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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#141

Post by jchw »

valarauca1 wrote: post #118
tambourine_man wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IE ran on... CP/M? What CP/M are you talking about?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#142

Post by daddykotex »

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…

What is Servo bringing to the table that will, in your opinion, make Firefox the browser of choice again?

I'm asking genuinely here. Is Servo expected to be have a much better performance?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#143

Post by detritus »

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…

Whilst Microsoft eventually started advertising Explorer as a response, Chrome was the first browser I'd ever seen advertised on billboard posters (liberally plastered all over London at least) and in non-technical magazines and newspapers.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#144

Post by bobthedino »

valarauca1 wrote: post #118
tambourine_man wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was even briefly a version of IE for HP-UX and Solaris.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#145

Post by cptskippy »

6DM wrote: post #127
simias wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you remember when chrome dropped? Gosh it was so blazing fast in comparison to everything else. I think that initial period is why so many regular people use chrome. It hasn't gotten to the point to look anywhere else yet, at least in my opinion. I think the other thing that pushed it this far is just the fact that it's new.

The same thing happened when Phoenix dropped. Over the years though it packed on the pounds though and started to look more like Navigator. Chrome's waist line has been expanding as well.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#146

Post by ice109 »

NiLSPACE wrote: post #89
simias wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox should start reporting its user agent as chrome :)

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#147

Post by [deleted] »

NiLSPACE wrote: post #89
simias wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#149

Post by Touche »

jahnu wrote: post #117
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.

Even if it causes Photoshop and CAD software and such to be ported to the web (which would be a huge business model change, so don't hold your breath) we're still talking about a tiny percentage of apps. There's no reason why Slack would rewrite in C++.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#150

Post by NiLSPACE »

daddykotex wrote: post #142
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…

What is Servo bringing to the table that will, in your opinion, make Firefox the browser of choice again? I'm asking genuinely here. Is Servo expected to be have a much better performance?

It heavily makes heavy use of parallelism and the GPU which increases the responsiveness. It's also uses Rust as a programming language instead of C++ which will prevent a whole category of bugs like buffer overflows and use after free.
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