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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#151

Post by Touche »

calcifer wrote: post #128
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.

> Meanwhile they are falling far behind in a variety of features that are useful to a much bigger % of the web Do tell...

Too many to name, really. is one that immediately comes to mind.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#152

Post by jhoechtl »

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…

Given the original posters perspective, Servo is certainly te least concern to change the tides. For an end user it makes absolutely no difference if Mozilla reloaded will be written in C++, OCaml, Rust, wathever. Features, performance, security and speed of evolvement do count.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#153

Post by NiLSPACE »

ice109 wrote: post #146
NiLSPACE wrote: post #89

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? 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 :)

There are people who actually do that because otherwise they get an inferior version of a website even though it works perfectly fine on Firefox as well.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#154

Post by SquareWheel »

sanxiyn wrote: post #83
SquareWheel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(P)NaCl was introduced to replace NPAPI, at a time when the majority of rich web interaction still happened through plugins.

I'm glad to see it killed off, and have been expecting it for a few years now. JS/asm and (hopefully soon) WebAssembly have supplanted many of its features and benefits.

Still, this doesn't strike me as anti-open web. Google offered a solution when one was needed - it didn't gain traction, so they eventually retired it.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#155

Post by ShannonAlther »

jhoechtl wrote: post #152
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…

Given the original posters perspective, Servo is certainly te least concern to change the tides. For an end user it makes absolutely no difference if Mozilla reloaded will be written in C++, OCaml, Rust, wathever. Features, performance, security and speed of evolvement do count.

Mozilla claims that Servo's parallelization will improve performance, and that Rust's features will improve security.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#156

Post by chrisweekly »

johnhattan wrote: post #76

One of the best things about Flash was that you could pack up all your bytecode and bitmaps and vectors and sounds and fonts into a single compressed SWF file that contained your entire application/game/demo. That made it really easy to do stuff like double-click-able client demos and deliverables for websites. Ditto for Java and JAR files. Looks like the "compressed bytecode that runs really fast" part is now a real…

Related tangent: sounds like Zeit.co's `pkg` for Node: https://twitter.com/zeithq/status/858393067241357312

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#157

Post by barrkel »

_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 feel exactly the other way about Chrome; whenever I need to type in a test site URL, it thinks it's a search query, and I need to go back and stick http:// in front.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#158

Post by tete »

chrisseaton wrote: post #11
tete wrote: post #3

I think this is a good thing. It probably prevented a new DirectX style dark age of the web. Probably! I don't pretend to be able predict what path companies would have went in the next few years. It's really good to see that there is a will to agree and that there is more than one player. Could always be more, also for keeping standards sane. (WebSQL officially failed because there isn't more variety)

> It probably prevented a new DirectX style dark age of the web. Do you mean ActiveX rather than DirectX? As in the OLE and COM technology for embedding user interface components on Windows?

Sorry. That was before my coffee. It's indeed what I meant. Thanks!

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#159

Post by tete »

douche wrote: post #34
tete wrote: post #3

I think this is a good thing. It probably prevented a new DirectX style dark age of the web. Probably! I don't pretend to be able predict what path companies would have went in the next few years. It's really good to see that there is a will to agree and that there is more than one player. Could always be more, also for keeping standards sane. (WebSQL officially failed because there isn't more variety)

DirectX fostered multiple generations of gaming on PCs. I dunno what you're talking about with referencing it in a web development context, but it was, and still is, miles ahead of dicking around with broken OpenGL.

Oops. Meant to write ActiveX.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#160

Post by jahnu »

Touche wrote: post #149
jahnu wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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++.

Not talking about re-writing. But there is an enormous amount of code out there in c, c++ and other langs that people would love to use in web apps.

In our case we use the same library code on iOS, Android, Windows and in the browser to do computationally expensive operations.

Also, to dismiss productivity apps such as PS and CAD as unimportant is kind of crazy. Huge business model change? They are still an enormous part of the software industry and the browser a great platform for distribution for many cases. Performance and code secrecy being two barriers that WASM solves for them.

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