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Comment by 2trill2spill | Hacker News Reader

Apple has a serious software quality problem. Last night I was helping a friend with their computer. Safari couldn't even render apples website correctly. Nor could Safari connect to any site with HTTPS. Installed FireFox and HTTPS sites worked and apples's site renders. But the submit button on their developer site is broken[1]. Mail on my Mom's fully updated laptop crashes every time it's opened. Once I reported a bug in ptrace like 4 years ago and no response yet. Also the archive utility fails often to extract tar files that the tar command has no problem extracting at all. Quicktime can't play most videos, etc, etc. And now shipping an operating system with a root account with no password by default.

Come on Apple you have a quarter trillion dollars in the bank why don't you spend some on improving your software.

[1]: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/60763

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> Safari couldn't even render apples website correctly. Nor could Safari connect to any site with HTTPS.

Sounds like something's wrong with your friend's computer, because neither of those issues are reasonable to expect no matter what your opinion of Apple's software is.

> But the submit button on their developer site is broken

Given the number of people who've successfully gone through that form, I'm willing to bet it's a content blocker extension that's blocking some dependency the form needs.

> And now shipping an operating system with a root account with no password by default.

The OS actually ships with root disabled. The bug isn't that there's no password (after all, a factory-set password isn't any more secure), the bug is that the login form is somehow re-enabling the root user when it's not supposed to be able to do so.

> Sounds like something's wrong with your friend's computer, because neither of those issues are reasonable to expect no matter what your opinion of Apple's software is.

Doubtful Firefox and Chrome work just fine.

> Given the number of people who've successfully gone through that form, I'm willing to bet it's a content blocker extension that's blocking some dependency the form needs.

Brand new install of Mac OS on a new SSD. So Safari was clean no extensions, no custom configuration.

> The OS actually ships with root disabled. The bug isn't that there's no password (after all, a factory-set password isn't any more secure), the bug is that the login form is somehow re-enabling the root user when it's not supposed to be able to do so.

Mere semantics, It doesn't matter if root is being "reenabled" or not. From an attackers point of view High Sierra effectively ships with root with no password.

> Doubtful Firefox and Chrome work just fine.

That doesn't mean anything. It just means that whatever is messed up affects Safari. It's not like the computer recognizes "oh those 3 apps are all web browsers, therefore if I'm going to screw one of them up, I have to screw them all up". Your claim would carry more weight if you were listing multiple browsers that all use the same system-provided WebKit.framework, but Firefox and Chrome are completely separate browsing engines.

Regarding the HTTPS issue, I believe Firefox and Chrome maintain their own list of root certs, so one possible way the computer could be screwed up is having the system-managed root cert list be damaged (you didn't specify what actually happens when trying to connect to HTTPS sites so I don't know if this is actually a plausible cause in this particular case).

> Brand new install of Mac OS on a new SSD. So Safari was clean no extensions, no custom configuration.

Well I don't know what to tell you, except to point out that there's, what, hundreds of thousands of registered Apple developers now? who've all had to go through that form, and there's only a handful of people on that thread, so it's far more likely to be a local issue.

> That doesn't mean anything. It just means that whatever is messed up affects Safari. It's not like the computer recognizes "oh those 3 apps are all web browsers, therefore if I'm going to screw one of them up, I have to screw them all up". Your claim would carry more weight if you were listing multiple browsers that all use the same system-provided WebKit.framework, but Firefox and Chrome are completely separate browsing engines.

That fact that everything besides Safari works certainly means something and the fact that they have different rendering engines is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether a site renders in a browser or not.

> Well I don't know what to tell you, except to point out that there's, what, hundreds of thousands of registered Apple developers now? who've all had to go through that form, and there's only a handful of people on that thread, so it's far more likely to be a local issue.

Well that's just one example of dozens of people having that problem. Also I have successfully filled out that form my self in the past, as I am a registered apple developer. But just because large amounts of people can use the form successfully does not mean that there isn't a bug affecting other user's like my friend.

>neither of those issues are reasonable to expect no matter what your opinion of Apple's software is.

Neither is your password showing up in a password hint field (or anywhere for that matter... why is it even stored unhashed?).

Neither is logging in with a blank password enabling a disabled root user.

> Neither is your password showing up in a password hint field (or anywhere for that matter... why is it even stored unhashed?).

It's not stored unhashed. And the password hint field never showed the password, it always showed the password hint.

The bug was Disk Utility's UI was accidentally using the password field instead of the password hint field when passing the data to the underlying API.

> Neither is logging in with a blank password enabling a disabled root user.

Stupid and awful bug, sure, but I actually can understand it. Something that's worked fine for years breaks because of some change to some underlying system, and there weren't any existing tests to see what happens if you try and log in as root (root has been disabled by default for something like 15 years, so it doesn't surprise me that people don't test trying to log in with it).

But apple.com not rendering right in Safari? That doesn't make sense, you know damn well apple.com is basically designed to be viewed in Safari and everybody that works on it is going to be using Safari with it.

And Safari not being able to load HTTPS sites makes even less sense. That literally breaks most of the web. This has to be an issue with the local computer.

Paid $3,000 for an iMac. Can't even watch any video or have the kids FaceTime their grandparents because video freezes constantly. Rebooting fixes it...for 2 minutes.

Its not just Apple though. Microsoft had the similar problems in the past. Edge did not support silverlight causing people to move to other browser. It was strange to see Microsoft's own software not supported by Microsoft.

> Its not just Apple though. Microsoft had the similar problems in the past. Edge did not support silverlight causing people to move to other browser. It was strange to see Microsoft's own software not supported by Microsoft.

In my personal experience Windows has been much better than MacOS for me. I've been using Windows 7 for the last year at work and I'm having significantly less problems with Windows then MacOS. But Windows and MacOS both give me more problems then a FreeBSD or Linux box ever has.

> I'm having significantly less problems with Windows then MacOS.

I'm interested.. What kind of problems?

> But Windows and MacOS both give me more problems then a FreeBSD or Linux box ever has.

I switched from linux on the desktop to MacOs precisely because of the problems linux had - driver support, even LTS updates breaking functionality, and overall clunkiness. I run linux on all my servers.

Really? What driver support on a desktop were you experiencing?

I've run Linux mint on my desktop at home for a few years now and have had zero problems at all (Intel i5, Nvidia gfx, wired connection).

The last time I had driver issues with Linux was ~10 years ago and it was for a laptop running Ubuntu.

Windows 7 has been on the market since 2009 while High Sierra has been out since June of this year. I feel like we're not comparing apples to apples here.. I'm sure both companies are releasing security fixes consistently and Win7 has clearly had more of them in 8 years.

Silverlight was EOL'd five years ago.

Tell that to Dish Network.

It was partly a marketing thing, but Edge is not IE, and Edge has never supported any plugins (which Silverlight is).

Correction: Edge is Not-IE(-Not-At-All-Nooosir)

EdgeHTML sure has advanced a lot from Trident, and I appreciate their openness with Platform status, but Edge as a browser is still a joke IMO.

The other day I had to use vanilla Windows 10, and wanted to save a text file from Edge. Nope, there's no such functionality. The closest thing to save is print to PDF.

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