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A Quantum Leap for the Web

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Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#121

Post by fuck_google »

mgalka wrote: post #84
aantix wrote: post #35

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 .

Yahoo's home page explains so much about the company -- unable to maintain even the simplest and most basic features of their site. I'm still on Yahoo mail, and there were a few months this year where the basic search functionality didn't work. Yahoo would probably make a great case study in corporate culture gone wrong.

Ex-googler as the CEO didn't seem to help either.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#122

Post by fuck_google »

anigbrowl wrote: post #101
aantix wrote: post #35

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 .

There are so many major brand websites that are so awful that I want to grab anyone who admits to working there and yell 'have you tried using your own damn product lately because it sucks' but I'd rather not be returned to prison for my unique form of UI feedback.

Using Google services led you to prison?

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#123

Post by xorcist »

dherman wrote: post #4

[disclaimer: I co-founded Mozilla Research, which sponsors Servo] It's awesome to see the Gecko team continue to tackle big, ambitious projects now that electrolysis is rolling out. And I'm so excited that they're betting big on Servo and Rust. Servo has really been taking advantage of one of Rust's promises: that you can reach for more aggressive parallelism and actually maintain it. I believe recent numbers showed…

> all of Firefox's users have at least two cores,

As an end user, it concerns me slightly that the visible change will be that Firefox pegs two cores instead of just one.

An absolute explosion in Javascript usage on the web together, of low quality haphazardly put together at runtime, together with the convenience of tabs makes this a problem. Mozilla may do everything right but that doesn't necessarily help the end user.

Is there anything I could do easily to remedy this, without bothering with white listing Javascript? And is there any activities at Mozilla concerning this, perhaps with identifying the most trivial cases of scripts spinning without doing useful work? Maybe pausing DOM changes for documents that aren't visible?

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#124

Post by Ygg2 »

cgag wrote: post #98
pcwalton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo is still being developed with the same manpower. Quantum is not de-emphasizing Servo. It would make little sense to do so, since the lack of legacy in Servo is part of what has given us the freedom to experiment with things like parallel restyling in the first place. And Quantum helps Servo, too—by giving us real-world Web compatibility experience with portions of Servo's codebase sooner, it helps us shake out…

It would make no sense to de-emphasize servo. It seems like it would make a lot of sense to de-emphasize Quantum/firefox/everything mozilla is wasting their time and money on that isn't Servo. I hope that either mozilla is lying for political reasons about their lack of intent to use servo outright, or that the servo team forks from mozilla and takes funding from patreon (or snowdrift when it launches) and builds som…

I think emphasizing Servo is the wrong goal.

Ideally, when rewriting a large legacy app you want to take the StranglerApplication[1] approach. Netscape tried rewriting its software from scratch and we all know how that ended for Netscape[2] - Netscape is no more. Luckily, Firefox came from that whole mess. But I assume a lot of effort was lost, going from Netscape to Firefox.

In idealized scenario, Servo slowly starts taking replacing parts of Firefox. First URL parser and media player, then slowly DOM, CSS, Renderer, and finally takes over and rewrites JS VM.

The takeover is silent and gradual and user doesn't notices anything outside speed improvements. It's like some kind of silent Borg infection.

[1] http://paulhammant.com/2013/07/14/legacy-application-strangu...

[2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#125

Post by mdahlstrand »

xorcist wrote: post #123
dherman wrote: post #4

[disclaimer: I co-founded Mozilla Research, which sponsors Servo] It's awesome to see the Gecko team continue to tackle big, ambitious projects now that electrolysis is rolling out. And I'm so excited that they're betting big on Servo and Rust. Servo has really been taking advantage of one of Rust's promises: that you can reach for more aggressive parallelism and actually maintain it. I believe recent numbers showed…

> all of Firefox's users have at least two cores, As an end user, it concerns me slightly that the visible change will be that Firefox pegs two cores instead of just one. An absolute explosion in Javascript usage on the web together, of low quality haphazardly put together at runtime, together with the convenience of tabs makes this a problem. Mozilla may do everything right but that doesn't necessarily help the end…

Disable javascript? Not that it's massively fun for you without javascript on the web, but it sounds like you have a very performance dependent workload on your computer. I don't think it's anything most people will have to worry about though, cpu scheduling is pretty good most of the time, and people's javascript suck less and less.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#126

Post by TeeWEE »

You can make a super fast web browser, but that doesnt solve the fundamental issue: The web is not designed for performant applications. Resources loading, javascript, rendering... Solve that first before you build a fast engine...

Off course a fast engine is good. But dont forget the root problems with the web.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#127

Post by amelius »

TeeWEE wrote: post #126

You can make a super fast web browser, but that doesnt solve the fundamental issue: The web is not designed for performant applications. Resources loading, javascript, rendering... Solve that first before you build a fast engine... Off course a fast engine is good. But dont forget the root problems with the web.

Yes. The article speaks of "zero latency", but that is simply not achievable with a network connection that has latency. My guess is that in current browsers, on average 90% of the latency is in the network (as opposed to rendering). So even if the render step was perfect, you would only get a measly 10% performance gain.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#128

Post by oldmanjay »

dherman wrote: post #4

[disclaimer: I co-founded Mozilla Research, which sponsors Servo] It's awesome to see the Gecko team continue to tackle big, ambitious projects now that electrolysis is rolling out. And I'm so excited that they're betting big on Servo and Rust. Servo has really been taking advantage of one of Rust's promises: that you can reach for more aggressive parallelism and actually maintain it. I believe recent numbers showed…

I would personally not be so eager to disclaim such impressive credentials, but I suppose you have your reasons.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#129

Post by ronjouch »

bzbarsky wrote: post #120
aikah wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here my experience with the current Firefox compared to Chrome : - Firefox consumes way less ressources than Chrome. I can open 20 tabs it will consume a reasonable amount of memory. - Firefox crashes way more often than Chrome. I get a crash everyday mostly because of a aggressive Javascript found in pages riddled with ads that abuse tricks in order to force the viewser to see ads ( Adblock can help ) - Firefox is w…

> Firefox is way slower when it comes to Javascript execution than Chrome If you have specific pages where you're seeing this, please file bugs on Firefox and add "bzbarsky" to the cc list for the bug!

Thanks for reaching out; will do if I encounter a case. I don't run Chrome daily, and my personal experience with Firefox is good, including with "big webapps" like Atlassian products (JIRA, Confluence), but I often read the comment that "big pages/webapps" are faster on Chrome than Firefox.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12794971 for examples of such talk, but it's rarely precise enough to file a bug :/

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#130

Post by bzbarsky »

ronjouch wrote: post #129
bzbarsky wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is way slower when it comes to Javascript execution than Chrome If you have specific pages where you're seeing this, please file bugs on Firefox and add "bzbarsky" to the cc list for the bug!

Thanks for reaching out; will do if I encounter a case. I don't run Chrome daily, and my personal experience with Firefox is good, including with "big webapps" like Atlassian products (JIRA, Confluence), but I often read the comment that "big pages/webapps" are faster on Chrome than Firefox. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12794971 for examples of such talk, but it's rarely precise enough to file a bug :/

Right, that's my issue. People keep claiming something is slow, but when I ask for an actual example they almost never come up with one, so I can't profile and fix it... ;)
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