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Universal and Native Apple Silicon Apps

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
Krubbadoo said:
I'm more a Firefox guy but thanks! Firefox is still on the slow side vs Safari
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I've personally always found Firefox slower than Chrome and Safari on both Intel and ARM.

Not sure if you saw my ninja edit but the Gecko engine used by Firefox is less secure than the Chromium engine in case that swings you any. If you are mistrusting of Google (perfectly understandably) there's many open source Chromium based browsers including some that have privacy features built right in, the most popular ones being Brave and Vivaldi.

At the moment I'm using Chrome just because Brave and Vivaldi don't have ARM builds yet.
 
Polly Mercocet said:
...the Gecko engine used by Firefox is less secure than the Chromium engine in case that swings you any...
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Got any sources for that? Browser security is less determined by rendering engine and more by Javascript engine, sandboxing, and privacy controls. None of which are dependent on the rendering engine.

That said, I'd argue that, at least on privacy, Chrome is the worst browser. You're better off with Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, or just Chromium if you want the Blink engine.

I'm prefer Firefox and have been running the Nightly version on my air without issues. I haven't noticed it to be appreciably slower than Safari except for when launched where it takes an extra bounce or two.
 
Krubbadoo said:
Are you running uBlock Origin without crashing on Nightly?
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Yeah, I haven't had any issues. I've got a number of extensions and customized stylesheet too, so if anyone were to crash, it would be me. Not sure what is causing yours to crash. Is it happening when trying to install the add-on or when launching the browser?
 
adderthorn said:
Got any sources for that? Browser security is less determined by rendering engine and more by Javascript engine, sandboxing, and privacy controls. None of which are dependent on the rendering engine.

That said, I'd argue that, at least on privacy, Chrome is the worst browser. You're better off with Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, or just Chromium if you want the Blink engine.

I'm prefer Firefox and have been running the Nightly version on my air without issues. I haven't noticed it to be appreciably slower than Safari except for when launched where it takes an extra bounce or two.
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Firefox has terrible sandboxing and this is largely what makes it so far behind in security.

The following is written by security expert Daniel Micay who is the developer behind GrapheneOS, a hardened version of Android that provides Google with many of the upstream security enhancements that eventually land in AOSP:

Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox runs as a single process on mobile and has no sandbox beyond the OS sandbox. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux, where it can hardly be considered a sandbox at all) and lacks support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole.
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Source: https://grapheneos.org/usage (command+f "firefox")

Most of that is focused on the mobile implantation but I've bolded towards the end where the desktop version is specifically mentioned.

It all paints a pretty bad picture of Firefox security when they're so sloppy they don't even implement sandboxing APIs provided by the OS.

The fact it's especially bad on Linux also leads me to wonder if it's equally as bad on macOS given they're both Unix systems. I'm sure they share at least some code. But I've not done enough digging to make any definitive statements on that.

Either way I would definitely go for a Chromium based browser over Firefox myself. I agree entirely Chrome is the worst for privacy. That's why I mentioned Brave and Vivaldi. Awaiting ARM builds for those.
 
Polly Mercocet said:
Firefox has terrible sandboxing and this is largely what makes it so far behind in security.

The following is written by security expert Daniel Micay who is the developer behind GrapheneOS, a hardened version of Android that provides Google with many of the upstream security enhancements that eventually land in AOSP:



Source: https://grapheneos.org/usage (command+f "firefox")

Most of that is focused on the mobile implantation but I've bolded towards the end where the desktop version is specifically mentioned.

It all paints a pretty bad picture of Firefox security when they're so sloppy they don't even implement sandboxing APIs provided by the OS.

The fact it's especially bad on Linux also leads me to wonder if it's equally as bad on macOS given they're both Unix systems. I'm sure they share at least some code. But I've not done enough digging to make any definitive statements on that.

Either way I would definitely go for a Chromium based browser over Firefox myself. I agree entirely Chrome is the worst for privacy. That's why I mentioned Brave and Vivaldi. Awaiting ARM builds for those.
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I asked the Brave developers (on the Brave community) when they are planning an ARM build. Crickets. I also don't see it listed on their planned features list. I hope they will get to it soon.
 
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RobbieTT said:
Ladies & gentlemen - this is the wiki thread for Universal & Apple Silicon apps. 😊
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Apologies, will stay on topic 🙂

badlydrawnboy said:
I asked the Brave developers (on the Brave community) when they are planning an ARM build. Crickets. I also don't see it listed on their planned features list. I hope they will get to it soon.
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This is a shame. I hope it's something they're looking at internally. Given Chrome has already got an ARM build it cannot exactly be difficult to port over the ARM Chromium engine and recompile for ARM. It should be something they can at the very least put out in beta form pretty quickly to be honest.
 
Polly Mercocet said:
Firefox has terrible sandboxing and this is largely what makes it so far behind in security...Either way I would definitely go for a Chromium based browser over Firefox myself. I agree entirely Chrome is the worst for privacy. That's why I mentioned Brave and Vivaldi. Awaiting ARM builds for those.
Click to expand...

That's what is great about choice. Brave (or whatever you usually prefer) is a good browser. I'm just so used to Firefox at this point and have customized it a lot that switching always feels weird.

RobbieTT said:
Ladies & gentlemen - this is the wiki thread for Universal & Apple Silicon apps. 😊
Click to expand...

Robbie, you're right, back on topic. Considering Chrome (and therefore Chromium) are ARM ready, I think it's only a matter of time before the other browsers based on it follow. I know Microsoft already committed an Edge build soon.
 
Just doing some quick google-fu, it looks like Brave has no ARM support at all for any desktop platform. Not for Windows or Linux.

Vivaldi already has ARM builds for Linux since 2017 so my money would be on Vivaldi being the first to come out with a native Apple Silicon build.

Which is just fine by me, Vivaldi is imo a better user experience. Still has built-in ad and tracker blocking and provides a non-Google Chromium browser but it also doesn't try to push a cryptocurrency based ad platform on you. Brave also has crypto ads on the default new tab page.
 
Spindel said:
OK
I can not get OneNote to run (rosetta version).

Does it work for anyone else?
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Are you getting any errors?

it ran perfectly fine for me with Rosetta. However, I have installed the beta which makes the OneNote and other apps run natively in M1. You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference though!
 
digitalbreak said:
Are you getting any errors?

it ran perfectly fine for me with Rosetta. However, I have installed the beta which makes the OneNote and other apps run natively in M1. You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference though!
Click to expand...
Yeah I get an error log, but it’s almost as if the app is still trying to run in intel mode (meaning rosetta translation failed).

Tried to remove and reinstall the app but same result. Now I’m not by the computer but tomorrow I’ll try to purge all associated files and reinstall it.
 
Spindel said:
Yeah I get an error log, but it’s almost as if the app is still trying to run in intel mode (meaning rosetta translation failed).

Tried to remove and reinstall the app but same result. Now I’m not by the computer but tomorrow I’ll try to purge all associated files and reinstall it.
Click to expand...

If I recall correctly, Rosetta 2 periodically recompiles apps. Have you tried attempting to trigger this with a reboot?

Or you can have a go at the native beta, if the alternative is something that doesn't work at all it'll surely be more stable 😉
 
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Spindel said:
Yeah I get an error log, but it’s almost as if the app is still trying to run in intel mode (meaning rosetta translation failed).

Tried to remove and reinstall the app but same result. Now I’m not by the computer but tomorrow I’ll try to purge all associated files and reinstall it.
Click to expand...

May be it’s time to start a new thread on your topic so we can keep this thread to the topic 🙂
 
Polly Mercocet said:
If I recall correctly, Rosetta 2 periodically recompiles apps. Have you tried attempting to trigger this with a reboot?

Or you can have a go at the native beta, if the alternative is something that doesn't work at all it'll surely be more stable 😉
Click to expand...

I've been using the beta of the office apps and they've all been super stable. Admittedly, I don't use OneNote very much, but Word and Excel (even with some crazy spreadsheets) have been solid.
 
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