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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#221

Post by wtetzner »

dobin wrote: post #103
_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.

I agree. I dont know where Mozilla is spending their money, but they are years behind in regards to security enhancements in comparison with Chrome, Edge, and IE11. Around IE7 nivea. Still waiting for 64 bit Firefox with Sandbox and per-tab-process and CFI.

I hope they never go with process-per-tab in Firefox. It's one of the things I dislike about Chrome.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#222

Post by maxsilver »

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.

> this feature that will be useable by 0.01% of applications

If they do this right, I suspect it will be much more heavily used than that. I can already see a world where every major webapp is using this (indirectly, using a language that compiles down to this) for the performance and user experience improvements it could provide.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#223

Post by pcwalton »

s_kilk wrote: post #136
danielbarla wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Am I the only one that feels this way? Nope. I really want to like Firefox but its performance is just so much worse across the board than Chrome. Another example is video playback: Firefox, when viewing video, heats up my laptop to the point where the fans kick in at full blast. Chrome stays nice and cool on the same material. The difference in battery life is noticeable too. Sorry Firefox, you need to do better.

For VP8 and VP9, Firefox and Chrome use the same video decoding backends, so it's likely not video decoding that is causing the problem. For H.264, Firefox uses the OS-provided codecs; I'm not sure what Chrome does, but in any case that's the only possible solution for Firefox due to patent issues.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#224

Post by tmaly »

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 donate to Mozilla every year, and I use Firefox on phone and desktop.

I like that I can install ublock origin on mobile firefox. Chrome does not support this option.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#225

Post by redtuesday »

falcolas wrote: post #126
_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.

Enter it in the search bar instead? Not trying to be snarky - but that's why Firefox offers both, so you can be explicit about your intent.

Yeah, wondering the same. Is there an advantage to type it into the address bar? Maybe a faster key combination or something?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#226

Post by OskarS »

Tomis02 wrote: post #186
6DM wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wer…

> 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.

I totally dispute that. I had a very modest PC at the time and I remember vividly using Chrome for the first time, noticing how much better it performed compared to firefox, especially if you had many tabs open.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#228

Post by TremendousJudge »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #213
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…

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 :-)

And a week later Chrome is back to being the default, since Google pushes it like it was malware. They learned a lot from toolbar installers

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#229

Post by ionised »

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.

Maybe your business decision should be a socially responsible one.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#230

Post by TremendousJudge »

camus2 wrote: post #113
roca wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really true. With JS glue code (including many libraries already written) Wasm modules can access anything JS can do. E.g. there are Wasm demos showing access to WebGL2, audio generation, camera/microphone, HTTP, storage, gamepads, ...

> E.g. there are Wasm demos showing access to WebGL2, audio generation, camera/microphone, HTTP, storage, gamepads, ... All web API. nothing a Javascript app in the browser can't do.

>nothing a Javascript app in the browser can't do.

not being written in Javascript is a great advantage

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