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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#241

Post by baby »

ucho wrote: post #234
baby wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the point of using Chrome if you can't have something like Tree Style Tabs? Unless you're a beta user I don't see the point. I personally will stop using newer versions of Firefox if they stop supporting tabs on the side.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#242

Post by markdog12 »

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?

Yes, search for remcob's answer on this page

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#243

Post by flavio81 »

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.

As pointed out, this will be HUGE.

For starters, this will enable client (browser) software development in a language other than Javascript/ES6. With, probably, a plethora of compilers to choose from, some of them giving better optiimizations than others.

I think this will make an explosion of more browser-hosted applications, with much more power than before. And will make many more programmers go into serious frontend app development.

Also, as a personal wish of mine, this enables the possibility of being able to program on the language of your choice, both in the browser side and on your server side. For example Haskell/Haskell, Common Lisp/Common Lisp, Clojure/Clojure, Racket/Racket Python/Python, etc. And i mean using in the browser the FULLY FEATURED version of the language, not a subset or a limited version like ClojureScript, PyJS, Transcrypt, etc, but a full version of the language supporting the full libraries available for it.

This also gives us a little step forward in liberating ourselves from being tied to the mainstream operating systems: Windows, Apple X, Linux, BSD, because more and more apps will target the browser environment, not the operating system directly.

Roll your own operating system and still keep compatibility with most apps!!

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#244

Post by flavio81 »

hacker_9 wrote: post #86

WebAssembly will finally put an end to the constant battle between browser vendors as to who has the fastest Javascript Engine. The endless benchmarks about how V8 is faster, or Chakra is faster, or SpiderMonkey is faster, and so on and so on. Hundreds of thousands of millions of man hours have been poured into building the fastest JS parsers imaginable, and now WebAssembly is going to come along and side step the wh…

> Javascript parsing technology will go down in history as ultimately the biggest waste of time that mankind ever indulged in, all because no one stood up and questioned if this language was even a good fit in the first place.

Javascript, in its current ES2016 version, is a pretty good and powerful language. ES2015 is also fine.

The problem is that most JS code out there has been done in the older versions of Javascript (pre-ES2015), which is really a terrible language (doesn't even have clean and clear variable scoping!).

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#245

Post by markdog12 »

Keep in mind nacl/pnacl, as a more mature technology, is ahead of WebAssembly wrt features, such as threads, simd, etc.

I know these are coming to WebAssembly, but who knows how long it'll take.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#246

Post by a_imho »

jhoechtl wrote: post #152
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…

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.

And impact wise fast default on content blocking is the feature that gives the biggest bang for your buck. It makes for a nice, fast and more secure browsing experience, plus it is a differentiation Chrome might be reluctant to enable (without crippling it too much).

Browser benchmarks should include how long does it take to watch a 30 sec youtube video from application start to finish or how much 3rd party feature/bloat/mal/adware it downloads connecting to $major_site.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#247

Post by throwaway-1209 »

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…

I can tell you exactly why I'm not using FF: due to extremely poor support for switching between multiple profiles. Oh, it's possible, but compared to Google's seamless support for the same, its very awkward, even if you install an extension (which is only available from a third party).

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#248

Post by cpeterso »

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…

> Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag

Stylo is still a compile-time option, but will soon be built by default and controlled by an about:config flag. You can watch the progress to build by default in this Firefox bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1356991

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#249

Post by livingparadox »

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…

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally, the deep integration with Google is a feature for me. Almost everything I do is on Google (email, domains, drive, Cell Carrier), so having the deep integration with Google on Chrome makes my life that much more convenient.

I got into chrome as a teenager, though, when my dad switched from firefox to chrome due to Chrome being apparently faster than firefox at its debut.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#250

Post by jaflo »

kuschku wrote: post #81
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…

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…

Do you have a link to the interview? And how is the YouTube experience worse on Firefox? I didn't know of Google's practices except for the banner in other browsers.
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