This is Firefox we're talking about, so yes it's popular. And this does happen far more than you're claiming. I'm not sure why you're still trying to push your angle honestly.
Look at commit email domains some time. Grep for @apple.com in popular projects. I don't have the firefox repository on hand but I would wager they're in there too.
Only things from @apple.com in mozilla-central are a few commits from the auto-syncing of web-platform-tests ( https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests ), and a few patches from code shared with WebKit where patches have been copied over. So, uh, no direct contributions.
I believe the PC's point is that you're leaning on "never having heard" about Apple committing compatibility fixes before as justification for that not being something they would do, but prior to reading this article, you would have "never heard" about Apple applying compatibility hacks inside their own runtimes either.
That's my point: Apple reaching out to third-party applications is a rare and secretive occurrence, almost always bound by NDAs. If it wasn't, we'd see more of it (which was basically the evidence I was asking for).
You don’t know if it’s rare because it’s secretive. Apple
doesn’t communicate things that don’t help them. Making the public know they add hacks to make sure their own and third parties’ software doesn’t break doesn’t help them so they don’t talk about it. The perception they want for the public is that the software, both their own and third party software on their platform, doesn’t break.
If this was a common occurrence, I'm sure this would be better known, NDA or not. For example, it's well known that Apple occasionally adds API to iOS exclusively to serve the needs of certain larger companies.
Just because you don’t hear about it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. You didn’t know about this whole infrastructure detailed in the article yet it existed nevertheless.
