Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by sebazzz on Sunday November 17, 2019 @09:53AM (#21558116)

Technically I think you are free to build have other browser engines on iOS. However, JIT or other dynamically compiled code is not allowed because that's a security risk. You can't have a browser in 2019 with interpreted javascript.

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by MaxBarraclough on Sunday November 17, 2019 @12:25PM (#21558861)

> I think you are free to build have other browser engines on iOS

I believe this is false, see 2.5.6 and 4.7 of https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

But they do allow Opera Mini, a 'browser' for iOS where rendering is done in the cloud.

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by fauigerzigerk on Sunday November 17, 2019 @09:55AM (#21558129)

But why is JavaScript JIT compilation tied to the rendering engine?

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by andrewl-hn on Sunday November 17, 2019 @10:28AM (#21558318)

Yep. technically, Apple doesn't force Firefox to use WebKit. They could still use their Gecko WebRenderer and use Apple's JavaScriptCore to run page scripts. Same goes to Chrome: Blink + JSC instead of Blink + V8.

In practice in seems like both Chrome and Firefox have their renderers and JavaScript runtimes so tightly integrated that it's very hard to replace the later.

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by fauigerzigerk on Sunday November 17, 2019 @10:47AM (#21558397)

Elsewhere in this debate sharpneli says that there is no public API to call into JavaScriptCore and using non-public APIs violates the App Store rules. So that would explain it.

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by saagarjha on Sunday November 17, 2019 @03:14PM (#21559812)

There is API to use JavaScriptCore in your apps: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/javascriptcore. No JIT, though, so it’s slow.

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by thekingofh on Sunday November 17, 2019 @11:14AM (#21558528)

I think you mean that you can have interpreted javascript, just not JIT compilers. They don't allow you to mark memory as executable. That syscall is completely disabled on their systems.

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by saagarjha on Sunday November 17, 2019 @03:11PM (#21559793)

It is not, moprotect (and mach_vm_protect) work just fine if you have the appropriate entitlements or have a way of getting around its checks.

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by thekingofh on Monday November 18, 2019 @12:43PM (#21566314)

I think the entitlements are not offered to apps such as firefox and those that are not Apple correct?

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by saagarjha on Monday November 18, 2019 @04:06PM (#21568142)

Some of them are, but they cannot be used with apps delivered on the App Store.

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by vbezhenar on Sunday November 17, 2019 @02:29PM (#21559534)

It can't be disabled because Safari and Webkit uses JIT for JavaScript. Probably it's enabled for apps signed by Apple.

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Re:Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web by thekingofh on Monday November 18, 2019 @12:45PM (#21566332)

True it is disabled if you aren't Apple.

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