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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

#151

Worth noting that this basically means that all of the JS engines are converging on what JavaScriptCore pioneered: - More than just two tiers (JSC has four, and I guess Moz has four too now; I guess it's just a matter of time before V8 follows). - Bottom tiers must include a fast interpreter that uses JIT ABI and collects types (Ignition and this Moz interpreter smells a lot like JSC's LLInt, which pioneered exactly…

Are there any solid benchmarck comparing JSC vs v8?

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to keep using FF despite being a gmail user so much so that I switched to Thunderbird for my emails. I guess Mozilla wins this way.

I thought Thunderbird was not under development anymore?

It's been a weird story. Here's how I remember things going:

1. Mozilla Corp. dropped Thunderbird as one of their projects, and told the community they would have to figure out how to move ahead with the project if they wanted to. News of "Thunderbird is dead" spread out after this announcement.

2. It turned out there was plenty of interest in the project among the public. Donations came in, and the project was kept alive. They established the "Thunderbird Council" as their governance body.

3. The project still needed some legal home and assistance. The Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit) offered to serve as that. The council studied several options and decided to accept this offer.

And this is how they got here: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/

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

#153
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally with Firefox on macOS, Gmail is by far the worst offender. Switching inboxes/labels takes several seconds in FF and is near instant in Chrome. Scrolling performance in FF is also much worse.

In my opinion, macOS is definitely FF's weakest desktop platform. I've personally experienced terrible performance, out-of-place UI for the platform (e.g. default dropdowns), and just a generally less polished experience compared to Safari, Chrome, and Chromium derivatives. I still use it as my default browser on macOS though because it does excel in other areas.

I have zero problems with FF MacOS. Might be something in your setup?

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i always wondered why it wasn't possible to use a js app in "record" mode and then export any witnessed type & profiling information from the JIT and deliver it alongside the source (like a sourcemap).

That might be considered an example of profile-guided optimization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile-guided_optimization

yes, i was going to say PGO :)

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

#155
post #31

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…

Because monocultures are bad.

Is linux bad? Is git bad? Your argument needs a little more development.

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

#156
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh neat, when they first switched to sync that wasn't the case (the previous system did allow it over WebDAV and such), but because sync wasn't just a data dump with WebDAV it wasn't possible at launch to run your own server. I'll have to look into that again.

As far back as I remember the code behind sync was on GitHub and I do mean the backend. It probably still is. But I let Mozilla host it cause they encrypt it. If I lose my password I lose my synched items.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hundreds of millions in revenue and probably < 0.5% of it due to its linux userbase?

Linux distros tend to ship with firefox and linux users are more concerned with open source. It would be strange if the percentage of mozillas userbase using linux was smaller than the general percentage of pc users running linux. Its probably more fair to go on profit not revenue. 100 million in revenue * 2.18% is 2.2 million. A decrease of 10% of that is 220k. If engineers at mozilla are 150k then 3 months of work…

there are a lot of assumptions in your reply.

> 3 months of work

according to whom? this will almost certainly need more than a single engineer's eyes on it. and even if it is 3 months, that's 3 months they don't spend working on features for 98% of their userbase.

i want this to happen as much as anyone, but i just don't see the compelling math here. it's a chicken-egg problem (if FF could use VA API [1], then more might switch to linux).

personally, i'm happy that Panfrost recently got mainlined.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API

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

#158
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To Disable: Uncheck "Warn Before Quitting" on the "Chrome" menu - in between the Apple menu and "File" menu.

it doesn't help when you're testing via automated software - test runners will open up chromes, then often fail and leave them open, and the 'warn before quitting' is always defaulted to on.

Pretty sure you can choose a profile with specific settings if launching from selenium or cli.

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

#159
post #145
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does on Windows and Mac. On Linux it does not but hopefully WebRender should pave the way to enabling it (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 ).

Something is still extremely funky with video on macOS Firefox. Playing MP4s on YouTube still uses 200-400% more power than on Safari, and that's with transparent window disabled. Hell, Twitch turns my 2015 MBP into a vacuum cleaner but Safari barely breaks a sweat.

Have you tried using a Nightly build of Firefox? There's recently been some work to use CoreAnimation on MacOS to reduce power consumption that hasn't made it to the Beta or Release channels yet. (See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522)

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baseline interpreter is a good example of doing things that help most Web pages instead of benchmarks. One of the major things that ARES-6 and other benchmarks test is whether generators are JIT'd, for example. This doesn't really help Web pages, as it's a rarely used feature at present and even rarer in hot loops. SpiderMonkey should get around to jitting generators, but I have a hard time blaming the team for focus…

Pcwalton! While I agree that most synthetic benchmarcks are mostly not representative for the real world, there is a benchmarck suite for real world. That is benchmarcking most used ALEXA websites. It's named TP 5 and TP6, mozilla use it internally (e. G to measure progress on stylo) Why is the real world (TP5/6) not public?? Phoronix has never used it, mozilla has never publicly published benchmarcks. I guess they f…

Did you look at the raptor dashboards? Let me help you: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2...
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