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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#471

Post by Manishearth »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #354
kenhwang wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust was pretty much designed to solve problems for Firefox. It's IMO the best bet Mozilla has made these last few years and we're just starting to see them reaping the rewards.

How much Rust is actually in the new Firefox? I'm not seeing any based on a casual click-around in the repo, though I'll freely admit I haven't scanned the entire source tree. Edit: if there is any, can someone give me a link to the part of the source tree that has it?

- The mp4 metadata parser. This has been shipping for a while now, and was the first shipped Rust code.

- The URL parser (rust-url). This is not shipping, because it's incomplete and there are some mismatches to deal with. But it exists.

- Stylo: Servo's CSS engine in Firefox. By far the biggest one, this is shipping in beta and nightly, and should be there in the 57 release for everything but Android

- webrender: Servo's GPU-focused renderer. Not shipping, can be flipped on in nightly. Still has work to be done

- encoding-rs: All encoding operations go through this now. Shipping

- The U2F stuff: A lot of the U2F code is in Rust. Shipping in nightly though I think it's still off by default (but that will change soon?)

As far as the location of the code:

The root rust crate is at https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/toolkit/libr... . Everything can be reached from it, and the cargo file that has all these links is https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/toolkit/libr...

- All of Servo is vendored in tree in https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/servo . Not all of Servo is used, the majority of the used code is from https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/servo/compon...

- Webrender is vendored in tree in https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/gfx/webrende...

- The U2F HID stuff is vendored at https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/dom/webauthn...

- There's a bunch of stuff in libcubeb ; I don't even know what it's there for (https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/media/libcub...)

- You can find "c api" rust crates scattered throughout, like mp4parse_capi, rust-url-capi, encoding_glue . These depend on the actual crate (usually, a crate that's published to crates.io) but expose an API that C can call into

- Finally, any dependency from crates.io is vendored in https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/third_party/... . Note that this includes build time dependencies (so you'll find crates that deal with CLI parsing and terminal color info that aren't actually used by firefox). Despite the folder being labeled "third_party", a lot of that code is maintained by us, but in separate repos and published to crates.io. In particular, large chunks of Servo are reusable published crates.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#472

Post by Manishearth »

dralley wrote: post #292
Brakenshire wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically Firefox OS would become a lot more viable with these sorts of performance improvements. Using Firefox Nightly I have actually felt an occasional sensation of blurring between native and web, because of how quickly some sites render and respond. I wonder how applicable these innovations will be on the mobile web. You'd have thought parallel processing would be particularly important in mobile processors whe…

Firefox OS was ahead of it's time in the most literal sense. What they really should have done was FIRST work on all these new web APIs that allow you to make web apps that can accomplish things that only native apps could do before. They didn't exist 5 years ago, and that was a problem. Perhaps if they focused on making web apps as capable as native apps first, it would have been a viable platform.

All the PWA stuff Chrome is doing is basically moving in this direction, from the opposite end, really. Instead of building an OS that needs a web based app system, they go in reverse by taking their existing OS and allowing for webapps to be work more like regular apps. This probably will involve more APIs and such.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#473

Post by Manishearth »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #379
noncoml wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's as a bit unfair conclusion. I just believe that if Firefox dies then for sure "Open Web" will die. But, yeah, of course I am not happy with Pocket. But it still better than using Chrome.

One of the big issues I have with Pocket isn't even the privacy problem, it's the integration. Firefox would (IMO) be better served by having such things as extensions included in the default distribution. They could even make a separate tab in the extensions dialogue for them, perhaps hidden behind an about:config preference. That way anyone who doesn't want them could disable them and speed the browser up. There wa…

Most firefox UI code is lazy loaded, and the pocket extension was a pretty simple thing that hit an endpoint. I doubt you could speed things up by removing it.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#474

Post by majewsky »

andrew3726 wrote: post #327
nextos wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox beta is very nice. My only (big) regret is that APIs that make Vimperator work are getting phased out. I can't live without Vimperator.

Well, there's vimium-ff [1] which works pretty good for me. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

I switched to it yesterday from VimFX. Basic stuff works the same as in VimFX, but:

- Yanking does not work at all.

- "Follow in new tab" (F) does not work. (EDIT: Working now, so maybe I did something weird yesterday.)

- "Open" (o) does not respect search keywords. "wikipedia Test" gives me a search for "wikipedia test" instead of the Wikipedia page for "test".

- Most of the shortcuts don't work on a blank page, or on "about:" pages. For example, when I open a new tab with "t", then change my mind and press "[Esc]x", it doesn't work. Nor does any other letter command.

I filed a bug for the first one, and it seems to be related to shortcomings in FF's clipboard API for WebExtensions, so I suppose that at least the last issue in my list is also related to what the browser allows WebExtensions to do. But at this point, I don't really care about filing more bug reports. I'm looking for alternatives instead. (Any suggestions?)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#475

Post by majewsky »

yorwba wrote: post #369
clircle wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have smooth scrolling disabled in about:prefs, which only disables it on my touchpad, not with vimium-ff

I just found "Use smooth scrolling" under Vimium's advanced options. Might be this page: moz-extension://78ac0671-3b7c-4a05-8771-f46ecdb2b65c/pages/options.html#advancedOptions unless that random string is unique per-user and I just broadcast my password.

When I copy this URL into the addressbar and hit Enter, it just disappears. Probably a security feature.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#476

Post by majewsky »

eropple wrote: post #143
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a technical position that may be true, but one cannot discount the speedup you subsequently get if you run an ad/script/tracker blocker on mobile...

I just use a VPN application that host-blocks that stuff.

Sort of off-topic, but I'm baffled by how well host-blocking works still, given the trivial nature of the blockade.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#477

Post by Supersonic112 »

As someone with lots of tabs (multiple hundreds) and windows (usually about two dozens) open in a session, I was very surprised and amazed how quickly the latest few Firefox versions started up. Before, there would be this constant fear of having to close the browser more often than every couple of months (due to updates or high ram usage, which also seems to have gotten better) because it would take several minutes of waiting idle until all windows and contents were slowly loaded and usable, whereas now everything is available in a minute or two at worst.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#478

Post by ZenoArrow »

int_19h wrote: post #470
ZenoArrow wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Firefox OS could've found a niche on low-end phones. There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI, Mozilla wasn't even the first to try it (the Palm Pre got there first). Also, there are tons of phone apps that are just websites in an application wrapper, so it's not like they had to start from scratch to build up their app ecosystem. Lastly, whilst Mozilla…

> There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.

As I said before, I saw Firefox OS's primary niche being low-end phones. In that market, many people barely care about the OS being run. They could've easily racked up some decent sales in this area without many of their customers caring about the long term benefits. In some ways, Firefox OS was a case of unfortunate timing, part of me wonders if it would've been better to have a longer incubation period to make the platform better before announcing it, but another part of me thinks that they had to release it when they did, before the vacuum that Symbian had left behind was completely filled by Android.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#479

Post by dom0 »

kuschku wrote: post #461
tzs wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: Actually, KHTML is licensed LGPL, and that's a viral license if you make a derivative work. So I suppose Apple was forced to open source their changes when it finally went to market. When LGPL code is linked with non-free code and the resulting work is distributed LGPL only requires that the changes to the LGPL code be open and that the object files for the non-free code are provided so that users can exercis…

The reason webkit is known today, and not KHTML, is because Apple ignored their LGPL requirements. First, they didn't publish anything for years. Then only obfuscated source dumps with all comments removed for many years. It took ages until they published some source code, even longer until they opened their repository. By that time KHTML was long dead, and development had centered on WebKit. No, Apple is no saint in…

Apple's JavaScript implementation is based on KJS as well. Arguably, Microsoft was hostile towards open source in general at the time, while Apple simply stole open source software.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#480

Post by [deleted] »

vanviegen wrote: post #430
zdkl wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah further proof for google that being sneaky Gets Shit Done. We collectively need to factor this into our product choices and stop encouraging the sneakiest of them all.

I understand that it's quite trendy to shit on Google's parade these days. But how exactly is bundling Flash player sneaky? Or are you alluding to some sort of bait and switch that was executed to suck people into the Google sphere? If so, please explain! Chrome was never marketed as a privacy-minded browser, was it?

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