Is there any way to directly donate to firefox (and not other mozilla related things)?
Maybe some of those fired engineers could fork it. I'd pay 5$ a month for a non-google organization that is not lead by Marissa and is developing an open browser.
Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
131–140 of 286 posts
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> years doesn't have long to live the market share is really worrying but OTOH Mozilla just secured another multi year deal with Google so in the short-medium term they are fine financially. I hope that a reason for all those projects cuts is at least partially creation of finacial reserves, in theory they do have enough cash and momentum to stay technologically relevant for at least 10 years.
Google needs Firefox to exist for anti-trust reasons. If they don’t buy fire fox’s traffic, bing will.
I always wondered if firefox would actually change default engine if google stops the cash. It would remove some chunk of users at least imo, can firefox really afford it?
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#133It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person. When I hear "the browser" discussed in almost any parlance, the implication is Chrome. It's rare to even hear someone say "Chrome," as it's the defacto choice for the non-mobile web. Convenience breeds ignorance.
> It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person. Does the average person really need to understand JIT optimisations?
No, but they enjoy faster performance that JiT optimization yields
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#134It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person. When I hear "the browser" discussed in almost any parlance, the implication is Chrome. It's rare to even hear someone say "Chrome," as it's the defacto choice for the non-mobile web. Convenience breeds ignorance.
to be fair most firefox people I know call it "my browser" as well
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person. Does the average person really need to understand JIT optimisations?
No, but they enjoy faster performance that JiT optimization yields
That's technically true, but most average users probably don't care. It's like optimizing your car's fuel efficiency by changing your spark plugs more often. When was the last time you changed your spark plugs?
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#136It'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…
Initially it was an option to become the engine, then after a time it simply became the place to try and engines and they said it would never be the "new" browser engine. It was a prototyping area.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#137It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person. When I hear "the browser" discussed in almost any parlance, the implication is Chrome. It's rare to even hear someone say "Chrome," as it's the defacto choice for the non-mobile web. Convenience breeds ignorance.
A 10-15% speed bump in CPU performance is certainly nice but in most cases it's not going to be something that users are consciously aware of. Web page performance varies a lot due to network performance, new versions of websites being deployed, different ads being served, and so on. This noise obscures things enough that it probably won't be easy to attribute a change in performance to the browser if you're not look…
I'm dealing with a Firefox issue where painting on canvas with a CSS filter is magnitudes slower than Chrome. It makes my app almost unusable for Firefox users. Improving the performance would certainly make users notice since it's one of the most common complaints.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#138It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person. When I hear "the browser" discussed in almost any parlance, the implication is Chrome. It's rare to even hear someone say "Chrome," as it's the defacto choice for the non-mobile web. Convenience breeds ignorance.
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Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#139Great. Now it's time to start throttling JS in browsers. Give them the equivalent of a few MHZ or a few seconds runtime to play with and no more.
Yeah, that would be awesome for web games.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
No, just no. they were badmouthing Mozilla because they didn't like mozilla firing their rust resources while they continue to pay enormous amounts for a CEO and other higher ups while Firefox's market share is in a death spiral currently. The only thing that can save it is better branding and "gotta have it features" which Rust can bring, along with stability.