Which I believe was Brendan Eich initiative. Mozilla without him is just not the same project.
WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
261–270 of 375 posts
Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
#262It'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.
Report to what?
https://webcompat.com/ is a good start.
Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can find an excerpt in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx1P93nS0c&t=51s
Transcribing the subtitles:
> "To be honest we’ve been offered some insane amounts of money to do bad stuff around VLC, like shipping tool bars at the same time of the installer of VLC or or installing other software like Google Chrome and so on. And when you see the numbers they propose to you, you’re just like: How the fuck am I going to say no to that?"
> "The thing is, it’s not only my project so I’m not allowed to do that. [It’s the] legacy of other people. That wouldn’t be moral."
Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
#264Earlier 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.
Firefox got big in large part because they had good developer tools long before anyone else did. I worked several places where management would say things like, "don't waste time, we only need this to work in IE". The developers would nod and go right back to creating in Mozilla and then fixing it in IE after, because it was faster.
In that way there was a quiet revolution toward cross browser support.
Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
#265Earlier 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.
You mean the thing that is not actually supported in any browser other than Chrome, because Google just came up with it a few months ago to replace , which worked in most brosers?
(Yes, I know Safari technical preview has support, but shipping Safari does not. We'll see whether Firefox ends up shipping support before Safari or not; the patches to implement in Firefox got posted to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222633 earlier today.)
Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
#266People seem way too optimistic about web assembly.
The elephant in the room is download size. A wasm photoshop, even if it works and performs well, is still a multi-gigabyte "web page". The browser is in no way set up to handle that.
Even simple things will be huge compared to javascript webpage. Let's say you write your todo app in Python with Qt bindings. Sure, wasm lets you run it on the web. You'll just have to ship Qt, the python interpreter, low-level graphics rendering code, shims for system calls in the standard library ... overall you'll end up way, way heavier than the javascript + DOM version. Probably 100MB or something.
wasm as it's implemented is going to have a very narrow band of usefulness. Basically, isolated computational modules (e.g. a physics simulation), and games. The games won't be, like, "Call of Duty on the web", they'll be little flash-type games with not too many assets. Creators will have to put a lot of effort into asset loading and compression to get around browser limitations.
Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Mobile is where the war is being fought. A better browser can ship with hundreds of millions of mobile devices. Firefox-next with ad blocking and better support for parallelism is just what phones need. Users will use what came with the phone.
How do you get Firefox on devices? If OEMs want to use the Google Play store on any single of their devices, they have to make Chrome the default browser on all of them.
Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
#268Earlier 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.
jQuery is tiny. https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.2.1.js is 268KB; the minified version at https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.2.1.min.js is 86KB, 30KB after gzip compression.
For asm.js/webassembly we're talking about source code sizes in the multiple megabytes range after gzip compression.
Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> noticing how much better it performed compared to firefox
Given that I used Opera's performance as a basis for my statement I guess your comment, instead of being a glowing praise of Chrome, simply reflects very poorly on Firefox.
At the end of the day, Chrome ended up using too many system resources to be a viable option for me at the time. People accused me on occasion of being an Opera fanboy, but, objectively, it was hard to justify why Chrome would need more resources than Opera while delivering significantly less features.
Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
#270Keep 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
Yep, I'm aware, my point is it's still behind.