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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#101

Post by sciurus »

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?

The European Commission has successfully acted against Microsoft in the past and has repeatedly tried to act against Google on various antitrust concerns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/technology/google-europea...

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#102

Post by agmcleod »

chrshawkes wrote: post #97
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.

It's true. I've been using firefox again for about a month now. It's pretty decent, but definitely lags behind. Stack trace errors in the console don't respect source maps. A 3D scene ive been working on has been slow to load/refresh, where it's a non issue in chrome. I'm sticking with it for now, as I don't want to be all in on one company, but it's hard at times.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#103

Post by dobin »

_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.

I agree. I dont know where Mozilla is spending their money, but they are years behind in regards to security enhancements in comparison with Chrome, Edge, and IE11. Around IE7 nivea. Still waiting for 64 bit Firefox with Sandbox and per-tab-process and CFI.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#104

Post by danielbarla »

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 have a good answer to your question, but for me it was actually performance. And this is particularly baffling, since Firefox seems to do extremely well in all benchmarks, often beating out Chrome.

But, as a quick test, I closed Chrome, and it was up again instantly (say 500ms). I did the same with Firefox (after a generous warmup / caching session), and got 4 to 6 seconds each time. Clicking links and page loading feels similar; on Chrome I don't notice it, on Firefox I always do. Am I the only one that feels this way?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#105

Post by acjohnson55 »

chinhodado wrote: post #99
jeswin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. It's the browser I'm using right now, but it's got some big problems. It's draining my battery and it interferes with chromecast.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#106

Post by Matthias247 »

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…

Maybe in a very distant future. In short term most webcontent will still be delivered as Javascript (maybe transpiled from TS & co). WASM will cover some niches, e.g. for running some native applications and games directly in the browser. Or for making some high-performance low-level libraries (which might have a JS API on top).

Besides that WASM is also executed by a Javascript Engine, so it's speed still matters.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#107

Post by Touche »

WebAssembly is nice and all, but I don't understand why Mozilla is so obsessed with this feature that will be useable by 0.01% of applications. Meanwhile they are falling far behind in a variety of features that are useful to a much bigger % of the web. Safari and Edge have leapfrogged Firefox in providing the important things to web developers.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#108

Post by empath75 »

rwj wrote: post #75
ericfrederich wrote: post #69

It seems there is this effort to get C/C++ code performing fast inside of a browser... then at the same time there seems to be an effort to get people to stop coding in C/C++ altogether and switch to something more memory safe. Go or Rust for example. Also, I watched a talk from DConf and saw that D is adding memory safety as well. You need to mark any part of code doing pointer arithmetic as "system code" or somethi…

It is not about running C/C++, it is about running native code (or something approximating it). With the right backend, most languages should be able to target WebAssembly. The other complication with supporting Go or Rust is that, even if the language is memory safe, the code still needs to be sandboxed.

Gc'd languages will take a while.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#109

Post by [deleted] »

ericfrederich wrote: post #69

It seems there is this effort to get C/C++ code performing fast inside of a browser... then at the same time there seems to be an effort to get people to stop coding in C/C++ altogether and switch to something more memory safe. Go or Rust for example. Also, I watched a talk from DConf and saw that D is adding memory safety as well. You need to mark any part of code doing pointer arithmetic as "system code" or somethi…

[deleted]

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#110

Post by fiala__ »

sciurus wrote: post #101
fiala__ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The European Commission has successfully acted against Microsoft in the past and has repeatedly tried to act against Google on various antitrust concerns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/technology/google-europea...

Thanks!
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