Firefox is a dead man walking. If you want privacy, use a FF fork called Librewolf
> Firefox is a dead man walking.
Dramatic.
> If you want privacy, use a FF fork called Librewolf
Thanks for the tip.
Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
41–50 of 286 posts
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#42I believe in Mozilla.and their products. as much as they need to get their admin/ceo pay down.as much as they need to adjust the new Android Firefox UI Unless there is another foundation with a browser promoting a free and open internet, my vote will always remain with them.
Why does the ceo pay need to go down?
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#43I believe in Mozilla.and their products. as much as they need to get their admin/ceo pay down.as much as they need to adjust the new Android Firefox UI Unless there is another foundation with a browser promoting a free and open internet, my vote will always remain with them.
The problem with your view is that the purpose of most nonprofits, as revealed by their actual spending, is to act as a well-paying job for their administrators and a volunteer/exploitation scheme.
They aren’t really about the mission. This is as clear as it could be for Mozilla.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#44It's nice to see some actual good news involving Firefox. With all of the leadership and financial struggles lately, it's made me worry that the browser I've been using for the last 17 years doesn't have long to live. Hopefully that is not the case.
I think it will take more time to say that for certain. Warp is an exception, but most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go. I think the thing to be worried about is: what will happen when they run out of stuff that's already in the…
> most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go.
This is not the case. Servo worked on big experimental moonshot projects. They had some major successes (Stylo, WebRender), but the rest of the Firefox team wasn't sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I don't think Servo ever made up more than a small fraction of the overall Firefox workforce. They had to pick and choose their projects. Note, for example, that Servo embeds SpiderMonkey instead of writing its own JS engine from scratch: https://github.com/servo/rust-mozjs
Don't worry! SpiderMonkey still has additional cool projects coming down the pipeline, none of which are dependent on Servo.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but haven't browsers nearly become just a VM for JavaScript? Rendering documents is sometimes incidental. I'm not sure Swing would actually be worse than HTML5.
Layout is actually difficult and offers a great many interesting problems when you try to parallelize it or efficiently use GPU acceleration. There are a lot of constraints and text is difficult to size and render.
Could the GeForce 3090 be fast enough to handle it?
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#46It's nice to see some actual good news involving Firefox. With all of the leadership and financial struggles lately, it's made me worry that the browser I've been using for the last 17 years doesn't have long to live. Hopefully that is not the case.
Agreed - what I don't get is: (https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...)
However, our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year.
(... snip ...)
According to the organization's latest financial figures [PDF], $430m of its 2018 total revenue of $451m came from those internet giants – primarily Google, we understand. These deals were due to be renewed or renegotiated by November this year.
As a non-profit open-source operation, Mozilla spends as much as it receives; its 2018 staffing bill was $286m with a headcount of about 1,000, or about $286,000 per person, on average.
Despite the renewal with Google, which essentially guaranteed a continuation of its revenue for the next three years, Mozilla axed 250 of its techies on Tuesday, and shut down its office in Taiwan, blaming the “economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic.”
Their cost is probably much more than just staffing - but still - doesn't look that bleak? I get the non-ideal situation of being dependent on you competitor like that, but it _has_ proven to be a robust source of income so far..: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio...
Btw.. is there any way to format a pretty quotation on HN?
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 5-15% on web content is significantly faster to me. Is it though? Would you even notice it? If there was an already short processing action, e.g. 1 second, now it would be 850ms -- hardly noticable. If there was some long processing action, say 5 minutes, now it would take 4 minutes and 25 seconds. Hardly something to write home about in either case...
That fits into my definition of "significantly". It may not be a total game-changer, but if up to 15% isn't significant, where do we draw that line?
>but if up to 15% isn't significant, where do we draw that line?.
It's not like we don't have a yardstick for actually noticeable speed updates. Pre-JIT JS to JIT JS for example was a big several times speedup. PHP 6 vs PHP7 was several times as well (no JIT involved here, just other optimizations).
15% is only 'significant' in the context of an already heavily optimized program (which FF's JIT is). Not significant as in "the users will notice it".
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 5-15% on web content is significantly faster to me. Is it though? Would you even notice it? If there was an already short processing action, e.g. 1 second, now it would be 850ms -- hardly noticable. If there was some long processing action, say 5 minutes, now it would take 4 minutes and 25 seconds. Hardly something to write home about in either case...
I'm sorry friend, but 10% is a huge incremental improvement. This could save me hours over a year.
"Hours over a year" doesn't sound huge.
We've had export / fx processing improvements in NLE programs or 3D rendering for example that saved weeks over a year. PHP 6 to 7 got several times faster in common use-case workloads. And so on...
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#49That's browsers for you these days. They ignore browsing features and concentrate on being a faster javascript engine for buying things and streaming video. I'd say more but that google groups link requires logging in to a google acount.
What browser features do you think are missing? Other than perhaps some love for containers, I can't think of anything else I want for. In honesty, it feels like they've been making UI tweaks for the sake of it for a while now; if anything, I'd like some to be rolled back!
I'm quite happy to see performance improvements - I'd love to see more on the memory reduction side of things too.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 5-15% on web content is significantly faster to me. Is it though? Would you even notice it? If there was an already short processing action, e.g. 1 second, now it would be 850ms -- hardly noticable. If there was some long processing action, say 5 minutes, now it would take 4 minutes and 25 seconds. Hardly something to write home about in either case...
If I were to squeeze 10% out of a project I had spent significant time and resources optimizing I would be thrilled.
You and me yes. Users though not so much, because they already know the optimized previous performance, so they just see a meagre 10% over it -- that it's hard to optimize something already optimized and thus 10% is a feet is not relevant to their perception.