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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#81

Post by kuschku »

jeswin wrote: post #78
SimonPStevens wrote: post #55

It's worth pointing out that Mozilla can only continue to put pressure on Google and fight for the open web if people continue to use Firefox and support them. Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome. Report websites that don't support FF. We are all better off for the existence of Mozilla, and strong viable competition to Chrome and IE.

Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this. Servo, which I think is the most important software project in the world, is where it will start to change. That's when those of us who may not be directly contributing code into Servo need to come out and do our thing. I still fondly remember the NYT ad and the crop circle. We should d…

I doubt that would help.

As the lead dev of VLC in a recent interview said, they’ve been offered huge amounts of money to include Google Chrome in their installer, and saying no was the hardest decision he’s ever made.

As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites, as long as Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox (see the youtube redesign), as long as Google pays developers to ship Chrome as malware with every single installer, as long as Google forces OEMs to install Chrome with Android, Chrome will rule the market.

The only solution now is the EU.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#82

Post by _0w8t »

jonloldrup wrote: post #46
_0w8t wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both PNaCl and WebAssembly need a compiler to a get the machine code run by CPU, but the output of PNaCl is checked via NaCl verifier while nothing checks that the output of WebAssembly is safe machine code. As the verifier for NaCl is likely to be an order magnitude smaller than a component in WebAssembly implementation that verifies and compiles the bytecode to the native code, PNaCl attack surface is much smaller.

"...the verifier for NaCl is likely to be an order magnitude smaller than a component in WebAssembly implementation..." Why is this so?

NaCL verifier is just a loop that essentially matches the instructions against a white list and checks their format and offsets. WebAssembly needs parser/linker/optimizer/assembler. Granted that the format is optimized for fast translation, but just the amount of code to support data structures in the implementation like maps, lists etc. must be big.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#83

Post by sanxiyn »

SquareWheel wrote: post #79
SimonPStevens wrote: post #55

It's worth pointing out that Mozilla can only continue to put pressure on Google and fight for the open web if people continue to use Firefox and support them. Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome. Report websites that don't support FF. We are all better off for the existence of Mozilla, and strong viable competition to Chrome and IE.

You make it sound like Mozilla is somehow fighting against Google for the open web. But virtually all browser vendors are aligned on this issue, and have been working towards improving the web through standardization, improved performance, and functionality for years now.

The point of the article is that while Google is mostly aligned on the issue, Google also does things like creating PNaCl, which is not an aligned behavior.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#84

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #55

It's worth pointing out that Mozilla can only continue to put pressure on Google and fight for the open web if people continue to use Firefox and support them. Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome. Report websites that don't support FF. We are all better off for the existence of Mozilla, and strong viable competition to Chrome and IE.

I use FF, although Mozilla focuses on thousand of other things instead of making FF a great browser.

As a developer I'm annoyed every time I enter "com.scala.List" in the address bar and FF does not use google to search but thinks this is an url. No, "List" is not a TLD and no that website does not exist.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#85

Post by simias »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #55

It's worth pointing out that Mozilla can only continue to put pressure on Google and fight for the open web if people continue to use Firefox and support them. Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome. Report websites that don't support FF. We are all better off for the existence of Mozilla, and strong viable competition to Chrome and IE.

I don't follow these things pretty closely but why is chrome so much more popular than firefox these days amongst non-technical users?

I use Firefox as my main browser but my girlfriend uses chrome on her computers so I get to use it from time to time. I don't notice any major differences, the extensions I care about are available on both browsers, the speed is not noticeably different etc... On top of that Firefox predates chrome so it's not like people not switching away from IE because they didn't know better. So what happened exactly? Is there some chrome killer feature that I just happen not to use myself?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#86

Post by hacker_9 »

WebAssembly will finally put an end to the constant battle between browser vendors as to who has the fastest Javascript Engine. The endless benchmarks about how V8 is faster, or Chakra is faster, or SpiderMonkey is faster, and so on and so on. Hundreds of thousands of millions of man hours have been poured into building the fastest JS parsers imaginable, and now WebAssembly is going to come along and side step the whole thing in one go by moving the parsing stage off of the client.

Javascript parsing technology will go down in history as ultimately the biggest waste of time that mankind ever indulged in, all because no one stood up and questioned if this language was even a good fit in the first place. In a few years the WebAssembly creators may even win the Noble Peace Prize for finally ending the biggest battle in the never ending "browser war".

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#87

Post by moonfern »

In 2016 the global games market had $99.6Bn revenue and a 8.5% YoY. PC had a 27% +4.2% market share, TV 29% +4.5% , mobile 27% +23.7% tablets 10% +4.5% and casual webgames 5% -7.5%. (source:Newzoo) Google with it's presence in mobile, tablets and web seems to be the winner, edge will support webassembly in the future and mozilla which is much smaller than opera on mobile reminds me of Xerox.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#88

Post by fiala__ »

kuschku wrote: post #81
jeswin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this. Servo, which I think is the most important software project in the world, is where it will start to change. That's when those of us who may not be directly contributing code into Servo need to come out and do our thing. I still fondly remember the NYT ad and the crop circle. We should d…

I doubt that would help. As the lead dev of VLC in a recent interview said, they’ve been offered huge amounts of money to include Google Chrome in their installer, and saying no was the hardest decision he’s ever made. As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites, as long as Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox (see th…

can you elaborate on that last point? What does the EU have to do with this?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#89

Post by NiLSPACE »

simias wrote: post #85
SimonPStevens wrote: post #55

It's worth pointing out that Mozilla can only continue to put pressure on Google and fight for the open web if people continue to use Firefox and support them. Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome. Report websites that don't support FF. We are all better off for the existence of Mozilla, and strong viable competition to Chrome and IE.

I don't follow these things pretty closely but why is chrome so much more popular than firefox these days amongst non-technical users? I use Firefox as my main browser but my girlfriend uses chrome on her computers so I get to use it from time to time. I don't notice any major differences, the extensions I care about are available on both browsers, the speed is not noticeably different etc... On top of that Firefox p…

> I don't follow these things pretty closely but why is chrome so much more popular than firefox these days amongst non-technical users?

Because every time people go to google.com they see a popup that google works better in Google Chrome.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#90

Post by spcelzrd »

simias wrote: post #85
SimonPStevens wrote: post #55

It's worth pointing out that Mozilla can only continue to put pressure on Google and fight for the open web if people continue to use Firefox and support them. Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome. Report websites that don't support FF. We are all better off for the existence of Mozilla, and strong viable competition to Chrome and IE.

I don't follow these things pretty closely but why is chrome so much more popular than firefox these days amongst non-technical users? I use Firefox as my main browser but my girlfriend uses chrome on her computers so I get to use it from time to time. I don't notice any major differences, the extensions I care about are available on both browsers, the speed is not noticeably different etc... On top of that Firefox p…

What happened is tighter integration with google services and every time you go to google.com, there's a prompt to download Chrome.
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