and then have devlopers whine at them that an update broke their (application, plugin, etc.) because the interface changed, are in a position where they can be honest enough to say "tough shit" to the whiner. If not, that really removes an incentive to be honest.

(That isn't necessarily the only reason to keep secrets, but it's one reason to keep secrets. I get the impression that Linus, for example, is more than willing to say "tough shit" if somebody writes kernel code that assumes the kernel will always work the way it does now and has their code breaks because it starts working differently; if he says "tough shit" in that case, my sympathy would entirely be with him, not with whoever's software breaks. Don't want your software to break? Don't use interfaces that the supplier of the interface doesn't guarantee won't change in an incompatible fashion.)

Re:M$ Kind of Market Share.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with you and those dollar signs anyway? Are you trying to be funny, or just bring down the signal to noise ratio, bad as it is to begin with?

How long?

[msimm]

How long until someone smart and articulate enough creates a mirror /. with real news for nerds and real stuff that matters. A few years ago it was kind of novel having our very own tabloid but now the jokes over and our little community is turning into just another glorified narrative.

Reading /. used to be like a dirty little secret. A guilty pleasure periodically through-out the work-day. But more and more often I'm left just feeling dirty. Or simply mis-informed.

And I don't mean to suggest that I'm either smart or articulate. Just that /. has created a model and a community and now it seems they have created a vacuum in their own misguided attempt at revelry or viewership.

Re:How long?

[LaskoVortex]

Read the /. comments and you'll get a fairly accurate picture of reality. I usually see both sides of every story represented more or less fairly (with an arguable slant towards liberalism--but then again, the demographic is educated). If you think TFAs are what the meat of ./ is all about, then you are missing the point. TFAs are simply to introduce topics of discussion. You see a lot of redundancy in the comments, sure, but some are insightful and are usually modded as such. You can actually watch the evolution of thought on the scale of an international community if you strain your eyes.

Re:Dtrace (wrong topic name)

[Sentry21]

Changing the default email client or web browser is a 4 step process*:

Choosing an email application other than Mail

Open Mail (/Applications/Mail).
[...]

Choosing a default Web browser other than Safari

Open Safari (/Applications).
[...] It should be worth noting that it is not a requirement to use Safari or Mail to change these defaults (nor the other default that both can change, namely the default feed reader for RSS/Atom feeds). Any application is capable of implementing this; many current browsers already do so, such as Shiira; it should be trivial, now that Firefox is a Cocoa application (or even before...) for Firefox to implement this exact functionality for users as well.

That is to say, it is not that Safari or Mail must to be used to change these preferences; rather it is specifically that Firefox and Thunderbird cannot (or at least, cannot through the preferences window).

Re:Dtrace

[vought]

Microsoft has Default program settings, Apple has nothing. So, so wrong.

1. Setting browser and RSS preferences: Choose Preferences from the Safari menu. Click the General Tab and select a default browser from all those installed. Next, select the RSS tab, and choose a reader aong the plethora you have installed. Quit, and you never have to use Safari again for browsing or RSS if you don't want to.

2. Setting e-mail software preferences: In Mail, choose Preferences from the Mail menu. Select a default e-mail program. Quit, and you'll never have to use mail for any e-mail tasks again.

I mean, you must not have even looked for this - these settings have worked (and well) for me for the past three years, at least - but then again, you comment was pretty much a troll anyway - "Apple does this and does that, they suck!"

printf

[andreyvul]

who uses "%" instead of typing "percentage"? printf and friends, definitely printf("%d years old\n", x) vs printf("precent years old\n", x)

Re:Dtrace (wrong topic name)

[melikamp]

+Insightful? How deliciously ironic...

Sometimes I think that I read Slashdot just for the mods.

apple lockin

[TheRealZeus]

next thing you know, you're gonna tell me m$ is practicing lockin too!

No.

[warrax_666]

It's either "X Window System" or just plain "X".

Re:No.

[BeanThere]

Thank you, finally, someone got it right. It's NOT "X Windows" or "X Window", "OS X" cannot be referred to as "X", and the "X Window System" is only either that, or "X". I can't believe how many people on /. seem to be confused about this, if you don't even know this, you don't belong on /., really, you should all be handing in your nerd cards ..

Open your eyes apple fanbois

[GISGEOLOGYGEEK]

Since when has Microsoft's mistakes and bad practices ever stopped Apple from making mistakes and excersizing bad practices?

You're just a blind apple fanboi if you don't see it.

Re:Open your eyes apple fanbois

[Jesus_666]

Sure, Apple has done a lot of nonsense and/or evil. This is not an example of that, however. As many posts and indeed TFA itself point out, this is neither evil nor even secret. It's a Webkit-internal hack to reproduce what a public API does for legacy apps that don't use that API but link to Webkit, because otherwise those apps could get performance issues. The Firefox team has already implemented the public API and Firefox is blazing fast now. TFA itself even comments on how /. overreacted.

Sorry, but this one doesn't go to you.

mmmmmm

[EdelFactor19]

smells like fanboy

a. if this was MS you'd be screaming bloody murderb.
b. you are telling me that your beloved apple is putting experimental code on our machines? or code that might be experimental? I call bs... if they created an API they would have tested it,

for the sake of comedy lets pretend this was a new dish for the menu at a restaurant... the convo would go something like this
"hey johnny try this new dish i cooked up, its fantastic but ummm.. it may or may not contain dog feces"
"well which is it?"
"I can't remember, can you just taste and tell me what you think?"
"I have a better idea, lets just start selling this to customers and let them tell us"
"fine, but we gotta figure it out so i can make more"
sniffs
"whatever just play it safe and use half as much feces as you think you may have used and we'll see if anyone complains"

yeah im guessing that would go over real well with consumers...

Re:mmmmmm

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

a. if this was MS you'd be screaming bloody murder

That could just be because pretty much everyone here screams bloody murder whenever MS puts a toe out of line.

From the article...

[danhuby]

"Edit: Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do."

Slashdot editors - can we drop the sensationalist titles/summaries and stick to reporting the facts?

Dan

Re:From the article...

[bestinshow]

I agree. The title is libellous, and Slashdot did choose to publish it. I am astounded that the article is still here, uncorrected, so many hours after it was published, and with so many corrections - even forcing the article to have to be altered to point out how wrong Slashdot was.

The Slashdot article is a troll. The linked article is completely different in meaning, although it does equate Safari with the OS level component of Webkit. Webkit, as an OS level component, can surely use private OS APIs to do its thing! I mean, OS level components have to build upon stuff within the OS, right?

Mods need to RTFA too

[Derosian]

Looks like a lot of people in high places actually didn't read the article. spikedLemur is among those who didn't read the article or intentionally exaggerated it out of proportion...

apple can't afford to do this

[howlingmadhowie]

apple may have enough fanbois which buy any new product apple makes, but that isn't really enough in apple's world. the company needs to expand and for that reason i don't think apple can afford to be too unfriendly to software writers.

it is nevertheless amusing what happens with closed-source software.

Tying

[Per Abrahamsen]

And is that the answer to everything is it? No, it is the answer to the very specific question of when "tying" is not acceptable.

They can do anything that they feel like purely because they are not the dominant player... That is an incredible stupid opinion that must be attributed solely to you, as it was neither stated not implied by the original poster. As an extreme example of the monumentally stupidity of your stated position, sending out assassins against your competitors is both illegal and unethical quite independtly on your market position.

so all of Microsoft's underhanded playing early on when they weren't the dominant player is all excusable too is it? If they had been tying their screen saver and their basic interpreter that would have been stupid, but mainly hurting themselves. Just like it would be stupid for Apple to make it harder for third party browsers to run on their platform, but mainly hurting Apple itself.

It was not stupid for Microsoft to put the competitors to MS Office at a disadvantage on MS Windows 95, it was the second most brilliant business decision they have ever made. [ The most brilliant being their cheap non-exclusive license of QDOS to IBM. ]
But it was, or should have been, illegal.

It's ridiculous to try and use this insane rationale in regards to any company that's not Microsoft. At what point do you then start going 'well, actually I've decided they have enough market share now, NOW they should be ethical'

What's the fuss about?

[gilesjuk]

Apple isn't the dominant platform.

Apple haven't integrated Safari into the desktop.

Safari can be removed.

Apple aren't trying to kill off Netscape :)

Undocumented does not necessarily mean secret, commercial companies have timescales.

Safari is based on open source software.

Re:What's the fuss about?

[pandrijeczko]

Apple isn't the dominant platform.

And for that we can be truly thankful!

Apple haven't integrated Safari into the desktop.

Safari can be removed.

So can a veruca - I just wouldn't want one in the first place.

Apple aren't trying to kill off Netscape :)

Nobody killed off Netscape, it died because it wasn't innovating and fell behind.

Undocumented does not necessarily mean secret, commercial companies have timescales.

No, commercial companies have IP and profit interests - documentation might be deemed counterproductive to those two interests.

Safari is based on open source software.

Therefore, by assumption, since Safari itself isn't Open Source, then it's probably violated a license somewhere.

Re:What's the fuss about?

[tokul]

As in http://www.apple.com/safari/

The fastest, blazing performance and 2 times faster

There is nothing about "we use unstable internal libraries to make sure that our browser tops in benchmarks". Oh. We really don't like it, but take a look at browser benchmarks on our front page.

Re:What's the fuss about?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

There is nothing about "we use unstable internal libraries to make sure that our browser tops in benchmarks".

Is it too much to ask that you RTFA, or at least one of the dozens of postings from the original blogger? Safari does not use an undocumented, internal API. Webkit does use an internal API so that all applications that use it will get better performance than Applications that don't set a parameter that is in a documented API. A default system library using an internal API is not exactly uncommon. The person who wrote the original comment made a mistake and thought that he had to set a parameter globally for all cocoa applications, instead of setting it for just Firefox. So now he knows and isn't using the internal API because it is not needed to gain the same benefit.

Re:What's the fuss about?

[tokul]

"We don't like it" is from comments in TFB.

I used to like slashdot

[supertsaar]

But its getting harder and harder.

Re:Dtrace

[Angostura]

As a bit of Mac Fanboy, I have ti say that these do work just fine. And yet, and yet... it seems somehow inelegant that the only inbuilt way to tell the system not to use application Z is to launch application Z and change a setting. I would find a Prefpane approach much more desireable.

Not a big issue, just a niggle.

Slashdot seems to have picked up on this

[stevenp]

"Edit: Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do."

This pretty clearly sums it up.

MS

[LKM]

Newsflash: MS is doing the same thing.

The code itself isn't experimental, but the interface to it may not yet be something suitable for general adaption.

Re:MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash:When MS does it - BAD
When Apple does it - EXCUSES

Re:MS

[LKM]

MS does do it. Yet I don't see an article called "Windows secretly cripples non-Microsoft Software" on Slashdot, now do I?

So Apple provide a plist function for this ...

[bestinshow]

Wait, I read the article, and Apple have exposed it, you set an entry in the .plist file for the application.

That's not a hidden API.

Sure, Safari itself calls a hidden OS API to do the same thing, but it's not like Firefox had to hack around it. The plist entry was documented by Apple. The end result is the same.

This isn't like exposing slow libraries to third parties, and using fast special APIs for your own apps with no documented way for third party apps to achieve the same end effect, like Microsoft.

For what I know about Apple, they don't like exposing libraries/OS functions to end users until they are extremely happy that they'll stay stable. *mumbles something deprecating about operating systems that change the core OS ABI between releases to thwart certain classes of applications*

Intresting to see the fanboys in action

[SmallFurryCreature]

The editors should really do a social experiment once with a story like this. Contact the original author and for a day fake a story like this and make it sound like it is about MS instead. Note who makes what kind of post, reveal the truth that the story was about Apple after all and then make each and every post eat his words.

Now offcourse there are differences, Apple isn't a monopoly for one, but I see a lot more people attempting to find excuses then if the picture had been about Billy Borg.

Undocumented API's are a hell, every programmer knows this, if nothing else they are an indication that the stuff you are working with is a bloody mess. Trust me on this, as far as I can follow the story between all the bending over backwards to appease the mighty Jobs, it is "just" a case of there being two API's, the official one that is supported and is the nice and proper, if a bit slower, method available to all 3rd party developers who program directly for the system, and the undocumented method that you can use if you use Apples own tools.

Oh dear god I come across that in the past, it is perfectly understandable, you often have to deal with legacy code even when you really want to get rid of it, you then write a new API but have to keep the old one around for backwards compatibilty and then find users who still use it. Still, it smells a lot of what MS has pulled in the past and I seen nothing but wishfull thinking that proofs Apple was completly in the clear when they did this.

Not that it really matters, Apple ain't big enough to abuse a monopoly, but it is still intresting to see Fanboys in action.

I pretty much agree with one sentiment from the original article, with opensource none of this would be possible. You can't have hidden stuff in the open.

Re:Intresting to see the fanboys in action

[Shados]

Apple ain't big enough to a buse a monopoly, and when MS started doing that, they weren't yet a total monopoly either. (and not convicted of it, either).

Jobs' wet dream is to be Microsoft. He does the same things, use the same strategies, comfy with the idea that as long as he doesnt reach his goal, he can't be sued for it.

Re:Intresting to see the fanboys in action

[yogibeaty]

Too bad you haven't read TFA. Let's try one more time:

It's not an undocumented API. It's an alternate way to handle a possible problem, that it self could lead to further problems. Apple has documented all this.

You are an opensource troll.

OK, now?

Slashdot Pressure

[superbrose]

I think one of the main reasons acronyms are frequently used on slashdot boils down to the pressure of posting a slashdot comment as early as possible.

After all, the longer it takes to post a comment, the more comments it will be competing with and the chances of it being read (modded up) dwindle.

In fact, even if this was a great comment by now the chances of it reaching +5 Insightful are pretty slim.

Maybe great late comments do deserve more generous attention though.

Re:Slashdot Pressure

[kelnos]

In fact, even if this was a great comment by now the chances of it reaching +5 Insightful are pretty slim. Oh, the irony. Let's add that one to the long list of "things to put in your post to guarantee getting modded up."

Re:Slashdot Pressure

[magus_melchior]

This is precisely why I switch to 0/Flat/Newest-first when I'm given mod points.

Context? Bah, that's what the "Parent" link is for.

That's how it used to be

[amake]

The settings for default browser, mail app, and perhaps chat app were all found in a prefpane prior to 10.3(?). Personally I agree that the settings should at least also be available in a prefpane, but word on the street is that when they surveyed users, about half of people wanted them in a prefpane, and the other half thought they should be in the apps themselves.

I recommend RCDefaultApp if you want a prefpane with similar (and more!) functionality.

Bullshit, ask the original firefox blogger:

[slashbart]

On the Firefox blog Vladimir writes:

Edit: Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do.

His finding is that there is a beamsync synchronization, which can possible cause rapidly updating displays to slow down. There are some yet undocumented calls in the Webkit library that allows software to deal with beamsync.

Re:Dtrace

[amb1978]

Well it turns out that to launch Mail you have to configure it. So what's the point of using another mail client for the regular Joe, if he has already configured Mail? I'm considering running linux on my mac lately...

Can't read the article

[MrMickS]

Sure it may be cool to have grey writing over a dark grey/black background, but its certainly not very user friendly. I started reading the article by highlighting each paragraph in turn so that I could see the words. After two paragraphs though I thought "What am I doing? If someone wants me to read their writing its up to them to make it easy to read". Perhaps the mistake I made was trying to read it in Firefox!

Re:Dtrace (wrong topic name)

[bestinshow]

Wow, thanks. I've been wondering how to get Adium to open links in Firefox instead of Safari for *ages*. That certainly could be made easier to manage - although I think Firefox should have had an option itself to make it the default web application, rather than having to set it from within Safari.

Agreed

[p.rican]

FTFA:

Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do.

newspeak?

[airdrummer]

same mentality that considers a smaller-than-previous increase to be a cut in benefits:-}

Firefox vs. Konqueror on Linux

[CarpetShark]

Firefox is slow compared to Konqueror on Linux too, and KDE's APIs and code are completely open. Taken with the fact that the firefox folks are complaining about undocumented APIs that bypass design features not being available for long-term use (which is somewhere between an argument that needs more evidence, and an argument that's just crazy), I'd say this is a case of the firefox folks being pissed that their hugely bloated GUI+threading+web+ftp+mail client is slow by design.

(this was posted in firefox btw... well, Iceweasel actually... so I'm not as biased as you might think, just calling it as I see it.)

Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[Futurepower(R)]

Quote from the article:

"Edit: Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do."

Slashdot has a reputation: "Slashdot ... in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post."

It amazes me that, after all these years, Slashdot editors still apparently do not do any research before they post the stories. That has reduced the value of Slashdot as an advertising medium enormously.

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[ivan256]

On the contrary, had the headline not been so sensational, they would have attracted far fewer viewers to the new ad-laden comments section of this particular article. I think the editors have struck a balance between pissing people off enough to get them to click the story, and not pissing them off enough to leave (you're still here, after all).

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[Lumpy]

Why? it works fantastically for Fox-News on cable. they go for the sensational inaccurate reporting for viewiership and accuracy dead last. It's highly effective to the point that they are doing great.

Slashdot is better because of all the bitching and discussion afterwards on how it's inaccurate.

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[jc42]

Slashdot has a reputation: "Slashdot ... in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post."

So does this mean that slashdot has graduated to MainStream Media status? Rob and Taco now qualify as professional journalists?

What's the Web coming to?

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[daffmeister]

Slashdot editors still apparently do not do any research before they post the stories. That has reduced the value of Slashdot as an advertising medium enormously.

You've researched that have you?

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are ads on slashdot? What are you, a Safari user?

I can live with a browser performance hit if it means no ads...

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[corbettw]

It amazes me that, after all these years, Slashdot editors still apparently do not do any research before they post the stories. That has reduced the value of Slashdot as an advertising medium enormously. Pullitzer and Hearst disagree with you.

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[gad_zuki!]

>On the contrary, had the headline not been so sensational

Exactly. Lets face it, this is the People magazine of the tech world. Its rumors, sensationalism, gossip, etc. I like slashdot because its fun and goofy, but its far from respectable and nothing near journalism.

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[KingSkippus]

Slashdot is better because of all the bitching and discussion afterwards on how it's inaccurate.

That's not true!

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[wall0159]

"the new ad-laden comments section"

ad-laden?

(no I don't use safari - I use firefox with ad-block!)

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[jake_fehr]

"Finding the OS X Turbo Button" != "Mac OS X Secretly Cripples Non-Apple Software"

Do you see the context difference here Soulskill? How could you post misleading garbage like this? Posts like these are exactly why Slashdot's reputation isn't what it should be.

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[jmorris42]

> So does this mean that slashdot has graduated to MainStream Media status?

Nah, they still have a way to fall. They are still just misunderstanding things. When they start deciding what the story will be and going forth to find some facts to support it they will be getting close. But to reach NYT levels of 'journalism' they will need to start just reaching up their asses and pulling stories out. But the most important part of 'professional journalism' isn't in the reporting, it is in knowing what NOT to report. The very best lies are ones of omission, not commission, and thus very immune from criticism.

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[FrameRotBlues]

Slashdot has ads? Really? I've never seen them. I thought funding for this site came from a cranky old rich guy who was pissed at corporate America, political America, and half the entertainment industry.

[Thank You, ABP!]

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary, had the headline not been so sensational, they would have attracted far fewer viewers to the new ad-laden comments section of this particular article. I think the editors have struck a balance between pissing people off enough to get them to click the story, and not pissing them off enough to leave (you're still here, after all).

Except that because of the shitty editor behavior, the quality of comments and story submissions has plummeted over the past 5 years.

Five years ago, this was one of the best places to learn about new technologies. There was so much good information in the comments that it could take an hour to wade through all that information. There were at least half a dozen stories worth reading per day. It's well below that number for the past few years.

Now I typically just set my filter to 5 and only glance through the comments.

(Anon -- because this is completely off-topic.)

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[Rary]

It amazes me that, after all these years, Slashdot editors still apparently do not do any research before they post the stories.

You seem to be under the false impression that Slashdot is a news site. Unfortunately, this is a common mistake.

Slashdot is a discussion site. The articles are merely a seed -- a relatively unimportant seed, as evidenced by the number of people who don't read them. This is why I personally think they should do away with the "off-topic" mod. Whatever we, the slashdottians, decide to talk about is the topic.

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[Darinbob]

Slashdot does seem to have a bad record of filtering their front-page stories. There are a few gems now and then and a few genuinely informative pieces of news that I catch here, but seem to become rarer over time. Are editors just choosing stories because they seem "hot"?

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[ivan256]

It seems more likely to me that over the last five years you've learned enough about technology to realize how poor of a place is to come to learn about it.

This site is flamewars and geek-porn, and the occasional nugget of wisdom. Always has been.

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[kelnos]

I agree with the blog author's interpretation, not Slashdot's, but still... the blog author's opinion of Apple's intentions and whether or not they're "crippling" other apps isn't the be-all end-all of opinions. If Slashdot's editors have formed a different, harsher (more sensational) opinion, it's perfectly within their right to do so.

And anyone who considers Slashdot real journalism is sorely deluded (yep, there's *my* opinion).

Re:Slashdot ... has completely misunderstood...

[wealthychef]

ad-laden? Yes, he's Bin's brother.

Netscape Navigator similarities

[Crock23A]

Wasn't there a similar situation where MS crippled Netscape so people would be more likely to use Internet Explorer?

Re:Netscape Navigator similarities

[multipartmixed]

> Wasn't there a similar situation where MS crippled Netscape
> so people would be more likely to use Internet Explorer?

You mean the one where IE4 did a better job implementing W3C DOM and CSS specs than Navigator 4 did?

Whoops!

Re:Netscape Navigator similarities

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Wasn't there a similar situation where MS crippled Netscape so people would be more likely to use Internet Explorer?

Yes the DoJ ruled Microsoft guilty of criminal antitrust abuse in that regard. The difference being MS was legally determined to have a monopoly on desktop operating systems, and the only thing Apple is close to having a monopoly on is portable, digital music players. So for Apple, this is annoying third party developers, while for MS it was criminal. I guess that means Apple won't have to donate to election campaigns in order to get a free pass on breaking the law.

Not really much of an issue

[kellyb9]

I, for one, despise Macs almost as much as I hate their fanboys. I remember the day before X-mas I went to the mall and saw people lined up to go into the Mac store, and I just wanted to walk up and let every one of them know that they were douchbags for just not going to the online store. Now that I've let you know my absolute hatred for all things Jobs. I don't really see much of an issue here. Apple is simply taking advantage of their OS to improve the functionality of their browser. I know they do this in the MS realm constantly. I wonder why the Firefox team doesn't go after them for this practice?

Re:Not really much of an issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for clearing up that one for me.

The fact that only gay men and art students buy Apple Macs never quite added up to the number of the damned things being sold - now I know the remainder of the buyers are "douchbags", that clarifies it.

Re:Not really much of an issue

[Beefslaya]

Maybe when you grow up and quit your job of writing VB logon scripts and answering printer service calls, you might be able to afford a Mac and begin to understand why people stand in line.

Your opinion about Job's shouldn't have anything to do with the quality of their products.

He may be a CockGoblin...but that doesn't change the culture he created within Apple to produce such high quality products.

Re:Not really much of an issue

[kellyb9]

wow - why so much malice? my opinion had nothing to do with the quality of their products. I really don't like their business model personally. But thats besides the point, I could make 6 figures and still have trouble keeping up with the prices of their products.

Re:Not really much of an issue

[revscat]

wow - why so much malice?

Because you're an asshole?

I remember the day before X-mas I went to the mall and saw people lined up to go into the Mac store, and I just wanted to walk up and let every one of them know that they were douchbags for just not going to the online store.

News flash: people are social animals. They like to be around other people. Another news flash: you don't know why they went to the store, and to assume that they are all douchebags for choosing to do so makes you a douchebag, not them.

Sounds familiar...

[ilitirit]

OS X ain't done til Firefox wont run

Nice post.

[Xocet_00]

"Jobs won't sell it to you until he's sure it rocks."

This is one of the most enlightening things I've read here in a while. I've never understood why people get so attached to the Mac platform. Macs have build-quality issues (for example) like any other brand, but I suppose I can see how Apple fans buy because they know that they're getting a product that, at the very least, Apple is sure is awesome. I've never really gotten the foaming-at-the-mouth fan-boy thing for ANY brand, but this at least explains some of the brand loyalty for Macs.

"So the next time you feel the need to abuse someone just because they use a Mac, ask yourself instead why you hate that they use the Mac. What difference does it make to you?"

While I don't go out of my way to abuse Mac users, I do find myself getting defensive around Mac users by default, which I suppose can lead to a sort of abuse-in-retribution. My desktop is a assembled-at-home affair, and my laptop is a Dell XPS, and both run Windows Vista Ultimate. The laptop (Dell + Vista) is like wearing a bullseye on my forehead when Mac users are around, and I'm constantly berated by "Mac-heads" over my choice of computer and operating system.

Of course, the Dell machine I use was virtually the *only* discrete graphics option in the 12.1" formfactor at the time that I bought it, and Windows affords me the opportunity to take advantage of that hardware (in the form of gaming). Now, to be fair, I could game in Linux, and I have. However in windows I can easily do things like undervolt my processor, overclock my video card and, in the end, get the maximum amount of gaming and battery performance out of my tiny, under-powered machine.

The point is that I take crap from a number of Mac users for not using a brand that doesn't have a machine in its lineup that meets my needs! The Macbook and Macbook Air, while both relatively small (although still bigger than an M1210) don't have discrete graphics. That's the end of the story for me. If they offered an option that suited me, I'd consider it.

Now, one could argue (and some of my Mac using friends have) that they abuse "PC" users because PC users abuse them. In the end this may just be a chicken/egg thing.

What I don't get it why people can't just be happy letting people choose for themselves. I absolutely approve of giving, say, a Linux Live CD to someone who has never tried it, and I've converted a number of friends to Linux even though I don't use it much myself. Exposing people to new options is admirable. Abusing them for their choices is not.

Sorry, this ended up coming off as more of a rant than an insightful comment.

But they must publish their code!

[GNUPublicLicense]

Indeed their OS is GPL, isn't??? Ah... hu... no BSD license.... hum... again I know why I code GPL/LGPL software...

Wow, good writing from Apple!

[Futurepower(R)]

Wow.

What I noticed is that the article to which you linked is so much better written than anything I've seen from Microsoft.

(I'm mostly ignorant about the issues being discussed.)

Another Friday afternoon....

[Anonymous Coward]

...and another long row of bare-arsed Apple fanbois spreading their cheeks ready to be shafted by Steve's huge barbed member.

Good point.

[Futurepower(R)]

"Instead they became a monopoly by using dirty and underhanded marketing practices such as product tying where a company buying a PC would get a free copy of Word so that the company would then have no reason to buy the rival WordPerfect."

Excellent point.

Another way Microsoft killed WordPerfect was not stopping piracy. I don't know about now, but there was a time when it seemed that every PC was offered with Microsoft Word for $50 extra.

That doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple can't really do that because the following is what will happen:

(1) Apple publishes the SPIs with all sorts of warnings and disclaimers about how they might change, how the apps should not rely on them exclusively, etc.

(2) App developers read the docs and start using the SPIs in their apps. Some developers use them without even reading or comprehending the warnings. After a year or so, there are a bunch of apps out there that depend on these SPIs.

(3) Apple now does as promised and announces that they are going to change the functionality. Some developers don't notice; some developers have gone out of business. Some developers change their use of the SPIs, but the old version of their app is deployed on thousands of people's machines and those people have no intention of upgrading or patching their apps.

(4) Apple releases the new version of OS X that breaks the old SPI behaviour. People start installing it. Their apps that depend on the old behaviour of the SPI don't work anymore, or start to crash or act funny when they do certain things in them.

(5) Message boards around the world are filled with people complaining that the new version of OS X is buggy and unstable and makes their applications crash. Idiot users send their Macs back to Apple for unnecessary repairs. Apple gets egg on face and has to roll out a patch restoring the SPI behaviour to the way it was before, and disabling their new stuff that depends on the new behaviour.

In practice: Once you publish an API of any kind, and application developers start relying on it, you can [b]never change it[/b]. At most, you can extend it in some backwards-compatible fashion. Exposing your internal data structures is a very bad idea because of this... after you do that, you will never be able to change them without breaking other people's badly-written apps and being blamed for it.

Re:That doesn't work.

[dgatwood]

Why was this AC modded down? I wouldn't have been quite so melodramatic or called people "idiots", but... yeah, that's exactly what would happen. In fact, it sometimes happens with Mac OS X in spite of Apple telling people not to use SPIs....

Take for example the case of the "haxies". They use SPIs and internal knowledge of data structures all over the place and the result is breakage with each OS release. Older versions of one very popular such hack kit did not contain version checks to notice OS upgrades and disable the hacks on newer OSes, and as a result, when Leopard came out, a whole lot of people who had installed these hacks found themselves unable to boot as far as Finder.

Did those people scream at the hack vendor? Well, some of them did. Many, however, screamed "Leopard sucks" on the Apple message boards, as they couldn't even contemplate how a hack that their son/daughter had installed two years earlier without telling them could cause the OS not to boot. Granted, that was a really extreme case, but the point remains. Of course, eventually, these people got back up and running again (usually involving them booting single-user and nuking the hacks), but it still caused a bad experience for an awful lot of users. Imagine if Apple didn't tell people not to use the SPIs....

Fair is fair

[elrous0]

Well, the EU and pretty much everyone on /. seems to think *Microsoft* is sitting together in a room saying that.

But what about...

[M-RES]

Safari on Windows? Is that the same... and is that why it's so fast?

Not the same thing

[joeyblades]

Using proprietary, unadvertised API hooks to give Safari a competitive edge is not the same thing as targeting competitors specifically.

Apple is not obligated to give everyone externally the same information that they have internally.

Summary is a troll

[BeanThere]

The article has been updated with this:

"Edit: Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do."

Answer in here, boys

[bill_mcgonigle]

This use of an undocumented API was to ensure that third party developers who incorporated Webkit into their applications didn't experience slow-down issues with Webkit due to frame rate syncing.

Thanks. This is the first comment I've seen that actually explains the issue well enough to understand what's going on. I think oldhack was in the same confused boat as me.

Not so Sekret

[Laerien]

Apple apparently is terrible at keeping secrets, since they thoroughly http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/Drawing/Articles/FlushingContent.htmldocument the performance issue, explain why it exists, and layout ways to avoid it.

If your program displays animated content, because it is a game or other multimedia-based application, your code should avoid updating your window content faster than the screen refresh rate. Drawing content to your local window buffer and flushing that content to the screen at more than 30 frames per second is usually a waste of CPU time. Most users cannot perceive updates at rates greater than 30 frames per second, so flushing more frequently is rarely needed. Changes introduced in Mac OS X v10.4 to eliminate visual "tearing" and other display artifacts are also likely to cause performance problems in code that flushes too frequently. . . . To avoid performance problems, you should never draw or flush your window buffers faster than the screen refresh rate. If you typically draw your content and then immediately flush it to the screen, you can use timers to notify your code when it is time to draw. Simply set a timer to fire at the same frequency as the screen refresh rate and have it call your drawing routine. As Vladimir points out, this is no conspiracy.

Mod Parent Up

[magical_mystery_meat]

Most useful post I've read on here in a while.

Buried...

[Cycline3]

Buried as inaccurate.

Re:Dtrace

[Tjp($)pjT]

Wow. ... No programming required. [Command-I] [fan-I] (or the little key with an apple. press that and I at the same time) That brings up the info for the selected item. If you select a file and bring up info for it notice the section that says "Open with" ... play there. really... no programming required just mousing. And you can set it for that particular file only, which Windows can't do. Or you can change the default for all files that are the same. Really easy. And again no programming required.

And as far as it is useful yes I am a Premium Apple Dev subscriber, and have done Apple / Mac software development since Lightspeed C days. (Think C's predecessor) So again. Apple is just nicer to play with on the dev side. And For your particular nit, really and truly no programming is required. As far as access to the beta's ... Well MS beta program has shafted me more times than not. I'll gladly pay the small amount for a "Select" Apple dev membership if I drop the Premium one sometime. And Apple does have downloads of some beta's for free "online" dev members. So ad hominum attack aside. Apple allows a GUI user to change defaults not just for opening a whole set of files to open with a different program, but allows setting an individual file to open with a program different than the default. All from the GUI in case I have not been clear enough. Oh yes! English is my native language.

Thanks for the use of "dood" over "dude" but I am really not a close friend that that implies. As far as MYOB at launch ... I have to laugh. They can't pay the $3500 (and on sale every year for $2500) to be a Apple Premium Developer site ... WOW! I get betas much sooner as a paid Apple Dev (even when I was a Select) than MS puts out.

Because documented APIs are the stable one

[chrysalis]

In any library or operating system, there is undocumented stuff. Why? Because those APIs are internals APIs. They might have public interfaces, but if the developers see them as moving targets, they won't document them and provide documented wrappers. In their own apps, they can use the undocumented shortcuts because if the API changes, they will be easily able to adapt their software. Third parties want stable APIs, even if they are wrappers against faster APIs. This is what is documented. Documenting the lower-level APIs would be bad, it would introduce too much breakage if anything changes after an OS upgrade.

Remember the World of Warcraft rant?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Whenever someone brings up Slashdot's journalistic integrity, I'm reminded of CmdrTaco's World of Warcraft rant from a few years ago, Blizzard Made Me Change My Name. An entire 12-paragraph article because Blizzard made him change his name for using a title in it (Cmdr), which is against the naming rules. That CmdrTaco thought it was news, or that he felt so slighted that he thought he'd "strike back" at Blizzard by posting an article about it on Slashdot because he's CmdrTaco of Slashdot, gosh-darned it, just really showed me how immature and lame this site is.

The headline "Mac OS X Secretly Cripples Non-Apple Software" will go out on all the feeds. A lot of people won't even read the article. They'll look at it and say "See, typical tyrannical Apple." They may skim the summary and head straight for the comments. And they will be unknowingly misinformed.

obligatory reference once again

[Yvan256]

"But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
- Douglas Adams

for the downmodders

[clang_jangle]

No silly, this is a troll:

Easier to mod me down than to prove me wrong. :)

flawed

[EdelFactor19]

you have the whole monopoly thing wrong...
It is not illegal to be a monopoly; they exist. Get over it
It is illegal to engage in monopolistic practices.
By definition this kind of activity is exactly that.

mac uses the "secret hooks" to make a first product that is sufficiently better than the third party can possibly create. Then even if they do publish the 'secret hooks' and the 3rd party adopts, its too late because everyone is already hooked on the built in and already existing first party version
Apple is doing with safari the exact same thing that Microsoft did with IE. The fact that safari is a good browser and is infinitely better than IE could ever dream to be is irrelevant in terms of the principles involved. They want to test the "SPI?" ok go write a BETA or use your test team or hire one. When the product you are selling encompasses that very thing you are taking a competitive advantage.

the real problem here is that you have a vertical monopoly waiting to happen, Apple makes the hardware, and they make the os and the software and can do whatever they want to keep anyone else out. in actuality there really isnt anything wrong with that because if you dont like it you will use or develop something else. Microsoft is sorta in the same boat, but they dont make the hardware (i dont count mouse and keyboards as hardware for sake of discussion and they barely pass the you can kick it test anyhow).
more so the problem is that more and more what is being advertised as "the OS" is not the OS but is instead SOFTWARE... newsflash itunes is not osX and its not part of osX; its a piece of software that runs on osX... the same goes for iphoto and garageband and safari etc.... They are bundled software; good bundled software, but bundled software nonetheless. As long as apple continues to offer such large advantages to first party development you're not going to see as much commercial software target osX because every developer could take the rationale "i can make it, but theyll just clone it, use secret hooks to be faster and then embed it into the operating system to keep me out of business" It happens everyday.

bigger question: if apples software is so great why wont they release more versions of their software for windows and linux hmm? garageband for windows, garageband on linux.... I'd love to see iTunes on linux and finally be able to play m4p and itunes store purchased files on linux not to mention GOOD and Safe ipod support thats consistent when used on both linux/win/osX

Private Frameworks vs. Frameworks since NeXTSTEP 1

[tyrione]

You people truly should try working at Apple with how NeXT develops their APIs. It hasn't changed. When at NeXT we had people testing pre-release bits they would often want to try stuff that would break and this is good. We didn't give them untested PrivateFrameworks without sanitizing them for several release cycles and then we staggered the testing on a priority basis. This isn't a conspiracy folks ala Microsoft trying to shut a free browser out of the market.

Now that Mozilla realizes it has to follow the approach Safari/WebKit is doing in several embedded markets they are complaining when they switch to Cocoa?

I tell you what. Actually release a Pure Cocoa App for Firefox and then we'll talk. Show me you have managed to clean up those famous memory object retain/release [ObjC lingo] bugs that turn your browser into a memory hog and then we'll talk.

And while you're at it, contact Xorg and help them figure the same issue out because Xorg 7.3.x on Debian turns into a memory hog > 1GB after one has roughly 20-25 intensive window views whether it's via GTK+/GNOME or KDE or Qt specific apps.

Why is this still on Slashdot in this way?

[Clanger]

Shortly after this was first posted it became clear that there's no story here. The original proposition is just a misunderstanding. Yet, here we are 4 days later and the story still appears under an inflammatory headline accusing Apple of systematic deceit of its partners, Microsoft style. It will be quoted by all sorts of "analysts" as dishonest FUD. Slashdot must know this and should have corrected the silly headline at the very least. Failing to do so creates the impression that Slashdot will publish any old nonsense if it drives up the clicks. That devalues Slashdot a lot.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It's been done before!

[obeythefist]

Damn M$, I hate them, always screwing the little guys! Didn't they get done in court for doing stuff like this? Now they're at it again, putting hidden APIs in Windows so that Safa... oh wait...

Re:Apple hates developers

[rtechie]

Call me a troll all you want, I'm just relating my experiences with Apple developer support. Two different companies I worked for gave up trying to port apps to MacOSX for this very reason.