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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#171

Post by k__ »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #57
k__ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I could write an application in, lets say Rust, compile it to WASM and run it on Linux, macOS and Windows browsers without anything extra?

Yep! It's a completely portable target and fulfils the promise of “compile once, run anywhere”, although how well it runs depends on the particular browser. (It is pretty amazing you can compile C code to something that actually runs on multiple machines, it's very nice.)

Yes, this sounds awesome.

Can this be used as alternative to native modules in Node.js?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#172

Post by Vinnl »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #71
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.

> Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome. I have given Firefox plenty of chances. It's just too slow: webpages load slower, and when they are loaded interactions feel awful (low FPS on large webapps).

Keep giving it a try every now and then: there's a lot of focus to improve in these areas.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#173

Post by DiNovi »

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.

Or use the browser that works better for you...

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#174

Post by DiNovi »

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…

FF has memory and rendering problems

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#175

Post by tambourine_man »

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.

IE6 was not updated for 6 years. On Windows.

On the Mac it went as far as version 5 only. And never made it to x86 (unless you count Rosetta)

So, through the dark ages, IE was very much frozen and Windows only, for all intends and purposes.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#176

Post by Arcaten »

TekMol wrote: post #67
vanderZwan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot. There's a talk by Alex Danilo from Google IO 17 explaining it in detail. Here, I'll link you directly to the part where he starts explaining the differences on a technical level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v4E6oksar0&t=11m24s Another part is that I suspect it makes maintaining a good JS compiler easier, because all of that asm.js code can be removed. I'm sure the browser vendors are happy about that.

I don't mean the technical differences. I mean the benefit. What will be the gain for the user of a web app?

I'm not 100% sure about any of this (I've only listened to most of the video above), but I think the gist is that WebAssembly provides a compile target for applications, meaning you can pre-compile an application so that your source is downloaded essentially as machine code. Furthermore, that means your compilation can perform as many optimizations that you care for, because it's happening ahead of time (not on the user's machine).

Without WebAssembly, browser vendors have to strike a balance between optimizing the JS as much as possible (for increased performance), and running the script as soon as possible (so the user isn't waiting too long for execution to begin).

edit: Demo of this in-browser video editor charts a FPS difference between the JS and WebAssembly implementations. https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#177

Post by Symmetry »

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.

Does the 'g' prefix do anything? On my Firefox it still searches for 'g com.scala.List' in Duck Duck Go, my default search engine. When I run that on Chrome it searches for 'com.scala.List' on Github because I've chosen g as a search leader for Github (which is super convinient and I wish I could do that on Firefox).

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#178

Post by sirfz »

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.

It's the default browser I'm using right now on Android. Performance is still not on par with Chrome but it did improve since the last time I tried it a few months ago. The ability to install extensions surpasses anything else for me so I'm sticking with FF.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#179

Post by Vinnl »

_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.

> Mozilla focuses on thousand of other things instead of making FF a great browser.

Mozilla focuses on thousand of other things in addition to on making FF a great browser.

See project Quantum, WebExtensions (some would argue that it makes the browser worse, but the goal is undeniably to make it better), and Photon.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#180

Post by tambourine_man »

knocte wrote: post #119
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…

Chrome is not open source. Chromium is.

Its rendering and JS engine are, which is what matters to compatibility and portability
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