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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#251

Post by livingparadox »

jahnu wrote: post #117
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.

> useable by 0.01% of applications. I think you will be surprised how many apps will use WASM in the future. I'm a C++ dev and working with WASM (and asm.js as a fallback) full time. It's going to be absolutely huge.

Could you elaborate on how you're using WASM in your full-time job?

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#252

Post by livingparadox »

TekMol wrote: post #121
flohofwoe wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compressed download size is indeed only slightly smaller (mostly around 10%), but the parsing is much faster, even noticeable for fairly small demos. (edit: replied to the wrong comment, apologies)

Is the "parsing" what is displayed as "compile script" in Chromes profiler? That seems to take almost zero time. For example jquery.min.js compiles in 0.1ms here.

Libraries like jquery are not the target use case for WASM. Its intent is to make large applications viable on the web, like something you'd normally install on your computer.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#253

Post by Andrex »

This is just my personal viewpoint with nothing to back it up, but I doubt Google ever seriously wanted other browsers to implement PNaCl. As this post says, it was never specced and Google's big push for it was in Chrome apps on the Chrome Web Store.

Also, wasn't asm.js just a subset of JS? This line confuses me:

> asm.js and PNaCl represented quite different visions for how C/C++ code should be supported on the Web

Yes you could compile C to asm.js, but it would still be compiling it to JS at the end of the day. WebAssembly is completely different in that regard.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#254

Post by bzbarsky »

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.

IE ran on Sparc/Solaris too, at least as of IE5. I don't think they ever ported IE6 there.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#255

Post by xemoka »

markdog12 wrote: post #245

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.

More mature, and soon only available in chrome extensions and apps: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/05/goodbye-pnacl-hello-webass...

Chromium is refocusing on WebAssembly

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#256

Post by livingparadox »

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.

That's the point. a WASM app has access to the same Web APIs that JS does, for the most part. This was in response to the claim that WASM only gets to work off of a limited api, not an argument as to why WASM is an improvement over JS.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#257

Post by cpeterso »

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.

A Firefox patch to implement is being reviewed right now:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222633

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#258

Post by giantahead »

brudgers wrote: post #60
dullgiulio wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand what "the compiler is trusted" means. What could an evil compiler really do? Maybe add a spinning loop to waste CPU cycles, but that can be done in JS too.

The question reminds me of Ken Thompson's Turing Award essay, Reflections on Trusting Trust , http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/fa08/papers/p761-th...

one can never bring this up enough when discussing execution trust, but still, in context of relative security, some things look weaker than others

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#259

Post by bzbarsky »

redtuesday wrote: post #225
falcolas wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Address bar is Cmd+L on Mac. Search bar is Cmd+K on Mac. I _think_ on Windows/Linux it's the same thing but with Ctrl instead of Cmd...

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#260

Post by reacweb »

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.

At my office, there is a proxy to access internet. When a site is blocked by blue coat filter, I launch putty to open a tunnel to my webserver and I launch firefox portable using my tunnel as a proxy. I used to do it using chrome, but the enterprise has set a policy to block configuration of chrome proxy (like internet explorer). firefox is the only browser that allows uncensored (and private) internet access in my office.

At my house (ubuntu gnome), windows firefox on wine is the only way I have found to access some webTV based on flash.

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