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Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

#91

Post by jillesvangurp »

NiveaGeForce wrote: post #86
jillesvangurp wrote: post #80

The browser wars are back; that's a good thing. The web started moving forward again since Firefox upped their game on the performance and ux front. I converted back (from Chrome) about a year ago and haven't looked back. MS has been bleeding market share for a long time. The IE to Edge transition basically fragmented their market, destroyed their brand name, and they never really got back the market share they had g…

There is no need for MS to abandon Edge, especially when OS integration is going to be more important in the near future. Chrome and Firefox are also not as resource efficient on Windows, which his especially important on battery powered Windows devices. Same as on Mac OS, where you use Safari, if you value your battery life. Also there will be new mobile Windows devices very soon. https://www.windowscentral.com/upco…

I imagine maintaining it is a big effort and keeping up an even bigger one. Sure they make billions, but still. What are they really getting out of this at this point.

Re: Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

#92

Post by maga »

vbezhenar wrote: post #51
maga wrote: post #18

Two things on my wishlist as a developer: 1. Decoupling Edge updates from Windows updates for quicker adoption. 2. Custom Elements as the basic feature for Web Components.

Edge is a Windows component, why decouple its updates? Is there any problems with quick windows updates? Ordinary users can't even disable updates now, so it shouldn't be a problem.

According to Statcouter, Edge 17 released 2 months ago is only used by 2/3 of Edge users, whereas it takes just couple weeks for a new Chrome to reach most of its users.

When I hear about a new feature in Chrome/Firefox, I know I can start incorporating it into my code targeting those browsers immediately because by the time the code goes in production in couple weeks most users will have already updated their browsers. With Edge, I just put such news into "let's come back to it in half a year" box.

Re: Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

#93

Post by imtringued »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #80

The browser wars are back; that's a good thing. The web started moving forward again since Firefox upped their game on the performance and ux front. I converted back (from Chrome) about a year ago and haven't looked back. MS has been bleeding market share for a long time. The IE to Edge transition basically fragmented their market, destroyed their brand name, and they never really got back the market share they had g…

Windows S and Windows on ARM rely on the windows store which has banned third party html engines.

Re: Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

#94

Post by bovermyer »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #2

I've never seen a person using Edge. Does anyone here use it? Do you work at Microsoft or have a big technical investment in their technology? Do you find the lack of cross-platform support annoying, or do you primarily use a single OS? These changes all look like they apply to ChakraCore, which is open source and available outside of Windows. I'd be curious to hear what kinds of use-cases people have for using Node…

I use Edge for some things. It's definitely the fastest of the browsers for me.

I've had a handful of sites work strangely in it, though, which is why I don't use it as my primary browser.

Re: Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

#96

Post by MaxBarraclough »

NiveaGeForce wrote: post #21
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edge is on both iOS Well, not really. It exists on iOS the same way Chrome and Firefox exist on iOS: as frontends for iOS's WebKit engine.

And?

And that changes the game a great deal. The innards of the browser matter.

For instance, on Windows, I usually use Firefox, but I use Edge to view Netflix, as (for whatever reason) Netflix supports Edge's EME pipeline better than the other Windows browsers. That's specific to the browser's innards, not to its skin.

Incidentally, the DefectiveByDesign guys aren't happy about the situation - https://www.defectivebydesign.org/edge-netflix-eme

Re: Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

#97

Post by worble »

Jach wrote: post #59
NiveaGeForce wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something called Edge from Microsoft is available for iOS (where it is a rebranded WebKit) and on Android (where it is a rebranded Blink, IIRC). Why is it a problem that it uses webkit on iOS and Android? Why reinvent the wheel, when those rendering engines are already optimized for those platforms? The thing I care about is that it supports syncing of settings. > If you primarily work with Windows 10, Edge makes s…

The privacy controls of Windows 10 are insufficient. In order to make Windows 10 usable, at least by Windows 7 standards, for people who actually care (you sound content with MS's worldview, that's fine for you), this is the latest version of all the crap you have to do: https://github.com/adolfintel/Windows10-Privacy

I also highly recommend using this http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/msmg_toolkit.html to fully manage your installation in the first place. This'll get rid of a lot of the crud Microsoft tries to force on you before it even gets installed on your pc. It also has the added benefit of significantly lowering the size of the image and speeding up the install times.

Of course I also highly recommend just rolling your favourite linux distribution where possible, but sometimes it's just not possible for certain professions.

Re: Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

#98

Post by danShumway »

Flenser wrote: post #76
giancarlostoro wrote: post #66

One announcement I'm waiting to hear about in all honesty is Microsoft open sourcing Edge, they don't have to reveal Cortana specifics (though that would be fund to read through if they'd allow it) but just EdgeHTML with Chakra in a way that compiles nicely. I would love to see what would happen if they allowed the community to contribute back to Edge if it could become much more competitive as a result of them welco…

Chakra is Open Source: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore but I guess what you want is an "Edgeium" equivalent of Edge in the way that Chromium is the full (compilable) OSS version of Chrome.

I think that Microsoft is still working on a Chakra version of Node as well. That's probably what I'm most excited about, V8 hasn't had much competition, which means that there's nobody to question its approach to resource usage, garbage collection, etc...

V8 is great for some things, but it falls down hard on low-resource environments. This is one of the reasons why Electron apps are so greedy, you have to kind of do a lot of fighting with V8 if you don't want it to balloon RAM usage. If you have open RAM sitting around, sometimes V8 will decide to just take it so it can defer garbage collection longer, or so it doesn't need to waste time asking for it in the future. From what I've heard, Chakra is better about those kinds of situations.

I would really like to see a runtime ecosystem for Node and Electron that is as competitive as browsers are. Microsoft is probably in the best position to push that.

There's some potential that with a solid competitor they could open the floodgates and encourage other developers to start building browser runtimes that are optimized for specific scenarios rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

Re: Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

#99

Post by Cu3PO42 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #87
ksec wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am thinking of the same. No one uses Microsoft Browsers anymore, especially Edge. Even if you exclude Phones and Tablet, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer combined to have close to 90% market share. And if you include Smartphone and Tablet, which has 4 times the user base of PC, Edge has less then 2% of total web market share. They could made EdgeHTML and Chakra the base for Visual Studio Code, allowing…

I've thought about this too. Would be interesting to see how they could add Node-like support to Chakra (APIs) and see how it performs on Windows compared to Electron in regards to memory consumption and Battery usage. But when you talk about making even more web browser apps people don't get too excited.

They did!

"Node.js on ChakraCore" [0] already exists. It is maintained by Microsoft, but lives under the NodeJS organization on GitHub. Instead of reimplementing the Node APIs, they roughly implemented the V8 API layer on top of Chakra (which they call chakrashim) to enable "normal" Node to run. I believe the original use case was to run Node on Windows IoT, but I can't seem to find a source on that currently.

A very cool feature that is enabled by ChakraCore is time travel debugging (i.e. the ability to go backwards when stepping through code), which has worked very well for me so far.

In terms of performance, it does not appear to perform better (or just as good as) V8. The most recent benchmarks I could find are roughly one year old, but have Chakra consistently performing worse than what was at the time a recent V8 version [1].

It would be interesting to see how memory usage compares. MS has benchmarks to compare different engines for Node in the repository, however I am currently not able to run those. Maybe someone can provide current insight?

If you are interested in just testing it out, you can get Node versions built on Chakra from nvs and potentially other Node version managers (see [0]).

[0] https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore [1] https://sqreen.github.io/node_engine_bench/?q=eyJ0ZXN0cyI6Wy...

Re: Improved JavaScript and WebAssembly performance in EdgeHTML 17

#100

Post by Flenser »

danShumway wrote: post #98
Flenser wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chakra is Open Source: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore but I guess what you want is an "Edgeium" equivalent of Edge in the way that Chromium is the full (compilable) OSS version of Chrome.

I think that Microsoft is still working on a Chakra version of Node as well. That's probably what I'm most excited about, V8 hasn't had much competition, which means that there's nobody to question its approach to resource usage, garbage collection, etc... V8 is great for some things, but it falls down hard on low-resource environments. This is one of the reasons why Electron apps are so greedy, you have to kind of d…

They've open sourced some of their work on this, but it look abandoned:

https://github.com/Microsoft/node-v0.12

https://github.com/Microsoft/node-uwp

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