Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively
bugzilla.mozilla.org
bugzilla.mozilla.org
Depends on the app but some of them run faster in Rosetta than they do on comparable PC hardware.
Everyone keeps comparing a SoC designed for low-end (in the Apple lineup/ecosystem) to the Ryzen. As the AnandTech review noted, the M1 bests even the Ryzen on some benchmarks and Ryzen beats it in others.
The point everyone conveniently seems to miss is a new SoC for mobile devices running at 10-20 watts shouldn't be in the same universe when it comes to performance with any Ryzen desktop processor—but here we are.
It's disingenuous to state the only reason M1 seems fast is because all Macs are using old, slow processors.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro ($2,799.00) comes with a 2.3GHz 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz and for an additional $200, you can get it with a 2.4GHz 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz.
And yet the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with it's M1 processor blows them away when it comes to performance.
Here's a direct quote from their extensive review of the M1-based Mac mini (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...):
The M1 undisputedly outperforms the core performance of everything Intel has to offer, and battles it with AMD’s new Zen3, winning some, losing some. And in the mobile space in particular, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in either ST or MT performance – at least within the same power budgets.
10-20 watts is how much desktop processors use for a single thread, so they're not claiming an unfair advantage there. It would be truly impressive if the M1 at that power level was competitive with desktop processors on multi-threaded workloads where they actually use their full TDP, but it isn't even close.
> The 16-inch MacBook Pro ($2,799.00) comes with a 2.3GHz 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz and for an additional $200, you can get it with a 2.4GHz 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz.
Which are old slower Intel CPUs. Intel's latest is 10th-generation and even those are slower than Ryzen, much less the older 9th-generation ones. And even those older Intel mobile CPUs defeat the M1 on multi-threaded workloads like Cinebench.
Core i9-9880H scores 8311 compared to 7833 for the M1 (native):
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-intel_core_i9_9880h-958
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
You seem to be ignoring the benchmarks where the M1 beats the Ryzen 9 5950X on several--but not all--benchmarks. [1]
From the article: In SPECint2006, we’re now seeing the M1 close the gap to AMD’s Zen3, beating it in several workloads now, which increasing the gap to Intel’s new Tiger Lake design as well as their top-performing desktop CPU, which the M1 now beats in the majority of workloads.
And there's this: The situation doesn’t change too much with the newer SPECint2017 suite. Apple’s Firestorm core here remains extremely impressive, at worst matching up Intel’s new Tiger Lake CPU in single-threaded performance, and at best, keeping up and sometimes beating AMD’s new Zen3 CPU in the new Ryzen 5000 chips.
And regarding power consumption: While AMD’s Zen3 still holds the leads in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption in the +49W range while the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device active power.
That's the point I previously made—Apple’s first go at making their own processors for their entry level laptops and the Mac mini is super competitive with AMD's newest and best processors and beats it in several benchmarks, at a fraction of the cost and power consumption.
That's pretty impressive.
It has to make one wonder what the results will be when Apple ships a processor made for higher-end desktops, where they won't have the thermal and power restrictions of a laptop processor?
I'm sure when they were contemplating a transition away from Intel, they had to do their due diligence and consider if AMD could be an option. But clearly they knew they have a much higher ceiling with their architecture.
You know there are prototypes in Apple's lab now that far surpass Ryzen that'll be in machines spring/summer 2021. Apple's been relentless with shipping faster A series chips every year for the iPhone; I suspect we'll see the same thing with the M series.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
These are all single-threaded benchmarks. They don't even list the 5950X for the multi-threaded benchmarks because it's not even a comparison -- CineBench R23 MT for the M1 is 7833, the 5950X is 28641.
> And regarding power consumption: While AMD’s Zen3 still holds the leads in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption in the +49W range while the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device active power.
Which is, again, not surprising, because of the way CPU power curves work. The mobile Ryzen U-series processors have a similar power consumption to the M1. The desktop versions of the same processors are only slightly faster for a single thread but use a lot more power, because that last few hundred MHz is extremely inefficient and has only a marginal performance gain, so you only do that on desktop where power consumption isn't a priority.
A mobile processor being more power efficient than a desktop processor isn't a novelty. A mobile processor having about the same single thread performance as a desktop processor isn't a novelty. These things are par for the course. If they weren't true you aren't even in the game. Desktop processors primarily use their TDP to hold higher clocks even when running many threads.
> at a fraction of the cost
But you're again comparing a 16-core desktop processor to a 4+4 core mobile processor when the desktop processor would embarrass it on anything threaded, which is why it costs more. The lower core count processors have nearly the same single thread performance and cost less than half as much, and the "budget" Zen 3 processors, which should again have similar single thread performance, weren't the first to be released.
> It has to make one wonder what the results will be when Apple ships a processor made for higher-end desktops, where they won't have the thermal and power restrictions of a laptop processor?
It's not hard to infer what would happen. It would have marginally better single thread performance and much better multi-thread performance. Which is what the competing desktop processors already have.
> You know there are prototypes in Apple's lab now that far surpass Ryzen that'll be in machines spring/summer 2021.
But then it'll be competing with Zen 4 on 5nm and Socket AM5 with DDR5 memory. And 5nm and faster memory are two of the obvious reasons that the M1 is competitive as it is.
Regarding Rosetta, the AnandTech conclusion is (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...):
The software side of things already look good on day 1 due to Apple’s Rosetta2. Whilst the software doesn’t offer the best the hardware can offer, with time, as developers migrate their applications to native Apple Silicon support, the ecosystem will flourish. And in the meantime, the M1 is fast enough that it can absorb the performance hit from Rosetta2 and still deliver solid performance for all but the most CPU-critical x86 applications.
RE: extensions, I run Adguard for Safari and that’s pretty much it; it’s free and it catches most ads. Safari also has built in tracker blocking now, which is nice to have but more or less ignorable.
The nice thing about having Safari be your main browser is that you can reserve Chrome for development, and having a vanilla Chrome browser where content scripts don’t haphazardly log things to the console or block requests is really nice.
Many authors have used Apple's utility to convert their extensions for use in Safari.
It's pretty straightforward; here's an example: https://ngyikp.com/safari-14-webextensions/
The author will likely need to make a few tweaks and changes; it shouldn't be that hard.
So I am torn between the two.
I ended up migrating to Better as it uses Apple's API for this(I think it's a list of things to block), is OSS, and Apple seemed to be helping them with a change of ownership publicly and that lended some trust.
uBlock (without Origin in the name) is property of the same owners as AdBlock Plus, and both extensions whitelist ads under their owners' "Acceptable Ads" program, with many of the advertisers paying for that special access.
Here's a link to a tweet showing Safari with 400 tabs on a M1 MacBook Air… the performance is incredible.
Turns out Chrome choked and became unresponsive when trying to do the same thing: https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1328790134548905985?s=20
+ support Handoff macOS -> iOS
+ text fragment support! [1]
+ nice plugins and (Brave Browser) nice built-in Ad Blocker
+ good performance, but
- memory & cpu heavy (this counts as 2 minus)
- pinned tab can still be closed with `⌘+W`
Firefox: + feels smoother and more battery friendly than Chromium based browsers
+ built-in Picture in Picture
- no macOS menu bar function for "Pin Tab", thus making a lot of stuff hard for me
- doesn't support Handoff macOS -> iOS
Safari: + The most battery friendly and lightweight
+ iCloud tabs & Handoff
+ built-in Picture in Picture, but
- activating Picture in Picture is not as easy as Firefox
- No good Vim keybindings emulation
- cannot view rss raw text
- automatically opens related macOS app if any link contains redirect to app
[1]: https://web.dev/text-fragments/- pinned tabs don't transfer to a new window
The entire 'pinned' premise is out of the window with this
I hate this on iOS. Quite surprised there appears to be no way to disable it globally or per-app as it's such an annoying feature. The only way I know of is to press-and-hold a link to get the context menu, then open it from there... or more usually, uninstall the app in question!
Hope they'll make it optional.
My biggest gripe with FF on MacOS is that they don't include "look up "x"" in the right-click menu.
The PiP in Firefox is a lot better than in Safari. I do wish FF came with better tools for opening PiP for videos that on purpose or on accident hides the PiP-button.
I also think that Safari's back-gesture is a huge plus.
This algorithm doesn’t work very well on CJK-languages.
yes, I also miss that feature in Firefox. A sacrifice they choose over their own custom popup with Pocket and "Take a Screenshot"(great feature!), I guess.
I get the little FF with a phone icon if I open my mac after using iOS Safari sometimes.
Or do you mean iOS FF and MacOS FF?
And handoff took its sweet time but it has been supported for a while now between iOS and Firefox on Mac.
or you can use keyboard. Either you (2)press `⌘⇧?` and search for any functionality, or you (3)assign your own customized shortcut from System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts.
Adding a menu item for "Pin current tab" seems like a pretty straightforward bugzilla request too.
Only from iOS to macOS, not the other way around - at least not with Safari on iOS (I don't use Firefox on iOS).
about:config
set
media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.enabled = false
Firefox:
+ exposed about:config
- cannot "highlight all occurrences in scroll bar" for search result
Safari + simulate safari iOS perfectly, for webdev (duh)
- idem, cannot highlight all occurrences in scroll bar for search result
- devtools is lackingToday, I tried reinstall Vimari. It is a lot better now! Thank you for indirectly making me reinstall Vimari!
If someone sends this link to you, it will open just fine. If you send a link to someone else there's a very high probability they use Chrome. Otherwise, you can recommend them this extension.
It's the first time I heard about this new potentially standard feature, and it's very very useful. Thank you!
- Lacking extension support - Difficult to manage tabs compared to FF and Chrome [0]
[0] FF and Chrome allows you to select tabs the same way you select files. Click on individual tabs while holding command to select them or click on one, hold shift, and click on another tab to select all tabs in between. This makes it much easier to move groups of tabs between windows or break a group of tabs out into a new window.
Edit: apparently still has failure points; when I added a sample to this post, it failed. Perhaps it's the URL parameter?
But when I linked to a page without a URL parameter, it did work. Ex: https://web.dev/text-fragments/#creating-text-fragment-urls-...
Today, I tried reinstall Vimari. It is a lot better now! Thank you for indirectly making me reinstall Vimari!
Also: Using Bluetooth for discovery of your units suck. I live in an area with lots of houses close by each other, and I see at least 3 Apple TV's in my iPhone's AirPlay menu which are not on my network, and there's no way for me to get rid of them.
Apple, Google and friends: Stop. Trying. So. Hard! We're all on the same network. It's OK. No need to look further.
Write a script to stream Rick Astley's most popular clip to them in a loop, wait for the owners to turn off P2P Airplay.
It's the P2P AirPlay design which needs a justification, not me wanting to get it disabled.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-r...
Should I choose "Nightly" in the dropdown to get the ARM64 universal binary?
This is the changeset that enabled them: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/4153d7645a3...
Download from: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/
file ~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin
~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64]
~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
~/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin (for architecture arm64): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64Here are the money paragraphs:
St Paer-Gotch says that Apple's changes mean the company needs to move its "plumbing" to Apple's new hypervisor framework. And it also relies on software from other companies which are similarly still working to adapt to Apple Silicon.
"We rely on things like Go for the backend of Docker Desktop and Electron for the Docker Dashboard to view your Desktop content," he continued. "We know these projects are hard at work getting ready for M1 chips, and we are watching them closely."
If HN supported DLCs[1], I'd take the under on such a bet. The Apple Silicon DevKit which these guys have had access to since the summer didn't support virtualization (being based on the A12 SoC) but they knew that going in. I'd like to think they got some meaningful work done.
Apple showed Debian running on a prototype Apple Silicon Mac back in June at WWDC. I’d bet they’ll have something before the end of the year.
[1]: https://www.coindesk.com/dlc-private-smart-contracts-bitcoin