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Comment by nhojb | Hacker News Reader

I've been a professional macOS developer for almost 20 years now and I can't tell you the number of times that this has been an issue.

With no access (or ability to patch) the platform source code you are left with a) hacky work-arounds, b) re-implement the component or c) change the app's design or feature to compensate. All of which are a pain / more work / risky etc, etc - just to work-around bugs in the platform.

Sure you can file radars (I do), but whether something gets fixed or not, is up to the gods...

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The same happens with html and browser bugs all the time.

If it's an open source browser (Firefox or Chromium-based) can't you submit a patch?

That is likely to be non-trivial to develop unless you’re very comfortable with large, complex C++ projects and then you have to convince them to accept and ship ship it. That’s better than not having the option but it’s not for the faint of heart.

Chromium — yeah, seems like not friendly towards outside contributors, and nobody has convinced Google to accept stuff they don't care about (JIT for unpopular CPUs, support for new windowing systems, video decoding acceleration APIs, …).

Mozilla? Getting your patches merged is rather easy and very pleasant. Firefox is truly a community project we all build together.

Sure, but this is a thread about how Linux is better than MacOS because you can modify Linux. Those same criticisms you have I think could apply to Linux too.

True. In my experience though, it tends to work out. If 100 people are affected by a bug it's a drop in the ocean in the grand scheme of things, but now you only need a 1 in 100 chance of someone being up to the task! And the others can help with info and testing along the way.

still have to care about Safari, where one man can prevent all communication to localhost for years. with no real reasons, breaking the spec.

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171934

That patch will likely take weeks or months to reach end users

Sure, but this is a thread about how Linux is better than MacOS because you can modify Linux. I think a Linux patch would take much longer to reach users. Modern browsers auto update frequently, but I don't think Linux users update Linux as frequently.

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