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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.
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?
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 These unpublished APIs were probably custom-built for Safari, and since Apple apparently has a wicked case of not-made-here, this is not a surprise.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.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
This is new news?? You'll notice its almost impossible too, to replace apple programs to default to other ones. Microsoft has Default program settings, Apple has nothing. Furthermore, Apple seems to want to cripple Java by maintaining only an old version, and have depreciated the Java-Cocoa bindings (or they may be gone by now) to try to force people to use Cocoa/Objective C instead it seems. You cant use Dtrace on their own programs, they break drivers constantly which aren't their own (Look at all the M-Audio stuff, constant breakage). Apple is no good, and I'm surprised this needed to make front page at all. It is old news!
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.
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?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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.
Your comment is garbage. You're thinking like a freshman at a second-rate school. Encapsulation (which is what you're talking about) is not something exclusive to object-oriented languages, or even object-oriented design, but a general principle of good program design.
What WebKit is doing is both unfair and bad code design -- it amounts to a layering violation. WebKit, be it written in Forth, Lisp, C or BASIC, should use the same APIs available to any other application.
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 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.
Did you say Apple is not a monopoly? Hell, they're more of a monopoly than Microsoft when you compare OS features, OSX has a lot more anti competitive applications/features built in.
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.
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.
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.
Vista has a terrible graphics viewer, where as OSX previews just about all file types right in the os.
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.
Apple controls the distro of their hardware, software, and even f'n accesories. Apple Store anyone? iPod liscensed accessories....
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.
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...)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
"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!
John Soward...University of Kentucky
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.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
The real story here is not Apple "crippling" software, but Apple "crippling" developers by not adequately documenting their interfaces. Lots of methods for Cocoa/Carbon are completely undocumented. If you ask Apple about them they tell you to go to hell. There are lots of method and prefs they didn't want to expose because they don't want to support them. So they'll patch in a fucntion or methods for an Apple app, like iLife, developers will ask "How do I do this thing iLife does?" and they'll tell you to read the docs, which don't actually document anything, before you go to hell.