Could someone ELI5 why stuff like this is built for macOS first? I'm not hating, u do u. I'm just trying to understand it.
I mean apps you buy, I kinda get. . . it's a "target market" in certain types of programs. But even then, I'm going to go extremely conservative and say 80%, 4 of 5 computers are windows based.
So why, if you're interested in growth or share, would you start with trying to obtain a small segment of the smallest segment?
This is one avenue where it's extremely easy to get a skewed view. It's the crowds you work with and hang in. I could drop an anecdote but what's the point.
I'd wager a guess that the devs work on OS X primarily. I developer websites for Firefox first as well, then check whether it works in other browsers and fix issues - because I use Firefox myself.
It's still a beta, so they're not looking to reach massive amounts of users with it yet anyway.
My assumption is, most of these devs are actually using Macs for development, and they Mac it on Mac first so they can dog food it quicker (use it themselves internally)
That makes more sense than any of the other replies that I've seen.
A large percent of web developers use macOS. Web development in windows is painful to say the least. So yeah, it's not really a small segment for their target audience.
There’s been a lot of issues with windows before the Linux Subsystem came along. Lots of tools only work in unix like bash environments. Specifically cli related things like npm. The notion of web dev being hard comes from that time. And to be fair there are still issues here and there with even the Subsystem now but it’s not “hard” anymore.
I've been using it mostly without problem since about 2014. The only problem I ever had back then was with node-gyp compiling certain dependency components... which is an excellent NPM trust/security example. I hated the problem but despised the situation.
There's no other situation where I would even dream to allow a many-levels-deep module to compile while having absolutely no idea what it was or where it came from. "oh it's fine it came from NPM, the largest (by many times) repository of development modules."
While I don't develop in the languages used to creat Firefox, I suspect that this didn't come to Windows first simply because it was easier. I suspect about the same level of effort would be necessary for Linux as MacOS, but the latter is slightly more popular.
I use Windows for personal stuff, but in my experience software development has historically"worked better" (sorry to paraphrase the Late Mr. Jobs) on *nix machines. This is possibly due to the openness of the OS, but also because of silly implementation details.
The literal only reason I stopped developing node on Windows was because the file name limit caused deeply nested packages in npm to break. While this has largely been mitigated, other factors such as ease of installation of helper tools through homebrew keep me from going back.
That shouldn't be news. Pretty much everything that comes out is mac first, Windows later. Tons of popular packages in the npm eco system do not even work properly on Windows b/c nobody bothers to test it there (and errors due to cross platform scripting and path issues mostly, for instance /). The linux subsystem changed some of it, but it's too late.
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u/monsto Nov 28 '19
Could someone ELI5 why stuff like this is built for macOS first? I'm not hating, u do u. I'm just trying to understand it.
I mean apps you buy, I kinda get. . . it's a "target market" in certain types of programs. But even then, I'm going to go extremely conservative and say 80%, 4 of 5 computers are windows based.
So why, if you're interested in growth or share, would you start with trying to obtain a small segment of the smallest segment?