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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

#131

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…

Speaking of good tech blogs, Netflix has an excellent one as well.

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

#132

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.

I worked around the accidental-Command-Q problem in Firefox by setting up a custom keyboard shortcut using the paid app Keyboard Maestro (https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/). I have a macro “Confirm Command-Q to Quit” that intercepts the ⌘Q keystroke, only in Firefox, and instead shows a floating dialog titled “Really quit Firefox?”. The Cancel button in the dialog stops the macro, and the Quit button continues the macro to the next step, which is a Quit Firefox instruction.

Another possible workaround is to go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts and create a new shortcut. You can specify that in the app Firefox, the menu item “Quit Firefox” should have the shortcut ⌥⌘Q. Then a normal ⌘Q should do nothing.

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

#133
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite experience with YouTube. With an AMD GPU on Linux, Chrome churns, drops frames, and stutters horribly on even 1080p videos at 30fps. Firefox, meanwhile, handles 1440p60 video with no problem. Even two such videos simultaneously, on separate monitors. Chrome became inexplicably better for parts of early 2019 (I did not note which versions), but starting 2 or 3 months ago Chrome returned to being un…

When chrome slows down for me, it normally means I need to run clear browsing history, delete cookies, cache, logins, etc. I have modern hardware, on both linux/windows same issue. But using res on reddit and click "show images" you can tell chrome isn't as fast as other browsers, firefox/brave are visually faster/smoother in scrolling with pics. Hell, even firefox focus is faster on android. But I like chrome addons…

Sync with my mobile and all the other devices (4 other computers) is one reason why I use Firefox. It's because it's the only browser, as far as I know, which lets me run my own sync server and offers a open source implementation of it.

https://jeena.net/firefox-sync-15

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

#135
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite experience with YouTube. With an AMD GPU on Linux, Chrome churns, drops frames, and stutters horribly on even 1080p videos at 30fps. Firefox, meanwhile, handles 1440p60 video with no problem. Even two such videos simultaneously, on separate monitors. Chrome became inexplicably better for parts of early 2019 (I did not note which versions), but starting 2 or 3 months ago Chrome returned to being un…

When chrome slows down for me, it normally means I need to run clear browsing history, delete cookies, cache, logins, etc. I have modern hardware, on both linux/windows same issue. But using res on reddit and click "show images" you can tell chrome isn't as fast as other browsers, firefox/brave are visually faster/smoother in scrolling with pics. Hell, even firefox focus is faster on android. But I like chrome addons…

Hey, I remember the time when Chrome was soooo fast and we needed to clean up all the stuff to get Firefox to run adequately :)

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you double checked whether firefox is set to use your gpu or not, for video?

Neither Firefox nor Chrome under Linux are capable of using GPU for video decoding. Only some distribution-specific Chromium builds do.

I seem to remember that some GPU acceleration under Linux was disabled voluntarily, on both Firefox and Chrome, because they actually ran much slower than CPU, probably due to bad drivers.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diversity and multiple implementations are essential for the web IMO. V8/Blink/Chromium are not independent community projects, but firmly in the hands of Google. Chromium being the only viable implementation would put too much control in the hands of a single company (regardless of which company that is, Firefox being the only implementation would be just as bad). It's redundant effort, but it also enforces consensu…

Also a much slower one - on PDFTron's benchmark, WASM is half as fast as PNacl for me: https://www.pdftron.com/benchmarks/pnacl-vs-wasm/ .

Their very own blog post goes into plenty of detail about this: https://www.pdftron.com/blog/wasm/wasm-vs-pnacl/

It's nothing fundamental about WASM; in fact they state that the actual computations are slightly faster.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair i think this is an exercize in vanity and why not say it, stupidity. Javascript VM´s these days are fairly complex beasts with huge amount of man-hour and expertise. Also technically this would be a inferior solution as compared to what V8 did with its interpreter in Turbofan (and SpiderMonkey are doing now as presented in the article), by generating pure assembly through the turbofan backend (the same tec…

There's already a JIT for JS coded in Rust: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2017/10/20/holyjit-a-new... The overall goal is to have Firefox recoded in Rust, why would a JavaScript interpreter be left out? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation That's the whole point of Oxidation.

> There's already a JIT for JS coded in Rust:

To clarify: it's a proof of concept, not a full JIT for JS. If you want to follow that project, it lives here: https://github.com/nbp/holyjit.

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

#139

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…

Gmail is really crazy slow on Firefox, it’s such a deal breaker. I have regularly 30s to load the web application, it’s closer to 2-5s on Edge with the same setup (same ad blockers, etc).

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

#140

I'm waiting to hear about when they start to rewrite their JS interpreter in Rust. It will make things kind of interesting, especially if it becomes a stand-alone capable JS inrepreter.

To be fair i think this is an exercize in vanity and why not say it, stupidity. Javascript VM´s these days are fairly complex beasts with huge amount of man-hour and expertise. Also technically this would be a inferior solution as compared to what V8 did with its interpreter in Turbofan (and SpiderMonkey are doing now as presented in the article), by generating pure assembly through the turbofan backend (the same tec…

To clarify: for the moment, there is no project to rewrite SpiderMonkey in Rust. However, any bit of SpiderMonkey that needs to be rewritten will be rewritten in Rust if possible, and new features that can be written in Rust will generally be written in Rust.

Note that not everything can be easily rewritten in Rust due to the existence of lots of C++ code using macros and templates. Getting such to interact with any other language than C++ is painful.

(I'm in the SpiderMonkey team)

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