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Put it this way: if I were in charge of a major OS, and I having one of the major app frameworks used on my OS tested on for my annual upgrade, I'd feel pretty

by emn13 1y ago

Put it this way: if I were in charge of a major OS, and I having one of the major app frameworks used on my OS tested on for my annual upgrade, I'd feel pretty embarrassed, even if there's a figleaf excuse why it's not my fault. This doesn't exactly instill confidence in Apple's competence.

BoredPositron 1y ago
That's how you end up with windows.
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  This. Would it really be better if macOS accumulated workarounds for buggy apps?
  - cwillu 1y ago
    Yes.
  - emn13 1y ago
    There's also the alternative of announcing this breakage publicly to electron beforehand; and the alternative of having a hack and publicly announcing it will be removed in a year. There's even the alternative of just announcing the caveat at all, so your users aren't unwitting guinea pigs. If they don't want to support a million workarounds forever, they don't have to it's not all or nothing.
whatevaa 1y ago
Apple doesn't care, they know their users will eat anything they throw at them. Electron used non-public pieces to workaround an issue with Apple code which Apple knew about and was not interested to address, now it's broken after it changed. Nothing new.
reaperducer 1y ago
if I were in charge of a major OS, and I having one of the major app frameworks used on my OS tested on for my annual upgrade Each program contains its own version of Electron. How is Apple going to know the version of Electron your particular version of your particular app that you installed on one particular date perhaps years in the past works? n apps in the world × n versions of Electron The problem isn't Apple. It's that the developer of your program is using an outdated version of Electron, or it's put out an update and you haven't updated.
- buildfocus 1y ago
  They only needed to test with the latest Electron at the time of release (or indeed, any chance version - they're all affected - but latest is a reasonable baseline). If they had, they would've seen this. There are patches out now, but only after Apple released the OS to the entire team world and people reported the issue to the Electron team. Imo, Electron is sufficiently popular that somebody should test at least one Electron app on a major new OS version sometime before releasing it as done! Any app would've worked, and there's plenty of popular ones, as this post shows.
  - jmull 1y ago
    There's just no way for Apple to maintain and run comprehensive test suites for all the different software platforms out there, even "popular" ones. That's why they release betas early -- that gives each project an opportunity to run their own test suites, however comprehensive they may be. It's a little hard to hold Apple responsible when there are a lot of app teams in a better position to catch this than Apple, and apparently none of them did. (Maybe it was a late change in Tahoe? Still, no one found it in the RC either it seems.)
    - hu3 1y ago
      What's stopping Apple from running automated performance regression tests for popular applications? They certainly have the resources.
sleepybrett 1y ago
Electron chose to use a private api, they are private for a reason.
matt_heimer 1y ago
They broke Java last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39741115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39741115

by emn13 1y ago

BoredPositron 1y ago

That's how you end up with windows.

badc0ffee 1y ago
This. Would it really be better if macOS accumulated workarounds for buggy apps?
- cwillu 1y ago
  Yes.
- emn13 1y ago
  There's also the alternative of announcing this breakage publicly to electron beforehand; and the alternative of having a hack and publicly announcing it will be removed in a year. There's even the alternative of just announcing the caveat at all, so your users aren't unwitting guinea pigs. If they don't want to support a million workarounds forever, they don't have to it's not all or nothing.

whatevaa 1y ago

Apple doesn't care, they know their users will eat anything they throw at them. Electron used non-public pieces to workaround an issue with Apple code which Apple knew about and was not interested to address, now it's broken after it changed. Nothing new.

reaperducer 1y ago

if I were in charge of a major OS, and I having one of the major app frameworks used on my OS tested on for my annual upgrade Each program contains its own version of Electron. How is Apple going to know the version of Electron your particular version of your particular app that you installed on one particular date perhaps years in the past works? n apps in the world × n versions of Electron The problem isn't Apple. It's that the developer of your program is using an outdated version of Electron, or it's put out an update and you haven't updated.

buildfocus 1y ago
They only needed to test with the latest Electron at the time of release (or indeed, any chance version - they're all affected - but latest is a reasonable baseline). If they had, they would've seen this. There are patches out now, but only after Apple released the OS to the entire team world and people reported the issue to the Electron team. Imo, Electron is sufficiently popular that somebody should test at least one Electron app on a major new OS version sometime before releasing it as done! Any app would've worked, and there's plenty of popular ones, as this post shows.
- jmull 1y ago
  There's just no way for Apple to maintain and run comprehensive test suites for all the different software platforms out there, even "popular" ones. That's why they release betas early -- that gives each project an opportunity to run their own test suites, however comprehensive they may be. It's a little hard to hold Apple responsible when there are a lot of app teams in a better position to catch this than Apple, and apparently none of them did. (Maybe it was a late change in Tahoe? Still, no one found it in the RC either it seems.)
  - hu3 1y ago
    What's stopping Apple from running automated performance regression tests for popular applications? They certainly have the resources.

sleepybrett 1y ago

Electron chose to use a private api, they are private for a reason.

matt_heimer 1y ago

They broke Java last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39741115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39741115