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A Quantum Leap for the Web

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Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#31

Post by pcwalton »

dblohm7 wrote: post #26
pcwalton wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Servo has always been and still is a research project. It was never intended to go into production as a fully-fledged Mozilla product. That's not true. Servo is designed to be production-grade.

> That's not true. Servo is designed to be production-grade. I never said that it wasn't. I said that it wasn't going to be shipped as a production Mozilla product.

> I never said that it wasn't. I said that it wasn't going to be shipped as a production Mozilla product.

That's also not true.

Maybe it will, maybe it won't; that's a decision that has to incorporate many factors other than technical ones. From my point of view as an engineering lead, I'm designing the engine to ship.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#32

Post by NoGravitas »

bobajeff wrote: post #12

This sounds to me like Mozilla is getting impatient with Servo. Servo was more than just a parallel browser engine it was the only new web engine not based off of decade old codebase. It was a statement that it's feasible to hold off on monoculture because compatibility isn't impossible to achieve on new engines.

Isn't this announcement basically just saying, though, that Servo is going to replace Gecko piece by piece, rather than all at once?

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#33

Post by [deleted] »

krastanov wrote: post #28
criddell wrote: post #22

Heh. It's interesting to me that in the vernacular a quantum leap is a large change while in physics it's a very quick, extremely tiny event.

No! This meme is just wrong (and it does grind my gears to an unreasonable amount as a physicist). In physics quantum means discrete, it does not mean small. Hence the idiom "quantum leap" used as "a discontinuous abrupt jump in quality" is perfectly in sync with the way physicists use the phrase.

[deleted]

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#34

Post by Touche »

larsberg wrote: post #14
bobajeff wrote: post #12

This sounds to me like Mozilla is getting impatient with Servo. Servo was more than just a parallel browser engine it was the only new web engine not based off of decade old codebase. It was a statement that it's feasible to hold off on monoculture because compatibility isn't impossible to achieve on new engines.

Project Quantum is an opportunity to ship some of the Servo components in Firefox and gain millions of users, real-world tests of the technology, and hopefully dramatically expand our contributor base. As we mention in a post to the Servo mailing list ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.servo/3b... ), Servo has a lot coming in 2017 unrelated to Project Quantum or Firefox.

Speaking for myself, I don't want "Servo components" in Firefox; I want Servo in Firefox. I want an engine as fast as the one they have shown of Servo as being; not pieces of it that make Firefox incrementally better; I want a browser that is miles ahead. That's always what I found interesting about Servo.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#35

Post by aantix »

They should use Yahoo's front page as their performance baseline.

Whenever I load it, the favicon starts to flicker, multiple movies (ads) start playing, and I can't tell whether scrolling has been badly hijacked by some rogue js plugin or if the performance of their video playback is just that bad.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#36

Post by muizelaar »

criddell wrote: post #22

Heh. It's interesting to me that in the vernacular a quantum leap is a large change while in physics it's a very quick, extremely tiny event.

"Although changes of quantum state occur on the sub-microscopic level, in popular discourse, the term "quantum leap" refers to a large increase.[5]"

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#37

Post by criddell »

krastanov wrote: post #28
criddell wrote: post #22

Heh. It's interesting to me that in the vernacular a quantum leap is a large change while in physics it's a very quick, extremely tiny event.

No! This meme is just wrong (and it does grind my gears to an unreasonable amount as a physicist). In physics quantum means discrete, it does not mean small. Hence the idiom "quantum leap" used as "a discontinuous abrupt jump in quality" is perfectly in sync with the way physicists use the phrase.

I'm not saying it means small, just that quantum leaps are nanoscale. And also, the state after the leap isn't better or worse than the state before, just different.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#38

Post by TekMol » 

    we’ll be rolling out the first stage of Electrolysis to
    100% of Firefox desktop users over the next few months.
From my experiments with it, this still does not fix the problem that the javascript in all windows shares one core. A script running in one browser window still slows down the other windows.

A problem that Chrome has solved years ago. So I think this is not really a leap for the web. Just FireFox catching up a bit.

FireFox is my main browser. The way I deal with it is that I start multiple instances as different users. So they run inside their own process. This way I can have a resource hungry page open in one window (For example a dashboard with realtime data visualization) and still work smoothly in another.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#39

Post by krastanov »

criddell wrote: post #37
krastanov wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No! This meme is just wrong (and it does grind my gears to an unreasonable amount as a physicist). In physics quantum means discrete, it does not mean small. Hence the idiom "quantum leap" used as "a discontinuous abrupt jump in quality" is perfectly in sync with the way physicists use the phrase.

I'm not saying it means small, just that quantum leaps are nanoscale. And also, the state after the leap isn't better or worse than the state before, just different.

I still disagree. Quantum does not imply nanoscale - we are building bigger and bigger systems that exhibit inherently quantum behavior (for instance superconducting cavities used in quantum computing research are centimeter scale). Moreover, the jump is not necessarily in a spatial variable - it can be a very big jump in energy levels for instance, which is the case with laser emissions.

Sure, a (big or small) discrete jump does not necessarily imply a jump to something better, but that has little to do with my complaint about the meme that "quantum implies small".

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