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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#281

Post by AgentME »

Andrex wrote: post #253

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.

WebAssembly (at least to start with) is mostly intended as a more compact binary encoding of asm.js. It still mostly executes the same way and offers the same APIs as asm.js.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#282

Post by wutbrodo »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #213
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…

Thousands of developers who probably also support 10's of thousands of family member's PCs and can just quietly switch the defaults. The price for me doing tech support for free on your laptop is the default browser gets switched to Firefox and Chrome gets uninstalled :-)

Eh, I'd rather not force my views onto people, against their interests, without their knowledge or consent. That strikes me as pretty dishonest.

I use both Firefox and Chrome pretty regularly, but I'm under no illusions that the quality of Firefox isn't quite a bit lower in multiple very concrete ways for my day-to-day usage (presumably because Mozilla has less resources than Google).

In the past, I have switched family members to a _better_ browser, but I'm talking about IE6 to Firefox, the usability gap between which was 1) in favor of the switched-to browser and 2) waaaayyy bigger than Firefox v Chrome in 2017. Even then, if I had to make that same decision again today, I would probably first convince the person whose computer I was modifying. Especially for non-technical users, having things suddenly change out from under you can be really jarring in an environment that's already pretty confusing.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#283

Post by fixermark »

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.

It may not be sufficient to just switch to FF. I think it likely that what FF needs is people putting in the grunt work of continuing to optimize the hell out of it so that it's performance-competitive with Chrome.

Users will choose the fastest browser that works, in general.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#284

Post by KORraN »

throwaway-1209 wrote: post #247
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 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).

Then try containers from Test Pilot and probably you will not need profiles anymore :)

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#285

Post by magicalist »

kuschku wrote: post #267
jeswin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In practice this means that the position of packages in node_modules is computed internally in Yarn, which causes Yarn to be non-deterministic between people using different versions.

I believe Chrome has to be installed, but it clearly doesn't have to be the default. Just see all the Samsung phones with the default Samsung Internet Browser as evidence.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#286

Post by fixermark »

Tomis02 wrote: post #186
6DM wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember when chrome dropped? Gosh it was so blazing fast in comparison to everything else. I think that initial period is why so many regular people use chrome. It hasn't gotten to the point to look anywhere else yet, at least in my opinion. I think the other thing that pushed it this far is just the fact that it's new.

> 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…

PROTIP from UI and UX theory:

There's no useful distinction between "Felt slow" and "Is slow" in getting users to adopt a product.

If your UI feels clunky because you open a window and paint it white before filling in the UI itself, stop painting it white.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#287

Post by wutbrodo »

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…

> As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites

Where do you see this? I have Firefox open and don't see this on Search, Drive, Google Music, etc.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#288

Post by nathancahill »

fixermark wrote: post #283
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.

It may not be sufficient to just switch to FF. I think it likely that what FF needs is people putting in the grunt work of continuing to optimize the hell out of it so that it's performance-competitive with Chrome. Users will choose the fastest browser that works, in general.

Have you tried it recently? Mozilla has done exactly that. The latest version is faster than Chrome in some benchmarks.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#289

Post by fixermark »

Touche wrote: post #149
jahnu wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Even if it causes Photoshop and CAD software and such to be ported to the web (which would be a huge business model change, so don't hold your breath) we're still talking about a tiny percentage of apps. There's no reason why Slack would rewrite in C++.

The question of interest is "In a world where webassembly exists and is well-supported, would Slack have been written in JavaScript (or a JS-targeting language like TypeScript), or was there some other language the developers knew better that they could have worked faster in but the JavaScript tax prevented that option?"

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#290

Post by TekMol »

kibwen wrote: post #231
TekMol wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would the whole Photoshop be downloaded and compiled? I would expect a web app to only download the parts the I use. If I want to blur an image, I don't need the other gazillion filters for example.

And hey, even if photoshop is 1000 times bigger then jquery - that would still compile in one tenth of a second.

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