Is Apple crippling third-party apps?
February 28th 2008
In an article title Finding the OS X Turbo Button, developer "Vladimir" details his many troubles in getting Firefox 3 to run as fast as humanly possible. In pursuit of this worthy goal, he came across a number pratfalls--that one might reasonably assume were intentionally--laid by our friends at 1 Infinite Loop--dozens and dozens of undocumented performance caps and hidden throttling methods "designed" to slow down a third-party browser written in Cocoa.
There are now over 100 private "OS-secrets-only-WebKit-knows" in the library, many of which are referred to in a mostly comment-free header file. Reading the WebKit [Ed: Open-source core of Safari] code is pretty interesting; there are all sorts of potentially useful Cocoa internals bits you can pick up, more easily on the Objective C side (e.g. search for "AppKitSecretsIKnow" in the code), but also in other areas as a pile of these WK* methods used in quite a few places. Would any other apps like to take advantage of some of that functionality? I'm pretty sure the answer there is yes...
Happily, Vladimir and his companions at Mozilla have managed to overcome this nest of snares and booby traps, and Firefox 3 will deliver greatly-improved performance when it ships, including excellent Javascript execution.
Editor's note: Would Apple really sink so low--ie Microsoft--to insure Safari is the fastest browser on the Mac? Perhaps it's a simple case of documentation lagging the shipping product...
What's your take?
