Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust has a monoculture. So firefox does/will have one
What is Rust's monoculture?
I think he means the rust compiler.
Chrome Won
511–520 of 583 posts
Re: Chrome Won
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mentioned these features as selling points but at the current state of things parallel styling/layout are buggy. Servo is buggy. And its not 100% proven better (emphasis on "experimental") than current tech. Chrome may not have these on the roadmap but its stable. The styling and layout algorithms are battle tested. Servo is a nice goal and a technological feat but its a big business risk for Mozilla without clea…
I'd be more than willing to hear your technical thoughts as to why the features I mentioned are not "100% proven better" than the status quo. From my point of view, having measured this stuff over and over again for years, it's undeniable that they result in wins. The remaining bugs are features at the margins and will not affect the overall results. You seem confident, so I'm sure you have specific technical reasons…
The question isn't whether you should or shouldn't try to improve, it's where to invest your resources. Servo improves the speed of layout, style, etc. but is that really what's making the web experience slow? If you do some performance tracing, you'll see your browser already spends a paltry amount of time doing those things. It's spending most of its time running ridiculous amounts of JS that's being pulled in from dozens of domains on any given page load. I don't think the sentiment is "lets be complacent", rather that Servo is optimising in the wrong places. We need to fix the web platform so that apps don't need to rely on performance killing techniques. Servo is cool, but I don't think it's solving what really ails the web.
Disclaimer: I work on Chrome.
Re: Chrome Won
#513Re: Chrome Won
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern JS is pretty fast yeah, but I still don't think it rivals Objective-C does it? If we stipulate it's 1/2 as fast as Swift, it's still much faster than v8 on the benchmarks game [1]. Can you be trickier with JS code than those toy programs are? [1] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...
Objective-C and Swift are completely different beasts, especially on those kinds of workloads. Idiomatic Objective-C would be much worse than that.
Well now that I think about it, maybe in the context of your original argument a comparison against Swift makes sense. It's hard for me to see JS ever being competitive with Swift or a similar compiled language.
Re: Chrome Won
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome is improving on the resource usage front. It's far from perfect but it's getting better. As for privacy you could use the open source chromium, there's a fork somewhere which has all the Google removed.
On windows firefox does everything in one thread while chrome opens many. Depending on the usage both can be fast or slow. Firefox handles multiple tabs better. Chrome handles multiple tabs of videos better
Sigh ntsa. Firefox on my Windows 10 machine right now is using 81 threads. Firefox has used many threads for over 10 years at least.
Re: Chrome Won
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People forget that Microsoft made box-model No, I didn't forget. But you forgot to say that MS did all that with draft specifications or even no spec at all (XMLHttpRequest), just to beat everyone to market, then refused to correct their implementation once the standard was revised and agreed by others. And they sprinkled ActiveX on top, for good measure. > developers (and their managers) lapped it up Disagree. Dev…
Actually people are not taking the default on Windows but instead using MS browser to download and install Chrome. "Microsoft has lost over 300 million browser users in 2016, mostly to Chrome, tracking site shows"
That's mostly a function of the popularity of Android: people switch so that they can have their IDs synchronised with Android, which is now their primary device.
Re: Chrome Won
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
I switched to Opera recently. Got sick of finding Chrome hogging insane amounts of resources. I'm quite happy with it (built in VPN and Adblock!) I don't feel like anyone is trying to force me back to Chrome. Choice and competition are key. Chrome and Firefox did great things, but never forget that competition is the real hero.
I don't know if you're serious or not. But current Opera engine is the same as Chrome; Blink.
yes, but it works better in terms of start-up speed, battery life, looks more native (at least on windows 10).
Re: Chrome Won
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be more than willing to hear your technical thoughts as to why the features I mentioned are not "100% proven better" than the status quo. From my point of view, having measured this stuff over and over again for years, it's undeniable that they result in wins. The remaining bugs are features at the margins and will not affect the overall results. You seem confident, so I'm sure you have specific technical reasons…
The question isn't whether you should or shouldn't try to improve, it's where to invest your resources. Servo improves the speed of layout, style, etc. but is that really what's making the web experience slow? If you do some performance tracing, you'll see your browser already spends a paltry amount of time doing those things. It's spending most of its time running ridiculous amounts of JS that's being pulled in from…
> Servo improves the speed of layout, style, etc. but is that really what's making the web experience slow? If you do some performance tracing, you'll see your browser already spends a paltry amount of time doing those things. It's spending most of its time running ridiculous amounts of JS that's being pulled in from dozens of domains on any given page load. We need to fix the web platform so that apps don't need to rely on performance killing techniques.
This is a case in which looking at the numbers without digging in more closely can lead to misleading conclusions. Yes, the Chrome Profiler reports that a lot of time is spent in JS (though ~25% of total CPU time on styling, etc. is not what I would call "paltry"). But what is that JS doing? It's usually not doing raw computation but rather doing custom layout, interacting with the DOM, etc. People do synchronous reflows (no matter how much you evangelize, people will still do it), which means that layout performance affects what looks like script time. And, due to ads, a lot of the performance cost is cross-domain iframes, which have no reason to run on the main thread (process isolation is too heavyweight to scale this far, which is why Chrome-style Site Isolation isn't a solution).
The real problem with browsers is that so much is synchronous. We need to make everything as responsive as possible, and the way to do that is to aggressively multithread. Unfortunately, that's very hard to do in existing browser codebases. Hence Servo.
The solutions that the Chrome team keeps proposing—Custom Layout, Custom Paint, CSS Compositing, etc. are all targeted toward rendering (and they're essentially short-term band-aids at that). If rendering really weren't a problem, then we wouldn't be spending all this time on Google's Houdini proposals! If layout were fast, we wouldn't see people implementing layouts in JS, and therefore we wouldn't need Custom Layout. If painting were fast, then we could use SVG and CSS and not feel like Custom Paint is necessary. If the main thread weren't so bogged down all the time, then people wouldn't see the need to move a random subset of the Web platform to the compositor thread.
To be honest, I think that Houdini is largely misguided: there is a huge amount of performance left on the table that would obviate the need for Houdini if we simply chased it.
Re: Chrome Won
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Disagree. Developers were the ones that pushed Mozilla and then Firefox (and then Chrome) as soon as they could. No, the DOM put into IE was legitimately better than that in the old NN. MS won that war because their browser was BETTER, period. They then sat on their laurels and the rest of the world passed them by, so now they're still trying to play catchup. But at the time? No, anyone who had any experience in th…
>the DOM put into IE was legitimately better than that in the old NN Where did I mention Netscape? I didn't. IE5 is from 1999, IE6 from 2001, and they were undoubtedly better than Navigator; but the first 0.x releases of Mozilla with the new Gecko engine are from late 2000/early 2001, and were better than IE (although the suite was slow and bloated). Firefox was branched out in 2002 and took off very quickly because…
You may have your timelines incorrect then. By the time Mozilla and Firefox came around MS had already won that war and it was businesses who were making the decision to target IE, not developers.
When developers were pushing IE was when it was IE vs NN.
Re: Chrome Won
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well its not the same boss again. Sure Chrome has a massive market share. But even Today's MS Edge is not open. I used to work for the Edge team and the directors never really gave Open Source a serious thought. It was too tied to windows. I am glad Edge doesn't have the market share that Chrome has. Chrome works on every platform. It hogs memory but its fast. Chromium & v8 are open. This is the kind of things that g…
> Chrome works on every platform. Except anything MIPS-based. Or Power. Or in fact anything that isn't x86 or ARM. And it's not just a matter of compiling it for those platforms. There's a bunch of architecture-specific porting that would have to be done (e.g. you _have_ to implement a V8 backend; there is no platform-independent way to run V8 just with a C++ compiler).
(Thanks partly to Node) V8 works on Power (LE & BE, Linux & AIX), I'm pretty sure it works on MIPS (https://github.com/v8/v8/tree/master/src/mips64), and you can even get in on z/OS (https://developer.ibm.com/node/sdk/ztp/)!
Not sure about Chromium support on those platforms, but V8 support is pretty impressive.