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

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.