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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#111

Post by AndyMcConachie »

_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.

How could the browser know this is not a TLD without first doing a DNS lookup? And please don't mention Mozilla's Public Suffix List.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#112

Post by tambourine_man »

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…

Agreed with everything but your first sentence.

MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help.

(Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right thing)

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#113

Post by camus2 »

roca wrote: post #58
jonloldrup wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but the API you'll code against is limited

That's not really true. With JS glue code (including many libraries already written) Wasm modules can access anything JS can do. E.g. there are Wasm demos showing access to WebGL2, audio generation, camera/microphone, HTTP, storage, gamepads, ...

> E.g. there are Wasm demos showing access to WebGL2, audio generation, camera/microphone, HTTP, storage, gamepads, ...

All web API. nothing a Javascript app in the browser can't do.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#114

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #91
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What other arcane commands do I need to use to make FF work like Chrome?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#115

Post by makomk »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #37
k__ wrote: post #24

Is WASM platform independent?

To the extent that asm.js and JavaScript are, yes. Everything is well-defined, so in theory any Turing machine should be able to run it, but it's certainly going to be easier to implement efficiently on a typical modern 32-bit or 64-bit CPU in a computer or phone than on something more unusual.

Which is to say that they assume little-endian just like asm.js and modern JavaScript do. Architectures other than ARM and x86 are mostly dead so this isn't generally a huge problem except for the handful of die-hard Amiga users.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#116

Post by dagw »

Touche wrote: post #107

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.

I don't understand why Mozilla is so obsessed with this feature that will be useable by 0.01% of applications.

What follow is speculation:

At guess they feel burnt after they lost the whole closed source DRM in the w3c spec battle. They realize that something like WebAssembly will become a thing in the next few years and that if they don't push super hard for a completely open solution from day 1 then they're afraid that Google, Microsoft and Apple will get together in a room and make a deal without them.

At the end of the day Mozilla don't only care about delivering a browser, they care about delivering a completely open browser, and they don't want their ability to deliver that to become more threatened in the future.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#117

Post by jahnu »

Touche wrote: post #107

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.

> useable by 0.01% of applications.

I think you will be surprised how many apps will use WASM in the future. I'm a C++ dev and working with WASM (and asm.js as a fallback) full time. It's going to be absolutely huge.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#118

Post by valarauca1 »

tambourine_man wrote: post #112
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…

Agreed with everything but your first sentence. MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help. (Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right…

Whoa.

Internet Exploder was constantly evolving and multi-platform.

Did you forget IE ran on PPC Macs, X86 Macs, Windows, and CP/M?

IE updated... just slower than Netscape.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#119

Post by knocte »

tambourine_man wrote: post #112
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…

Agreed with everything but your first sentence. MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help. (Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right…

Chrome is not open source. Chromium is.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#120

Post by LamaOfRuin »

_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.

As a developer I'm annoyed every time I enter "defined.in.hosts.file" in the address bar and Chrome does not believe this is a url but performs a search instead. Yes, I can define anything as a valid domain in hosts and yes that website exists on my computer.
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