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A Quantum Leap for the Web

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Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#131

Post by [deleted] »

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!

[deleted]

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#132

Post by larsberg »

tedmielczarek wrote: post #91
mtgx wrote: post #13

> A first version of our new engine will ship on Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Someday we hope to offer this new engine for iOS, too. More people need to put pressure on Apple to allow third-party browser engines on iOS. Fortunately, they're already getting sued over this, but just in case that doesn't succeed, there should also be bigger public pressure on Apple to allow them. http://www.recode.net/2016/10/7/132…

I've had a Gecko port stood up and running on iPhone hardware several times in the past 6 years but we've never sorted out a real path to shipping. The most recent incarnation felt a lot nicer than Safari with our async pan/zoom architecture. Maybe I should just get Servo running and we can ship it as a tech demo. :-P

I'll do the CI work to keep it building :-)

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#133

Post by allendoerfer »

pcwalton wrote: post #113
cgag wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Here's how I think of it: What's the biggest risk to Servo? I think most people would answer that (besides it being a lot of work), as it's a big boil-the-ocean project, there's a lot of newly-written code that hasn't been battle-tested yet. How do we fix that? By gettin…

The competition in the browser market is much harder than for example the market of programming languages and even there big version bumps have huge costs. If you can avoid it, you don't want all your resources tied to Perl 6, PHP 6, Python 3 and so on, while your users are complaining because the usable version of your software does not improve any longer.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#134

Post by pcwalton »

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…

> Maybe pausing DOM changes for documents that aren't visible?

We already throttle background tabs heavily in various ways.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#135

Post by Roboprog »

the8472 wrote: post #79
Roboprog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it is "only" one process per tab on Chrome. This sounds like having multiple processes per tab (or at least, active tab), splitting up different kinds of work to "specialist" processes. Clarification / refinement, anybody?

There is this concept called "threads" which can be found in most operating systems.

Process, thread, task, whatever.

(I so remember the first time I was reading about threads in OS/2 and Novell back in 1989 or 90 - no risk not worth taking to squeeze a little bit more out of 10 MHz CPUs with OS's with crummy process management, I guess)

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#136

Post by cgag »

Ygg2 wrote: post #124
cgag wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 start…

I think the user needs to notice a lot of improvements, at all at once, because firefox really feels hopeless at this point. I don't know though, maybe a slow turnaround will work, or a sudden rendering integration will be the turn around it needs.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#137

Post by Eridrus »

pcwalton wrote: post #111
armitron wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the lack of sandboxing, Spidermonkey is qualitatively worse than V8. The metric used is ease of finding exploitable bugs _without taking sandboxing into account_. I do not know where you get your security track record from, but there is a big asymmetry in public-vs-private information on the matter. Most of the research into exploitation happens behind closed doors and the general public is not privy to…

> I do not know where you get your security track record from, but there is a big asymmetry in public-vs-private information on the matter. No, there isn't. Security bugs are made public in both Bugzilla and chromium.org once enough time has passed. Both engines have been around for years and years, so there's been plenty of time to gather data. Sorry, but I'm not going to just trust "I can't link to anything because…

Bugs are only made public when developers find out about them then fix them. Many exploits simply die to code churn rather than developers actually fixing what they understand to be a vulnerability.

I have no horse in this race, but I don't think you should assume you have all the information.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#138

Post by Eridrus »

pcwalton wrote: post #105
armitron wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that not one comment in this entire thread mentions security and exploitability, two areas where Firefox is not just terrible, but the worst choice amongst (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) (1) but also Edge and IE 11. Everyone is focusing on performance, as if that's the BIG issue these days. Talk about having your priorities screwed up. Reading your comment, and the linked post, I'm left with the impression th…

> Every exploit shop considers Spidermonkey to be a security clusterfuck yet it's still in use. Can you elaborate why SpiderMonkey is worse than Chakra, JavaScriptCore, and V8? SpiderMonkey has approximately the same security track record as all of them. I think you're conflating the lack of sandboxing and some mistaken security-related decisions in the Firefox chrome with some sort of intrinsic security problem in t…

Do you see sandboxing at odds with performance? I know it causes a hit to RAM, but I have no sense for impact on CPU usage or user responsiveness metrics.

Once sandboxing is implemented, will there be a push to implement the privileged process in Rust?

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#139

Post by Eridrus »

bholley wrote: post #43
TekMol wrote: post #38

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…

> So I think this is not really a leap for the web. Just FireFox catching up a bit. To be clear, Project Quantum is the next phase of architecture, post-Electrolysis. We're also simultaneously working on multiple content processes (which is how Chrome often avoids inter-window jank), but not under the Quantum umbrella. We think we can do better though, which is where Quantum comes in. The Quantum DOM project is desig…

This sounds like it directly conflicts with sandboxing tabs, either for security or stability. Am I missing something?

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#140

Post by Eridrus »

Roboprog wrote: post #75
k26dr wrote: post #74

Doesn't Chrome/Chromium already run as multiple processes?

I believe it is "only" one process per tab on Chrome. This sounds like having multiple processes per tab (or at least, active tab), splitting up different kinds of work to "specialist" processes. Clarification / refinement, anybody?

Chrome is working on isolating at origin boundaries, not really paying attention to it myself though.
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