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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#301

Post by realusername »

hinkley wrote: post #264
braveo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can confirm this, everyone I knew at the time was coding on Firefox even if no-one required any compatibility with it just for that reason, it was just much easier to code with.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#302

Post by eridius »

acdha wrote: post #279
Touche wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Safari Technology Preview is adding support for as well. I'm not sure what the current state is, but the last 2 releases both had changes that were related to this.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#303

Post by kevingadd »

danielbarla wrote: post #104
simias wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't have a good answer to your question, but for me it was actually performance. And this is particularly baffling, since Firefox seems to do extremely well in all benchmarks, often beating out Chrome. But, as a quick test, I closed Chrome, and it was up again instantly (say 500ms). I did the same with Firefox (after a generous warmup / caching session), and got 4 to 6 seconds each time. Clicking links and page l…

Session restore can make firefox take a lot longer to start. It's possible your profile has a very old session with a lot of tab history. Maybe try unpinning and closing all your tabs (there should be a 'bookmark all tabs' you can use to get them back later), and then exit firefox. This should prune all that tab data and history (session restore saves a pretty considerable amount of back and cookie history for each tab.)

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#304

Post by dmitrygr »

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.

Open play store and install it unlike iOS, android supports setting any browser as default. You can then even completely disable chrome

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#305

Post by Noseshine »

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++.

> which would be a huge business model change,

Is it? Since Adobe switched to the subscription model and the "Adobe Creative Cloud" I'd say they would be quite happy if that infrastructure would be good enough to run their very big application suite(s). Not to mention the savings of not having to support two major platforms (and several OS versions for each) - even realizing them only partially would be big. Of course, given the size of their product I'd say there is little use in talking about this at this point, the web platform would have to mature a lot more first.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#306

Post by hinkley »

realusername wrote: post #301
hinkley wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can confirm this, everyone I knew at the time was coding on Firefox even if no-one required any compatibility with it just for that reason, it was just much easier to code with.

When I shared my observations with coworkers, they would nod and say they had experienced the same thing. Same with peers I knew outside of work. Either we were in a very large bubble, or that was happening everywhere. And I think the rise of Mozilla aligns with those observations. It 'just worked' because everyone quietly made sure it did, even when people told them not to.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#307

Post by irrational »

wcummings wrote: post #275
ablankst wrote: post #123

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. 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.

At my job I work in Firefox, a coworker works in Chrome, and a third person works in Safari (to be honest we don't bother checking the site in any Microsoft browser). That way we are able to do cross browser testing fairly easily.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#308

Post by d2p »

Houshalter wrote: post #191
LamaOfRuin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer I'm annoyed every time I enter "defined.in.hosts.file" in the address bar and Chrome does not believe this is a url but performs a search instead. Yes, I can define anything as a valid domain in hosts and yes that website exists on my computer.

That's weird. Any time I search for anything in chrome that doesn't contain a space, it asks me "Did you mean to go to http://x ?"

It does a DNS lookup and if it's a valid domain shows you this. If you see it for complete nonsense, then it's possible your ISP is doing DNS Hijacking like mine!

Eg. if I type "cheese", it shows "Did you mean to go to http://cheese/"? If I click that link I get TalkTalk's "Error Replacement Service" full of ads (or at least I did, till I switched to Google DNS because TalkTalk's "opt-out" system has been conveniently broken for years)!

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#309

Post by d2p »

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #120
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a developer I'm annoyed every time I enter "defined.in.hosts.file" in the address bar and Chrome does not believe this is a url but performs a search instead. Yes, I can define anything as a valid domain in hosts and yes that website exists on my computer.

If you add a slash to the end, it'll always treat it as a domain. eg. "cheese/".

I did see someone from Google ask if it'd be useful if after the first time, when Google knows it's a valid domain, it should just go there directly (even without the slash). Everyone said yes, but it doesn't seem like it was ever implemented!

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#310

Post by Certhas »

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…

We already are getting desktop apps with HTML based UI [1].

A wasm photoshop would cache the download, use a HTML front end, and be written in a compiled language.

Sure you'll be able to use the tech to do stupid things like running a python interpreter inside a WebAssembler virtual machine. But then your argument is just that if you use the tech to do stupid things you'll get stupid results. Total straw man.

[1] https://electron.atom.io/apps/

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