161–170 of 281 posts
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Because monocultures are bad.
Is linux bad? Is git bad? Your argument needs a little more development.
Of course the git monoculture is bad. Have you seen how many people complain about git on Twitter?
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…
I still need to either use chrome on android or explicitly navigate to the mobile page to get the title text on xkcd.com ... android firefox cuts the title text off with no apparent way to read the full one :/
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?
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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…
I worry that every risk taken to improve Rust, might have a severe cost by alienating Firefox userbase, and with that Mozilla get into troubled waters.
But as you have clarified, inner pieces are being slowly replaced, which is not as bad as rewrite the whole thing from scratch in Rust, while at the same time, leaving the current C++ codebase without any improvement.
Anyway, from the enginnering perspective, kudo for you guys, for being able to make the browser work with all this complication going on under the hood.
Hope it all works out even with all the complication, challenges and risks taken, as we all need good players like Mozilla to lead us to a better future, as we rely more and more on technology to improve our daily lives.
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?
The last time V8 had their own benchmark, they retired it right after we beat them on it and made a post saying that benchmarks are bad because people cheat on them.
Around that time I stopped seeing google.com claim that I should switch to Chrome “because it’s faster”.
So basically JSC is fast enough to have made V8 ragequit benchmarking. Hope that answers your question!
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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 )
While for all major platforms even including Windows on ARM64 the performance is good for VP9, and somewhat degraded for high resolution H264 videos, the results for Mac are bad across all of them. It's not even possible to playback videos with a 480p resolution, without being affected by a lot of framedrops.
In those 15s of playback a 480p VP9 video produces around 5 dropped frames, a 720p and 1080p video already ~45 dropped frames. Really worse it is with 4k@60fps videos which have more than 400 dropped frames even with a playback speed of 1.0x!
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…
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…
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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.
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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.
No extensions, no GIFs, no heavy tabs open, perhaps one or two open tabs.
No slowdowns at all after 8 hours on Slack w/ Safari or Brave. Firefox is definitely the worst browser on macOS, compared to the Windows version where it's absolutely perfect and always quick.
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…