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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

#21

Post by Quekid5 »

gok wrote: post #13

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 s…

> 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.

Do you have numbers to back that up?

There certainly have been 1 or more security holes in JITs, but AFAICT most of the browser vulnerabilities have more to with bad (new) APIs.

The level where a JIT operates really has nothing to do with the surface syntax of JS, so adding "syntactic sugar" features to JS should have very little impact on JITs. (I'm thinking of things like the class syntax, lexical scope for function literals, etc. Maybe there's a class of additions that I'm missing.)

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

#22

Post by mikepurvis »

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.

It can, and things are better than ever as far as preserving (most) form state, sessions, and scroll positions, but it's not perfect. Just as one example, pages opened on one network (eg at work) won't be able to reload elsewhere unless I take the extra step of connecting to the VPN. This is not the end of the world, but it's an annoying detour when I really just wanted to close that one tab.

And it's so rare that I shut down the whole browser anyway, so it makes sense to me to make it hard to do accidentally.

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

#24

Post by devwastaken »

I can't help but think that regardless what different browser vendors do there's no competition with v8. Like any language there is a standard library, or environment around it. V8 is to JavaScript what CPython is to python.

At least in python you can use other versions and it's a very similiar environment. But if you want to use mozillas spidermonkey without Firefox, it's hoops and bounds worse experience. I'd argue that v8 is far less of a lock in by comparison.

Given all that, why are we still creating entirely separate engines that are made differently, yet do the same.

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

#25

Post by jandem »

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.

> One thing that wasn't clear to me from this post is why they still need the C++ interpreter at all.

A lot of code on the web is very cold (executed once or twice) and for such code the Baseline Interpreter would add some overhead (requires allocating a JitScript storing the IC data for example and we would then spend more time in IC code as well). It's possible this could be mitigated or fixed with additional work, but we need to keep the C++ interpreter anyway (not all platforms have a JIT backend and it's useful for differential testing) so it's not a priority right now.

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

#26

Post by the_duke »

The_rationalist wrote: post #18
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-...

Amended to "feels on par".

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

#27

Post by tracker1 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #8
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.

This is extra weird because browsers have become really good at preserving state between closing and restarting. The real answer to potentially destructive moves is not to ask the user twice, but to let the user easily undo.

It's also to keep chrome apps and notifications working. I use Hangouts a lot. Though I generally deny notifications for anything else. For most anything that I would use persistent I tend to use an external app anyway (even if it's just an electron wrapper).

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

#28

Post by tracker1 »

didip wrote: post #5
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.

This bugs me big time, I wonder what was the decision behind such inconvenient UX.

I'm guessing Google apps like Hangouts and notifications. To keep you from accidentally completely closing.

On Windows it silently keeps running in the background most of the time if you have apps or notifications running.

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

#29

Post by zachruss92 »

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…

Yea YouTube performance is nuts! It seems to be exacerbated when playing in full screen or @2x speed as well.

Google has been getting better though with supporting FF. They now support Hangouts on FF and Gmail is actually faster for me in FF than it is in Chrome.

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

#30

Post by saurik »

faitswulff wrote: post #3
fucking_tragedy wrote: post #2

Awesome. I love the direction Firefox is heading now that Chrome is a pain to use.

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.

FWIW, this behavior is trivial to disable (though I agree it should not be on by default: I actually had remembered it not being on by default). It was really important for me, as once a month I would accidentally hit cmd-Q and then sigh the sigh of the damned as I wait for what is effectively a reboot of my entire computer (as the only two things I tend to have open are a terminal and a browser).
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