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The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

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Re: The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

#11

Post by matheussampaio »

mikepurvis wrote: post #6
faitswulff wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was perfectly fine with Chrome's usability until I started getting a `Hold Command + Q` to quit` prompt on my Mac. Before then, I hadn't even considered the possibility that an application could block me from quickly and easily quitting out of it. Now I have to hold the key combo or double tap it to quit Chrome, and it is the only application I have to do that for. It's so annoying.

I'm surprised that functionality isn't possible to disable, but tbh I really like it. Too many times a finger slip turns Cmd+W into Cmd+Q and suddenly I'm lost a whole pile of tab state, possibly even half-submitted forms. Yuck.

It's possible to disable as mentioned in another comment.

Re: The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

#12

Post by the_duke »

The Mozilla tech blogs are always a good read.

Informative and easy to digest. I can only think of one other company blogging with similar consistency/quality: Cloudflare.

Firefox performance has seen tremendous gains since their Project Quantum efforts.

It mostly feels on par with Chrome for me pretty much everywhere.

There is one glaring omission though: a single company where I have problems with FF on multiple apps - Google.

Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried, Youtube can send my fan into a frenzy and Docs is also regularly problematic. (on Linux)

Re: The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

#13

Post by gok »

Javascript engines gave up on interpreters too quickly. JITs have been a huge source of security holes, and the language is so huge now that verifying the correctness of JS optimizations is extremely hard. JS was never meant to be a high performance language. Plus all the heroic work on exotic optimization has just resulted in induced demand. Web pages have just grown to contain so much Javascript that they're even slower than they were when JS was slow.

Browser vendors should agree to make JS slow and safe again like it used to be, forcing web developers to make their pages smaller and better for users. For the unusual cases like browser-based games, WebAssembly is ok (it's much easier to verify the correctness of a WASM compiler), and it should be behind a dialog box that says something like "This web page would like to use extra battery power to play a game, is that ok?"

Re: The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

#14

Post by [deleted] »

OskarS wrote: post #10
mikepurvis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that functionality isn't possible to disable, but tbh I really like it. Too many times a finger slip turns Cmd+W into Cmd+Q and suddenly I'm lost a whole pile of tab state, possibly even half-submitted forms. Yuck.

Surely that can be restored? In firefox, if you accidentally close a window, there’s a “Recently closed windows” thing in the history menu you can use that brings back all the tabs.

[deleted]

Re: The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

#17

Post by rileyteige »

OskarS wrote: post #10
mikepurvis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that functionality isn't possible to disable, but tbh I really like it. Too many times a finger slip turns Cmd+W into Cmd+Q and suddenly I'm lost a whole pile of tab state, possibly even half-submitted forms. Yuck.

Surely that can be restored? In firefox, if you accidentally close a window, there’s a “Recently closed windows” thing in the history menu you can use that brings back all the tabs.

That is true, however this results in all your tabs getting refreshed. For e.g. ProtonMail, this means you have to login (get out your 2FA device etc) all over again.

Re: The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

#18

Post by The_rationalist »

the_duke wrote: post #12

The Mozilla tech blogs are always a good read. Informative and easy to digest. I can only think of one other company blogging with similar consistency/quality: Cloudflare. Firefox performance has seen tremendous gains since their Project Quantum efforts. It mostly feels on par with Chrome for me pretty much everywhere. There is one glaring omission though: a single company where I have problems with FF on multiple ap…

It is mostly par with Chrome now pretty much everywhere. Well browsing most website should not trigger lag in any browsers. But if we look at benchmarcks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...

Re: The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70

#20

Post by evilpie »

mikepavone wrote: post #4

One thing that wasn't clear to me from this post is why they still need the C++ interpreter at all. I assume there is some non-obvious cost that makes it not worth it for the coldest of code, but I'm having a hard time guessing what it may be.

As mentioned in the blog-post, the Basline Interpreter uses the JitScript structure containing type and IC information.

Allocating this additional struct is a waste of memory for a function that is only executed a handful of times, without ever actually using that information for optimizing.

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