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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#91

Post by ComodoHacker »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #84
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.

Try "g com.scala.List" instead. It's not that much inconvenience.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#92

Post by Nokinside »

_0w8t wrote: post #51
Nokinside wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing applies to NaCl verifier. Bugs in verifier can cause problems. Verification or generation bugs are bug, not security weaknesses in the architecture. (I should not need to mention this but compiling is form of verification).

NaCl verifier in practice is much simpler than WASM compiler leading to a significantly reduced attack surface.

This is not true. NEXE has different security boundaries enforced differently on each supported platform. You need to write disassembler for each supported instruction set and verify them. This is more complex task than generating correct code from wasm.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#93

Post by jeswin »

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…

Mobile is where the war is being fought. A better browser can ship with hundreds of millions of mobile devices. Firefox-next with ad blocking and better support for parallelism is just what phones need. Users will use what came with the phone.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#94

Post by stdbrouw »

hacker_9 wrote: post #86

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 wh…

> Javascript parsing technology will go down in history as ultimately the biggest waste of time that mankind ever indulged in

If there is absolutely nothing else in this world that you can think of that might be a bigger waste of time than performance optimizations that have benefited billions of users for many years, you're not trying very hard.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#95

Post by ZenoArrow »

scriptproof wrote: post #7

Asm.js was a brillant idea, but wasm is more like a bytecode. This is where is the part from NaCl the author missed. Wasm is derived from asm.js but also an improvement on LLVM to make a portable bytecode, that LLVM is not. One more step in the LLVM toolchain to get portability...

WASM isn't based on LLVM. WASM is a compiler target, but compilers other than LLVM can target WASM.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#96

Post by NiLSPACE »

fiala__ wrote: post #88
kuschku wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Perhaps he means a similar thing to what they did to Microsoft by forcing them to make it possible to choose a different browser when installing Windows.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#97

Post by chrshawkes »

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.

Unfortunately it's not as easy as that. My web development is hugely dependent upon chrome's browser debugging. It's made my life a lot easier being a JavaScript dev. I'm sure Firefox has made strides but does it offer something better than Chrome? Probably not, there is a reason most web development shifted to Chrome in the first place.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#98

Post by hacksonx »

fiala__ wrote: post #88
kuschku wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think, I could be wrong but I think he/she is referring to what the European Union did with Microsoft and asked them to include a way that asks new Windows users to select a default browser and offer them choices besides Internet explorer.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#99

Post by chinhodado »

jeswin wrote: post #93
kuschku wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mobile is where the war is being fought. A better browser can ship with hundreds of millions of mobile devices. Firefox-next with ad blocking and better support for parallelism is just what phones need. Users will use what came with the phone.

Firefox's performance on Android is horrible though. I tried switching to it a few times but always have to switch back because of performance issue.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#100

Post by ZenoArrow »

tommica wrote: post #31
midnitewarrior wrote: post #23

Congrats for winning! This does not change Firefox being on its final death throes though. Chrome won where it counts.

And that is a sad thing :( I really hope Firefox comes back with a new push towards better web, and keeps pushing it!

In terms of usability it's already on a par, it's just a question of waiting for average users to have a strong enough reason to switch. Potential speed improvements from Project Quantum seem like the best hope in the short term.
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