WebAssembly: Mozilla Won • Hacker News Board

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#271

Post by dleslie » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:16 PM UTC

jhpriestley wrote: post #266

People 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 s…

I don't see the problem.

Given an enormous WASM binary one could write a small bootstrap binary that fetches the binary and stores it in local cache. Future updates to the mega-binary can be done with some kind of delta-diff mechanism.

Now, let's say you rely on Qt in some manner. Well, likely the WASM package resides at some known URI and is subject to standard browser caching.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#272

Post by markdog12 » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:24 PM UTC

NiLSPACE wrote: post #240

markdog12 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Thanks for the info, that is...unexpected, but a good approach.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#273

Post by 2bitencryption » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:26 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #187

braveo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's purely a business decision.

Not really. Assertions like yours are a moral assertion that we should ignore the moral points at issue and instead favor some unspecified pseudo-business-y ones. But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it wil…

if using Chrome meant you needed to step on three kittens a day, I think I would agree with you.

but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#274

Post by SimeVidas » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:37 PM UTC

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…

It can. My father and sister use Firefox, because I told them it’s the best option for privacy.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#275

Post by wcummings » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

ablankst wrote: post #123

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…

> 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…

I am horrified by the number of developers who only test in Chrome. At my last gig I found glaring UI bugs (whole menus not responding to mouse clicks, for ex) in FF. Sad.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#276

Post by schuyler2d » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:57 PM UTC

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #84

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 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 just add a space at the end and it becomes a search. Other sibling comments have other workarounds, but that's been the easiest for me.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#277

Post by diafygi » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:58 PM UTC

Will there ever be a way to have constant-time functions in WebAssembly? Relying on WebCrypto primitives is fairly limiting.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#278

Post by bobajeff » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 5:58 PM UTC

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 think it's important to scale back expectations for Servo. Given that Servo itself won't be ready to be used as a main engine for quite some time do to insufficient site compatibility.

Project Quantum will use only pieces of Servo coupled along with Gecko. Maybe Mozilla will fully replace all of the old single threaded code at some point in the future but I imagine that's a ways off.

Given the gradual progress of these changes it's likely that any successes in performance it brings will be copied in the other engines before they are too far ahead.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#279

Post by acdha » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

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.

As people have pointed out, that's Chrome-only at the moment but that's also a big moving of the goal-posts. Your original comment was “far behind in a variety of features that are useful to a much bigger % of the web” — precisely how much user-visible benefit do you think comes from a feature which may accelerate the first load slightly?

If that was that critical, it'd be easy to point to e.g. webpagetest.org traces showing Chrome loading a site significantly faster. And, yes, you can find differences in microbenchmarks but it's pretty rare to find something where rel=preload is a game-changer.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#280

Post by wutbrodo » Thu, Jun 01, 2017, 6:01 PM UTC

blazespin wrote: post #193

braveo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's purely a business decision.

It is a business decision, and the right decision is not to allow for monoculture to develop.

This is just flat inaccurate. Given the GP comments' premise of optimizing only for the business's direct interests, the expected value of your contribution against monoculture is so negligible that it won't balance out changing damn near any habit that you had already chosen. It's a pretty basic collective action problem; if you're optimizing for yourself and your business alone, ignoring the wider picture is still the optimal decision.

The actual argument against (which others are making and which I'm sympathetic to) is that one shouldn't optimize only for direct bottom-line business interests, that businesses and people have a social responsibility, etc etc. But that's entirely different from what you're talking about.