Live data from Hacker News

Inside a fast CSS engine

hacks.mozilla.org

111–120 of 144 posts

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#111
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source depends on people wanting to work on it. Firefox is a very intimidating beast under the hood. Making it interesting is a vital important goal.

I get that, and that's exactly what the Hacks blog is for (it has always done this masterfully). The recent posts on Hacks and Mozilla Tech on Medium have done this really well I think. I don't think the tone here necessarily does anything for generating interest though. This is highly subjective, but at least for me it made for a jarring read and I lost interest pretty quickly. As I said above, I respect the intent…

Different strokes I guess. There's plenty of documentation out there on CSS engines that you'd find readable while others lose interest pretty quickly. The diversity in approaches ensures that the pool drawn into Firefox development is diverse.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#112
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that by parallelizing work the browser can finish the work it's doing faster, which means your CPU can spend more time idle, which is better for power consumption.

That is a big "ostensibly" there. Hard data showing this would be somewhat nice. And, as others, you are also assuming I was not pegging out my machine doing something by choice.

Metajack mention power usage with parallelization briefly here[0], but doesn't provide the data.

[0] https://youtu.be/7q9vIMXSTzc?t=35m (2015)

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#113

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

No, I created Code Cartoons in my spare time. After I worked at Mozilla for a while, I pitched the idea of me making Code Cartoons explaining the things we were developing in Emerging Technologies. My (current) boss was super into the idea. I talked more about this on a recently recorded Hanselminutes podcast. It should come out soon.

your cartoon explanations are wonderful :)

By the way, what program are you using to make your art?

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#114
Isn't it just crazy that we're gonna get all this cool tech in a browser that is completely free and open source?

And along the way, Mozilla created what is perhaps the most disruptive programming language of the past decade. For free. And open source.

It's really hard to appreciate the gravity of this.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#115

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

No, I created Code Cartoons in my spare time. After I worked at Mozilla for a while, I pitched the idea of me making Code Cartoons explaining the things we were developing in Emerging Technologies. My (current) boss was super into the idea. I talked more about this on a recently recorded Hanselminutes podcast. It should come out soon.

This is kind of inspiring, I tend to doodle bits down on paper, and putting diagrams like this into posts seems like a great idea.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#116
post #112
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a big "ostensibly" there. Hard data showing this would be somewhat nice. And, as others, you are also assuming I was not pegging out my machine doing something by choice.

Metajack mention power usage with parallelization briefly here[0], but doesn't provide the data. [0] https://youtu.be/7q9vIMXSTzc?t=35m (2015)

To be clear, the reasoning is sound on this argument. I'm skeptical due to it never having delivered data, though. :(

I want it to be true. I expect that someone should be able to show this with data. I've never seen it done, though.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#117

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

No, I created Code Cartoons in my spare time. After I worked at Mozilla for a while, I pitched the idea of me making Code Cartoons explaining the things we were developing in Emerging Technologies. My (current) boss was super into the idea. I talked more about this on a recently recorded Hanselminutes podcast. It should come out soon.

What font did you use for this? To me it looked like Comic Sans, but I guess the reaction would be different if it was the case...

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#118
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I created Code Cartoons in my spare time. After I worked at Mozilla for a while, I pitched the idea of me making Code Cartoons explaining the things we were developing in Emerging Technologies. My (current) boss was super into the idea. I talked more about this on a recently recorded Hanselminutes podcast. It should come out soon.

What font did you use for this? To me it looked like Comic Sans, but I guess the reaction would be different if it was the case...

I created my own font based on my handwriting. It's called codecartoons. I also have a more Marker Felt-ish one called Clarker Felt.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I created Code Cartoons in my spare time. After I worked at Mozilla for a while, I pitched the idea of me making Code Cartoons explaining the things we were developing in Emerging Technologies. My (current) boss was super into the idea. I talked more about this on a recently recorded Hanselminutes podcast. It should come out soon.

your cartoon explanations are wonderful :) By the way, what program are you using to make your art?

Thank you :) I use Photoshop on a Wacom Cintiq.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just asked Emilio on IRC for some quick numbers. emilio: pcwalton: wrt gecko we have stuff like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1342220#c25 and similar emilio: pcwalton: there's also the tp6 numbers, though those also measure CSS parsing and other stuff that isn't the style engine per se pcwalton: emilio: our tp6 numbers are improved over Gecko at this point, yes? :) emilio: pcwalton: amazon by a huge am…

This is an easy benchmark for rejecting a lot of selectors: http://bholley.net/testcases/style-perf-tests/perf-reftest/b... Firefox with STYLO_THREADS=1 gets about 160ms on my machine, which is basically parity with safari and chrome. With the parallelism, Firefox gets 40ms. :-) You can also simulate sequential mode in recent nightlies by ctrl-clicking and loading the tab in the background (we disable parallelism for…

Thanks, that is the kind of thing I was looking for (though a bit of a narrow test). Cool to hear that this gets a solid speedup from parallelism.
Post reply on HN