The question for firefox was never been is it fast.
The question for firefox was always “why its using 10GB RAM?”
Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
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Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#72They well deserve some donations, and I just sent some quid, but would also buy some merchandise for me and gifts for friends/relatives if shipping costs make it worth, but apparently there's no way to purchase from them. A search brought some sites selling Mozilla branded items, but I'd like to be sure the money, or most of it, goes to the Mozilla Foundation. Any suggestions? Thanks.
Just to be clear, it's the Corporation that makes Firefox, not the Foundation. There aren't many ways to give the Corporation money. Paying for a service, like the VPN or Pocket Premium, is all I can think of.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure v8 gets a few orders of magnitude more attention and development resources than jvm and graal.
You're probably right about Graal, but there is no way that V8 has significantly more effort put into it than the JVM. At best, they're roughly similar, but I suspect that the JVM has quite a bit more development time and effort put into it.
I did not say that jvm historically hasn't gotten a lot of resources, but any innovation done there has been common knowledge for compiler developers for ages.
V8 gets to benefit from all that research, while simultaneously having far more resources (now as well as for the past many years) to apply it, as well as do more of their own.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#74They well deserve some donations, and I just sent some quid, but would also buy some merchandise for me and gifts for friends/relatives if shipping costs make it worth, but apparently there's no way to purchase from them. A search brought some sites selling Mozilla branded items, but I'd like to be sure the money, or most of it, goes to the Mozilla Foundation. Any suggestions? Thanks.
It seems the Mozilla foundation don't use donations for Firefox development though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#75Earlier 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...
This is pretty mature technology, and like most mature technologies, there aren't going to be a lot of 50% improvements any more. Look at CPUs or the Internal Combustion Engine. After 120+ years, it still improves, but you're looking at single-digit percentage points if that. I'm not aware of a lot of things that could magically improve browser performance, but if you do, you have a great opportunity for a unicorn st…
Internal combustion engines might not be the best example. They've seen REALLY impressive gains in the last couple of decades. =)
Today you can buy relatively affordable cars with 2.0 liter engines pushing 300 or more horsepower and doing so with greater fuel efficiency than cars with much more modest output from ten or twenty years ago.
(admittedly some of the gains in efficiency have been obscured by increases in vehicle weight)
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#76It'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.
Mozilla (the Company) has always had problems. They want to be something they're not. But the people on the Mozilla engineering team are top-notch and rarely affected by company drama (and probably feel the same way as you do about it).
Mozilla is one of the few places you can do this specific type of really interesting engineering work, without having to be at Google/Apple/etc.
(ex-Mozillian here :) )
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#77Earlier 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.
Layout is automated (and hopefully repeatable) typesetting.
The other thing Donald Knuth is famous for is getting so fed up with typesetting for his books, he created a document format to help him keep his sanity. And then went way way down that rabbit hole instead of finishing his book series. One might argue that's not sanity-preserving.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure v8 gets a few orders of magnitude more attention and development resources than jvm and graal.
Pretty sure you don't know how many JVM implementations are out there since around 2000. By the way does V8 already handle TB sized heaps with 1ms pause? Or is able to scale down into embedded devices with hundred KB, while respecting real time constraints? Or able to have an implementation in JS itself? Or does V8 cache JIT code across sessions and improves it via additional PGO data gathered across the sessions his…
You are speaking of many different JVM implementations which are all specialized for one purpose.
This is good and all, but splits finite resources even further without a shared benefit, and these variants have as much to do with each other as V8 has to do with Spidermonkey and JScript.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#79It'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…
> Or will they have to concede like opera and edge did.
I am sad to say this, but I think it's only a matter of time. At this point, the list of parties driving Web standards basically consists of a whole bunch of organizations that rely on Blink, plus Apple and Mozilla.
WebKit can probably hang on for a good long while because ~15% of user-agents are required by fiat to be WebKit.
Gecko? At 5% marketshare, I fear it's dropped below the point where web developers are well-incentivized worry too much about making sure their sites run well on it. Which means that it's going to get increasingly costly for individuals to continue using Firefox.
And, at the same time, actually making sure your site runs well on it is getting increasingly difficult. The rise of client-side JavaScript frameworks like React means that cross-browser issues have moved beyond easy-to-perceive things like ActiveX controls not being supported, or CSS rendering badly. Now the big problem is differences between JavaScript engines leading to annoying performance problems. And, if a developer is planning on doing the sane thing and relying mostly on libraries for their heavy lifting, there's just not that much that any individual can do about it.
My sense, at this point, is that, going forward, the Internet does still have room for free, open, community-driven standards that aren't tightly controlled by a small number of massive corporations. However, the Web (i.e., HTML, CSS and JavaScript) does not.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Many people are badmouthing Mozilla because they disbanded the group working on their pet language, Rust, as if this was synonym for Firefox technology. There are many things that Mozilla does beyond working on Rust.