This is great news. Based on the early reviews coming in, native Apple apps perform amazingly well on the M1 chips. So it's going to be really important for third-party apps to support M1 natively to remain competitive.
As a diehard Firefox user, it has never been competitive with safari when it comes to performance. JavaScriptCore and WebKit are kind of ridiculously fast. If only they were put in a browser that was at all usable.
I'm also seeing significant stuttering on Twitter on Big Sur on Safari 14.0.1. Chrome scrolls smoothly in comparison. Same deal on Reddit.
Then again it was still the case before Big Sur and Safari 14, so I can't call it a regression.
There was something with UBlock or Adblock Plus in the past and if it wasn't UBO I wasn't sure if they were trust worthy. I think one went rogue and one started selling the ability to unblock ads. But, with Safari 14 being able to transform chrome extensions, I hope that some of the popular ones and EFF ones can migrate.
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.
The short answer is that uBlock Origin is what almost all users are likely to want.
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.
Have you tried Safari 14? I recently upgraded and they’ve finally fixed the address bar race conditions and swipe back/forward lag which drove me away in previous versions.
14 corrects most of 13’s sins but the extensions are still shit. No add blocker comes close to UBO, no Reddit Enhancement Suite, no BetterTTV. I’m honestly surprised TamperMonkey works but that’s one of a set of full-fat extensions I need.
Sorry to but in but do you perhaps know if they've addressed the issues that made me switch from Safari to Firefox maybe 2 years ago? I listed them here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25132068
I’m very familiar with Safari address bar issues, where sometimes Safari just fails to navigate to a URL and you get an audible bell, or just general weirdness when you type too fast, and can say I have yet to experience these same issues in 14. I’m sure there are other problems but Safari has generally improved with every release.
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.
Short answer: Safari 14 supports the same standard for extensions that Firefox and Chrome do, with the addition of some security issues the other browsers don't seem to care about, including not implementing certain features to hurt privacy and security.
Many authors have used Apple's utility to convert their extensions for use in Safari.
It looks like you lose about 30% performance to Rosetta. That's quite a lot, and makes it slower than current x86-64 processors, e.g. Ryzen 5000 series, or even the Ryzen 3000 series. But compared to x86-64 Macs it's not that much slower, because the x86-64 Macs are using old slower Intel CPUs.
But compared to x86-64 Macs it's not that much slower, because the x86-64 Macs are using old slower Intel CPUs.
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.
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.
> 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.
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):
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.
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.
> You seem to be ignoring the benchmarks where the M1 beats the Ryzen 9 5950X on several--but not all--benchmarks.
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.
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.
And that's for static code. Chrome runs like garbage under rosetta for me, with frequent stutters, presumably because of the cost of dynamically recompiling freshly emitted code.
I believe that's due to ahead-of-time transpilation, but as noted in another thread, JIT code within the browser would need to be transpiled just-in-time which would mean pauses during runtime.
+ 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
Regarding Firefox, I'm unsure what you mean by "no macOS menu bar function for Pin Tab", is this something different from right clicking on a tab and selecting Pin Tab?
And handoff took its sweet time but it has been supported for a while now between iOS and Firefox on Mac.
in macOS, you can do (1)what you said with a mouse,
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.
> - automatically opens related macOS app if any link contains redirect to app
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!
Yes! I hate this feature on android. Sometimes I need to login to a Gmail account that I don't have on device, and it takes me to app instead of opening the website I need.
I think it is a good list, and it really shows how close browsers are today, that decisions are made on minor inconveniences like "How does it pin tabs?"
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.
> My biggest gripe with FF on MacOS is that they don't include "look up "x"" in the right-click menu.
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.
“Look up” is a macOS feature that can look up a word in the system Dictionary or Wikipedia. It can be activated by force-clicking or tapping with three fingers on a trackpad Mac, and by a right-click menu options in some apps (Firefox isn’t one of them) on all Macs. It is distinct from search.
The problem with force clicking is that the user doesn’t get to decide the string that is passed to the dictionary, instead a word boundary algorithm decides the word.
This algorithm doesn’t work very well on CJK-languages.
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.
Previously, I don't want to use Vimari because I think it only emulate C-n C-p as their j k bindings respectively. The effect of this is, it won't work great on sites that already have their own key handler, such as GitHub.
Today, I tried reinstall Vimari. It is a lot better now! Thank you for indirectly making me reinstall Vimari!
Safari picture-in-picture is better integrated with macOS: it can be used with multiple virtual desktops, it can be pushed to the side, it both snaps to predefined positions and it can be moved wherever. Firefox is stuck to one virtual display, unfortunately. Or has this changed?
Previously, I don't want to use Vimari because I think it only emulate C-n C-p as their j k bindings respectively. The effect of this is, it won't work great on sites that already have their own key handler, such as GitHub.
Today, I tried reinstall Vimari. It is a lot better now! Thank you for indirectly making me reinstall Vimari!
FYI: this build was pulled and fixed one will go live tomorrow. In the meantime one can use Intel version through Rosetta or manually give Bluetooth permission to native Chrome ( https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/83557143 ).
You could say the same thing about Linux. Standardization is helpful - there are so many companies with an interest in chromium it’s not just a google project anymore it is a huge community project.
But that's most likely on your local network. No need to use Bluetooth for this, when you have simple local UDP multicast.
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.
Which is it, because the headline here says 'Beta' but I'm already on the Beta channel and see no update and my architecture is still 'Intel' in Activity Monitor.
Should I choose "Nightly" in the dropdown to get the ARM64 universal binary?
Are you on 84b1 or more? If so, try exiting and restarting it once manually. If you upgraded from a version running with Rosetta, the restart initiated by Firefox will keep it running with Rosetta. This is tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677036
I had the same situation, seems the Beta auto-update doesn't switch to the new architecture. Just download the beta again and install it over you old install.
The performance difference is _really_ noticeable :)
The Mozilla bugzilla allows me to logon via Github, but when I logon it tells me that my account is disabled. But then it says to request it be reenabled from the login page... does anyone here know how to get around this issue?
You can change the title to "Firefox beta supports Apple silicon natively" (edit: or "Firefox nightly and beta support Apple silicon natively", the current "Firefox nightly (beta)" is ambiguous).
It means that M1 Mac's will not be translating x86 opcodes. Apple has done a very good job of making the transition (relatively) painless, but it's still not entirely trivial for many large projects, so seeing this many native binaries is quite nice.
What's the difference between this version of Firefox and the version of Firefox that can be installed on an iPad? I have been running Firefox on Apple silicon for some time I thought.
Unless I'm mistaken, the rendering engine on iOS would only be WebKit, and whatever else safari provides.
No alternative aloud. So it's ui/features on top of, essentially, Safari not real Firefox.
Gotcha, thanks. Just got the thing so I didn't realize that was the case. I suppose it's not overly surprising, knowing Apple. I doubt they would allow real Firefox on an iPad even though it technically can probably run on it now.
The Firefox you can install on an iPad is a mobile Firefox, designed for iPhone and iPad. This is desktop Firefox, the one you get on a Mac/PC. Also, because of the App Store rules, the mobile version uses WebKit instead of Gecko.
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.
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."
Am I missing where it states Docker is currently working? That seems to indicate that they hope to having it working at some undetermined point in the future.
