Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 375 posts

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#181

Post by [deleted] »

jeswin wrote: post #93
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#182

Post by Vinnl »

Kiro wrote: post #167
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.

Report to what?

Preferably to the website owner, optionally to Mozilla: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/pulse

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#183

Post by Houshalter »

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).

I have the opposite problem somehow. Chrome is incredibly slow and pages take dozens of seconds to load. Firefox feels so fast and responsive. I think the issue is due to adblock though, which I keep off of firefox.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#184

Post by SirensOfTitan »

Houshalter wrote: post #183
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I have the opposite problem somehow. Chrome is incredibly slow and pages take dozens of seconds to load. Firefox feels so fast and responsive. I think the issue is due to adblock though, which I keep off of firefox.

Try using uBlock Origin on Chrome next time. It's way more efficient than adblock.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#185

Post by sirfz »

danielbarla wrote: post #104
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 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 l…

I'm on Linux and I don't feel any noticeable speed difference using FF vs Chrome (startup time doesn't bother me at all, my browser is always running and I rarely restart my machine). I've been using FF since the early days and never found enough reason to switch to any other browser and I'm quiet happy with the improvements that have been coming to FF lately and what the future holds.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#186

Post by Tomis02 »

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.

> Gosh it was so blazing fast in comparison to everything else.

It was dead slow, actually, unless you were running a modern (i.e. very fast) multicore PC and with a very small number of tabs. For example, when trying Chrome out soon after release, it managed to grind my PC to a halt because I dared open something like 5 tabs (whereas Opera was happily running double to triple digits). Back in 2008 multicore CPUs weren't as widespread as they are today, so for the most common cases Chrome was just slow, context switching PCs into the ground.

> I think that initial period is why so many regular people use chrome.

Regular people don't simply install new browsers, it's the people familiar with computers (like the family geek, or the guy maintaining PCs for a living) who push them unto regular people. Anecdotally it went something like this: technically inclined people were supporting Firefox (because it wasn't IE and because of A LOT of marketing) despite it being a crappy browser and there being better alternatives. Now, Firefox was not slow per se, but if definitely FELT slow, so when Chrome was launched the same people who had popularized Firefox started promoting the new shiny trinket. Everybody kept saying "it's so fast!" - well, it certainly FELT faster than Firefox, at least when it came to the UI, and that was enough to switch.

> I think the other thing that pushed it this far is just the fact that it's new.

I think so too. Shiny new things have the side effect of attracting the enthusiastic bandwagon jumping types, and enthusiasm can be contagious.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#187

Post by wpietri »

braveo wrote: post #162
ablankst wrote: post #123

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. Thousands of developers from HN make websites . If they switch to Firefox, at the very least, the websites they make will support Firefox. This won't necessarily make Mozilla commercially viable, but if people are really that concerned about it, they can donate to the Mozilla Foundati…

that's purely a business decision.

Not really. Assertions like yours are a moral assertion that we should ignore the moral points at issue and instead favor some unspecified pseudo-business-y ones.

But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it will get tilted toward that company and away from the rest of us.

That may not be bad for any given business next week; these things take time. But for anybody building a serious business, you're going to have to worry about the long-term, large-scale stuff. Google's been going 20+ years; Microsoft and Apple, 40+; IBM, 100+. They didn't get there by only thinking about the next quarter, and you won't either.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#188

Post by paulmlewis »

braveo wrote: post #163
NiLSPACE wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are these category of bugs a constant problem in FF?

They're a big enough problem that they created Rust to deal with them.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#189

Post by sirfz »

falcolas wrote: post #125
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I haven't noticed this myself, and I use both extensively on a daily basis. I currently only use Chrome for work because of Google Meet. Drives me batty that I don't have a choice there.

Same here, can't stand the fact it's taking so long to get Hangouts support on newer versions of Firefox.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#190

Post by wpietri »

NiLSPACE wrote: post #170
braveo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these category of bugs a constant problem in FF?

Some of these bugs could've been prevented with Rust: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2017-0...

Do you have any evidence that's why users are switching away?

My general belief is that general-audience users don't care at all about bugs like those. Which is why we have so very many of them, and have for decades.

Post reply on HN