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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#211

Post by sp332 »

DiNovi wrote: post #174
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…

FF has memory and rendering problems

Firefox worked to close all memory leaks a few years ago. New ones are treated as bugs and fixed quickly. They even got aggressive about limiting memory that addons use. You can check about:performance to keep an eye on them.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#212

Post by angry_octet »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #209
chinhodado wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And saves battery and data. The absence of plugins on ios/safari and android/chrome is a severe deficiency. It is also interesting that adblocking firewalls get denied by the app stores...

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#213

Post by SimonPStevens »

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…

Thousands of developers who probably also support 10's of thousands of family member's PCs and can just quietly switch the defaults.

The price for me doing tech support for free on your laptop is the default browser gets switched to Firefox and Chrome gets uninstalled :-)

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#214

Post by tambourine_man »

wpietri wrote: post #198
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…

> MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. The Web won because a) its introduction was a one-time technological change whose social impact was on the order of the printing press, and b) Microsoft had gotten fat and lazy on their monopoly revenues from Windows and Office. We can't get cocky here. It is perfectly plausible that HTML will still render 500 years from now.…

Not cocky, just watchfully optimist

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#215

Post by steveklabnik »

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 constant problem in all browsers. Take last year's Pwn2Own for example: http://blog.trendmicro.com/pwn2own-day-2-event-wrap/

Demonstrated a successful code execution attack against Safari to gain root privileges using an use-after-free vulnerability in Safari and an out-of-bounds vulnerability in Mac OS X.

Demonstrated a successful code execution attack against Microsoft Edge in the SYSTEM context using an uninitialized stack variable vulnerability in Microsoft Edge

Demonstrated a successful code execution vulnerability against Microsoft Edge in the SYSTEM context using an out-of-bounds vulnerability in Microsoft Edge and a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Kernel.

etc. Highlights mine. All of these are prevented in safe Rust.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#216

Post by bobbytherobot »

k__ wrote: post #171
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That is a good question. I imagine it depends on why it is a native module. If they are native module because it utilizing features at the OS or machine level, then I doubt they could.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#217

Post by db48x »

Touche wrote: post #151
calcifer wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Use instead. This has existed for the entire lifetime of Firefox, all the way back to the first release when it was called Phoenix.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#218

Post by Houshalter »

remcob wrote: post #20
therealmarv wrote: post #16

Is there anywhere a "hello world" or simple DOM modification program which I can implement with WebAssembly?

I made this factorial compile-and-run example in NodeJS: https://gist.github.com/Recmo/e0b6911992897c5f51c38fda822537... To run it you need at least Node 8.0.0 and the `--expose-wasm` flag. Sorry for using modern JS, you will need to use babel-node to run it. Or you can port it to old fashioned JS.

I didn't know you could run wasm from node, awesome.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#219

Post by joobus »

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.

No, I won't support Mozilla. I used Firefox for a long time, but then they decided to drop their extension capabilities for something very similar to Chrome's. Why wouldn't I just use chrome?

Second, the zoom functionality in Firefox is broken. On a 4k display, pages just get jacked up after doing Ctrl-+ a few too many times. Chrome's zoom is far superior. People have told me, "just change the default pixels per inch" nonsense. No, Firefox's zoom is just broken.

Lastly, after the SJW witch hunt and ousting of Brendan Eich, I don't care what happens to Mozilla.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#220

Post by euyyn »

cknight wrote: post #207
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…

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…

> With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with

Microsoft was trying (and succeeding) for the web not to be a preferable API to Win32, so as to keep that way a high barrier to entry into the OS business. Which is why IE was squarely against standards.

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