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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#231

Post by kibwen »

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.

The partial intent of WASM is to write things orders of magnitude larger than jQuery. Whether or not it will ever be practical to ship e.g. a complete Photoshop clone in a browser remains to be seen, but if that's your goal then you do have to start worrying about things like parse time.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#232

Post by ionised »

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…

> but why is chrome so much more popular than firefox these days amongst non-technical users?

Google aggressively pushed Chrome on web users.

Banner messages claiming the users browser was out of date (it wasn't, they just weren't using Chrome), or that this website works better on Chrome.

Redesigning their web services to be coincidentally worse on Firefox.

The numerous and excessive ways it was bundled with various other application installers. Most users don't customise and application install, they just stick with the defaults and the result was, they ended up with Chrome as the default browser.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#233

Post by dylan604 »

pmontra wrote: post #140
calcifer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clicking links and page loading feels similar; on Chrome I don't notice it, on Firefox I always do. Because Chrome, by default, enables prefetching [0] (it loads links before you decide to click on them). Firefox will never do that due to obvious privacy concerns. It's the usual "principle vs convenience" thing, where most people choose the latter. [0] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1385029?hl=en

Actually http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.prefetch-next says > Link prefetching is when a webpage hints to the browser that certain pages are likely to be visited, so the browser downloads them immediately so they can be displayed immediately when the user requests it. This preference controls whether link prefetching is enabled. > Possible values and their effects > true > Enable link prefetching. (Default) You can…

How does prefetching affect things like the not-yet-viewed website's stats? Since it is a Google browser and Google Analytics is so dominate, is it to Google's advantage to do this for reasons other than convenience to the user? (Inflated stats for the prefetched website even though the user never viewed it?)

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#234

Post by ucho »

baby wrote: post #35
midnitewarrior wrote: post #23

Congrats for winning! This does not change Firefox being on its final death throes though. Chrome won where it counts.

tree style tabs

Yeas, what about it? Oh right, it might stop working after Firefox 57: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1224 . There are people working on it but that isn't true for many other extensions that are no longer under active development.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#235

Post by ionised »

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

For me personally, Chrome is WAY worse in memory usage than Firefox

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#236

Post by kibwen »

Vinnl wrote: post #202
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.

s/getting websites to //

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#237

Post by markdog12 »

pygy_ wrote: post #192
jhoechtl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the original posters perspective, Servo is certainly te least concern to change the tides. For an end user it makes absolutely no difference if Mozilla reloaded will be written in C++, OCaml, Rust, wathever. Features, performance, security and speed of evolvement do count.

Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance (GPU accelerated compositing and rendering), and is scheduled to be merged in Firefox as fast as possible. Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag (not everything is wired at this point), and it also improves perf. So, yes Servo is of paramount importance for Mozilla's future, because it does make a difference to end…

> Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance

Have you gotten amazing results on your machine? I ask because I think Servo, Rust, WebRender are awesome and I'm rooting for them, but the performance has not been great when I try Servo or WebRender in Firefox on multiple machines. Maybe it's just the machines I've tried on though.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#238

Post by ionised »

chrshawkes wrote: post #97
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.

Unfortunately it's not as easy as that. My web development is hugely dependent upon chrome's browser debugging. It's made my life a lot easier being a JavaScript dev. I'm sure Firefox has made strides but does it offer something better than Chrome? Probably not, there is a reason most web development shifted to Chrome in the first place.

What's the difference between the two?

I've only done a little front-end development but I tried both browsers debugging tools and other than layout, I couldn't see any differences.

They both seem to offer the same things.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#239

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

bobbytherobot wrote: post #216
k__ wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, whatever syscalls you want to make could be made by node.js for you, though that quickly veers into absurdist territory.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#240

Post by NiLSPACE »

markdog12 wrote: post #237
pygy_ wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance (GPU accelerated compositing and rendering), and is scheduled to be merged in Firefox as fast as possible. Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag (not everything is wired at this point), and it also improves perf. So, yes Servo is of paramount importance for Mozilla's future, because it does make a difference to end…

> Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance Have you gotten amazing results on your machine? I ask because I think Servo, Rust, WebRender are awesome and I'm rooting for them, but the performance has not been great when I try Servo or WebRender in Firefox on multiple machines. Maybe it's just the machines I've tried on though.

Currently WebRender on Firefox renders the page twice as explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/618p54/webrenderer_la...
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