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Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

theguardian.com

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Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#271

Post by saagarjha »

leadingthenet wrote: post #270
saagarjha wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it’s kind of depressing how much better it could be with just a touch of Cocoa; these shortcomings are readily apparent so it wouldn’t even take that much to improve it. I wonder if Mozilla could solve this by just hiring someone who’d focus on improving platform UI to the point where it was competitive with Chrome…

Even Chrome isn't competitive with Safari, UI-wise. It's plagued with many of the same issues as Firefox on macOS, last I checked.

Well, some of them. It's not great, but it's better than where Firefox is now.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#272

Post by lioeters »

fabrice_d wrote: post #160
lioeters wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following my curiosity, I found: The Story of Stylo: Replacing Firefox's CSS engine with Rust https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6SSTRr2mFU Woo, 9M lines of C/C++ to 85K lines of Rust.. Author's slides: https://www.joshmatthews.net/rbr17/

No, for the style system is 160K lines of C++ down to 85K lines of Rust. Still a great win!

Those numbers sound much more realistic, ~53% reduction in code size - and you're right, it's a great testament to Rust's conciseness!

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#273

Post by brlewis »

GeekyBear wrote: post #250
catalogia wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox for Mac has been more or less unusable up until the most recent release This is a gross exaggeration. I've been using firefox on MacOS for 3 years and it's worked fine the entire time.

The issue has been the power draw and heat on newer MacBooks with a Retina display. Older Firefox versions are redrawing the entire window even if only a tiny portion of the window was changing. With advent of high resolution windows, the amount of work needed to redraw the whole window for every frame became significant. The last version of Firefox moved to breaking the window into large tiles and only redrawing the…

I've been using Firefox on a newer macbook with retina display for the past 2 years or so. I haven't experienced "more or less unusable" in that time.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#274

Post by leadingthenet »

saagarjha wrote: post #271
leadingthenet wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Chrome isn't competitive with Safari, UI-wise. It's plagued with many of the same issues as Firefox on macOS, last I checked.

Well, some of them. It's not great, but it's better than where Firefox is now.

Very slightly, if at all.

The settings page is still non-standard, the same for the scrolling, keybindings don't work in the usual macOS way (CMD+Q for instance quits only if you hold, which is baffling), the app updates itself in a non-obvious way, the top-bar is laggy when in fullscreen mode, and the list can go on and on.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#275

Post by brlewis »

millstone wrote: post #215
throwGuardian wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are literally zero browser engines allowed on iOS, other than Safari/webkit, with a purposefully depleted feature set, to force developers and users to the app store. It is astounding that overzealous Apple employees and fan boys will employ circuitous mental gymnastics to substantiate Apple policies, instead of simply allowing an open-market to thrive on iOS. It's as if open markets where consumers are allowed…

What is this hope for a "thriving open market?" On Android, Chrome/Chromium engine has more than 99.5% marketshare. Consumer choice is a red herring. So for that matter is Firefox, which Google has stomped out on Android. Apple's policy is 100% aimed at preventing Google from controlling the future of iOS.

Consumer choice means that tomorrow if Android Chrome does something really unpopular, people can switch to Android Firefox. It is not a red herring.

Yes, giving users choice does mean loosening your control of your platform. I don't believe Apple thinks consumer choice would cause Google to control the future of iOS.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#276

Post by notacoward »

chrisseaton wrote: post #94
zzzcpan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One cannot have writeable executable memory on iOS (apple can, we cannot). > Thus one cannot make a JIT compiler for js and thus pages are slow. Lack of JIT doesn't slow down pages much. I believe the difference is so small that it might even be possible to be faster without JIT for most pages, especially on low power devices, it's only computation heavy pages that are going to suffer and even then it's not like yo…

> Lack of JIT doesn't slow down pages much. So why do you think so many major companies invest such a huge amount of money in JS JITs? Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Mozilla all maintain JS JITs and spend what I guess is hundreds of millions of dollars a year on it.

A budget of $100M, with 50% devoted to salary and a median salary of $250K, would be 200 developers. I seriously doubt any of the companies you name are devoting even a quarter of that to JS JIT development. Yes, they each make significant investments, but let's not weaken the argument by indulging a penchant for hyperbole.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#277

Post by brlewis »

alwillis wrote: post #248
detaro wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that surprisingly that the one making the decisions about the browser engine is blamed, not the one forced to use the browser engine instead of their own, is it?

To be clear, the html5test.com numbers for Firefox are for Firefox on Android.

Quote:

  YOUR BROWSER SCORES
         491
  OUT OF 555 POINTS
  You are using Firefox Mobile 68.0 on Android 8.1.0
Not 468.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#278

Post by simion314 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #225
simion314 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementing an html rendered that is compatible with all the css rules and it also implements all the extra workarounds that the current browser implement ( like handling illegal markup is not trivial) markup . I mean think about it, you hit invalid html markup and what do you do? You need to continue but now you need to check what Firefox or Chrome do for each case (missing end tags , P inside span, weird nesting o…

Just compile Firefox or Chromium to Wasm and provide necessary adapters. Well, I'm joking, of course, it's not that simple. But it should be possible in the end.

The point was to reimplement a browser. Imagine you want to make an ebook reader,this device needs not to eat too much batteries so you want to implement a basic css and html renderer not to re-skin Chrome.

Some ebook publishing platforms will perform checks and reject your epub(mobi or similar format) if is not respecting some strict rules, this makes it a pain if you have random html that works on web but you want to package it as epub because now you need to find all the bugs(or similar stupid DOM elements) and fix them as best you can.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#279

Post by alwillis »

brlewis wrote: post #277
alwillis wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, the html5test.com numbers for Firefox are for Firefox on Android.

Quote: YOUR BROWSER SCORES 491 OUT OF 555 POINTS You are using Firefox Mobile 68.0 on Android 8.1.0 Not 468.

The numbers I quoted were from Firefox 48, not 68.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#280

Post by johnsea »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #265
johnsea wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the mac settings about keyboard/shortcuts, you can define program specific shortcuts; e.g. take the exact name from the firefox menu for the 'next tab' action and give the shortcut you want.

Right, so that's part of my gripe. in keyboad shortcuts, i've got global (all applications) shortcuts for select/show next/previous tab. Those dont map to firefox. Fine, but Firefox doesn't have a menu title for next tab, so setting a shortcut for a non-named function doesn't work. I've tried the documentation( https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf... ), using "go one tab to the left" doesn't w…

I apologize, you are completely right (was not on the Mac when I answered and mixed it up with Terminal and Finder).
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