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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#201

Post by tapoxi »

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.

Internet Explorer wasn't really multi-platform. The Mac version used a different rendering engine (Tasman as opposed to Trident) and it of course didn't have support for ActiveX extensions.

For a long time being a 90s Mac user sucked as different websites required you to use IE on a Windows PC.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#202

Post by Vinnl »

ericfrederich wrote: post #66

WebAssembly and PNaCL always seemed like a hack. A very elegant thought-out hack, but still a hack. It required a 64 bit OS but could only ever operate in 32 bit space. Should have been dead on arrival because of that fact alone. For something that was trying to bring C/C++ and video games into a browser setting a 4GB max on memory should have been a non-starter.

I'm afraid pretty much every part in the pipeline of getting websites to your computer and shown on screen is a big giant hack of which it's a wonder that it even works at all, most of the time.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#203

Post by Houshalter »

_0w8t wrote: post #82
jonloldrup wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...the verifier for NaCl is likely to be an order magnitude smaller than a component in WebAssembly implementation..." Why is this so?

NaCL verifier is just a loop that essentially matches the instructions against a white list and checks their format and offsets. WebAssembly needs parser/linker/optimizer/assembler. Granted that the format is optimized for fast translation, but just the amount of code to support data structures in the implementation like maps, lists etc. must be big.

NaCL also needs those things because it has to compile it's bytecode to machine code on multiple architectures. It's no different than webasm, just a different bytecode. A big advantage of webasm is that it's integrated into the existing javascript VM, that has already been sandboxed and battle hardened.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#204

Post by z3t4 »

Seems like a lot of complexity for very little gain in performance. Optimizing JavaScript often gain 100x performance, and after that rewriting it to Web-assembly would only gain up to 4x performance.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#205

Post by tapoxi »

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 think for me it's specifically UI performance. Opening a new tab in Chrome is instantaneous. In Firefox there's a slight but noticeable stutter that annoys me just enough to avoid using it.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#206

Post by MisterBastahrd »

wpietri wrote: post #190
NiLSPACE wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I switched away from Firefox because at the time it was bloated, buggy, and slow. I haven't switched back because I am more familiar with Google's developer tools.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#207

Post by cknight »

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…

It's an interesting comparison.

With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with via its control of the client - Windows.

Google is influencing what the web is viewed with by simply being such a key part of the web itself, and using its weight from that direction instead.

(One could argue that they have Android for the client, but as a percentage of web users it's still far from what Windows had in the IE6 days.)

Firefox won back the web by having a great product, grassroots evangelism, and a Microsoft who badly neglected their competing product for many years. They left an opening.

Chrome might be losing its lustre but it's certainly not being treated the same way. I think Firefox's new battle for market share might be harder than it was vs IE, simply because Google is still so active on this front. In response, the only real new thing in our arsenal is hindsight, which I guess is what the VLC example above is a result of.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#208

Post by flohofwoe »

TekMol wrote: post #122
flohofwoe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a good overview from the emscripten author: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/why-webassembly-is-faster-... TL;DR: much faster parsing over asm.js (10x to 20x faster), parsing should also use much less memory, 10%..20% smaller downloads (when comparing the compressed sizes, uncompressed WASM is several times smaller then asm.js), 64-bit integers (these have to be emulated on asm.js),

much faster parsing Isn't parsing super fast already? From my experiments, jquery seems to compile in a staggering 0.1ms.

I get 165ms for my 8-bit homecomputer emulator which is 534KB compressed asm.js (http://floooh.github.io/virtualkc/), and it seems the first call into the code takes another 500ms on Chrome (probably for JIT warmup). Bigger apps like UE4 or Unity demos are several times bigger and can take seconds to compile.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#209

Post by bryanlarsen »

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.

I find Firefox on Android to be much faster than Chrome. The browser itself may or may not be faster, but the uBlock Origin plugin makes it scream...

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#210

Post by daddykotex »

NiLSPACE wrote: post #150
daddykotex wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok thanks.
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