Firefox 70 • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 70

#21

Post by ronjouch » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:46 PM UTC

ar7hur wrote: post #2

The one thing that prevents me from switching to Firefox is the spell checker. Like many non-native English people, I'm constantly switching between languages when typing. Chrome is smart with that, and detects the right language sentence per sentence. Is there a way to have FF do this? Did I miss something?

Please vote and/or speak up (constructively, no "mee too" comments please) on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687

Re: Firefox 70

#22

Post by nathancahill » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

kemenaran wrote: post #3

Not mentioned in this article (although it's in the Release Notes [1]): the amazing work done regarding the macOS compositor. This should give pretty noticeable speed and battery improvements on Retina Macbooks. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new

This should be the headline feature. I've been following this bug for so long on Bugzilla. The energy improvement is really incredible.

Re: Firefox 70

#23

Post by xvilka » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

I wonder, why they implemented Baseline JS interpreter in C++? Why not Rust?

Re: Firefox 70

#24

Post by eyegor » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #20

I would have wished a world where both the chromium project and Mozilla would collaborate to a unified JS compiler instead of having two separate implementations. How faster would have JS been? How more featureful and less buggy? BTW chrome 78 will be released today too!

But without their own js compiler, chrome couldn't randomly add/deprecate features! It's not like Mozilla existed first and was open source back when Chrome launched. Oh wait, it was open sourced 10 years before Chrome launched! So yeah, I blame greed.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/history/

Re: Firefox 70

#25

Post by KuiN » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

ivankolev wrote: post #19

pedrocx486 wrote: post #9

Compared to current Chromium based browsers (I'm using Edge/ium), how does this Firefox release's DevTools compare?

Day to day tasks like browsing the DOM, debug, networking, are top notch in both Chrome and FF, haven't found anything infuriating in FF devtools, they are very serious in having snappy and useful experience.

Recently switched my work (full stack web) Macbook to Firefox and I'm pleasantly surprised by how capable FF's dev-tools are compared to Chrome. I was expecting it to be a much more difficult transition. Still running Chrome on an iMac at home (we use a lot of Chromecast there, so I imagine switching will be a bit more painful) but would like to divest from Google where reasonable.

Re: Firefox 70

#26

Post by marius_k » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

I noticed that firefox (dev edition) got rid of possibility to disable update notifications. I prefer my browser to be updated from repository rather than by itself. Did anyone has the same issue or found some workaround?

Re: Firefox 70

#27

Post by taco_emoji » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

theodorejb wrote: post #17

Wow, blown away by how much better the new password manager is! If they add support for custom fields on each login, this could almost completely replace my need for a 3rd party solution.

Couple other features I'd like: - Import from other formats (Keepass, or at least any format Keepass can export to) - Share items with someone else

Re: Firefox 70

#28

Post by leevlad » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

pedrocx486 wrote: post #9

Compared to current Chromium based browsers (I'm using Edge/ium), how does this Firefox release's DevTools compare?

I do a moderate amount of ReactJS dev, and FF has been excellent. I barely noticed the transition from Chrome to FF when it came to my workflows.

Re: Firefox 70

#29

Post by stuartd » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #23

I wonder, why they implemented Baseline JS interpreter in C++? Why not Rust?

Because the interpreter pipeline shares code and data structures [0]: a couple of examples from the link below:

> The Baseline Interpreter uses the same frame layout as the Baseline JIT, but we’ve added some interpreter-specific fields to the frame.

> Because the Baseline Interpreter and JIT are so similar, a lot of the code generation code can be shared too. To do this, we added a templated BaselineCodeGen base class with two derived classes: - BaselineCompiler: used by the Baseline JIT to compile a script’s bytecode to machine code. - BaselineInterpreterGenerator: used to generate the Baseline Interpreter code.

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/the-baseline-interpreter-a...

Re: Firefox 70

#30

Post by SloopJon » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #20

I would have wished a world where both the chromium project and Mozilla would collaborate to a unified JS compiler instead of having two separate implementations. How faster would have JS been? How more featureful and less buggy? BTW chrome 78 will be released today too!

On the contrary, I'd say that competition has been good for all involved. For such a maligned language that was born in a little over a week, JavaScript is better and faster than it has any right to be.

The amount of resources that have gone into improving JavaScript is amazing. I just wonder what some other languages would look like now with that kind of attention.