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

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?

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 These unpublished APIs were probably custom-built for Safari, and since Apple apparently has a wicked case of not-made-here, this is not a surprise.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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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: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...)

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!

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.