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Mozilla is building an operating system

wiki.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#31

Post by owenmarshall »

burgerbrain wrote: post #24
owenmarshall wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has made memory overhead a serious priority in the Fx7 & Fx8 development cycles, with some impressive results: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31

Too little, too late. It took them literally years to admit that they had a problem. I've long since migrated, and I know many other people that have as well.

Maybe for you.

For me, I try Chrome out very often but keep coming back to Firefox because of the fantastic extensions, and because it just feels right in a way that Chrome doesn't.

But that's OK: I'm assuming you've migrated to Chrome, and that's a very good thing. The competition between Firefox and Chrome has only served to make both browsers better.

Two open source browsers with a significant user base? In 2001, we only could've hoped to be so lucky ;)

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#32

Post by stcredzero »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #4
yid wrote: post #3

Wouldn't it make more sense to replace gnome/kde with gecko? Isn't that essentially what the win8 demo was all about? So many questions, so little cloud...

The wiki page doesn't do a good job explaining it, but what they're aiming at is mobile devices. Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript. So a web application would be your phone dialer, a web application could access your NFC chip. All of the capabilities they're going for is stuff that's in the pipeline in W3C, they want to create an OS to accelerate the process (…

Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript.

I would love to hear more about the security model.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#33

Post by hollerith »

dman wrote: post #30
hollerith wrote: post #11

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive. I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running. (I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)

I am not on snow leopard yet so I dont know how much 1gig of RAM is by Snow Leopard standards but for reference how does Chrome / Safari do in comparison?

I haven't used Chrome enough to say because if you increase the text size on Chrome to where I like it then the text spills over the right side of the window (at least on 13.3-inch Macbooks) with the result that one has to scroll back and forth horizontally for every line of text. I admit that my preference for large text is unusual though.

Safari was unresponsive (spinning beach ball) even more of the time than FF has been.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#34

Post by nxn »

hollerith wrote: post #11

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive. I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running. (I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)

Well, as a user you have the option of using another browser. Though, admittedly, with 1 gig of RAM I can't think of any decent one that wont give you problems after a few hours of browsing -- maybe chrome?

As a web developer, I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that lets you change the line-height of a button/input element. Such a simple change, yet the problem has been around since 2006, if I recall correctly.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#35

Post by hollerith »

owenmarshall wrote: post #21
hollerith wrote: post #11

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive. I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running. (I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)

Firefox has made memory overhead a serious priority in the Fx7 & Fx8 development cycles, with some impressive results: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31

FF 7.0a2 (got Jul 24 from the Aurora channel) is less responsive than FF 3.6 was on my machine -- although I cannot be sure that the unresponsiveness is due to memory pressure rather than, e.g., insufficient parallelism of the UI relative to the part that executes Javascript.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#36

Post by pnathan »

joakin wrote: post #15

Impressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser. If that's insightful or useful comments hit me... I really don't understand this hate towards Mozilla that has been going around lately. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? It's a sincere opinion of a person who doesn't see a relation in critizising a project of an organisation in an article that talks about other projects. If you dont like Firefox its f…

Honestly?

Because Firefox performance is atrocious, and that is the single most salient point from the Mozilla project.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#37

Post by kenjackson »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #4
yid wrote: post #3

Wouldn't it make more sense to replace gnome/kde with gecko? Isn't that essentially what the win8 demo was all about? So many questions, so little cloud...

The wiki page doesn't do a good job explaining it, but what they're aiming at is mobile devices. Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript. So a web application would be your phone dialer, a web application could access your NFC chip. All of the capabilities they're going for is stuff that's in the pipeline in W3C, they want to create an OS to accelerate the process (…

The project is DOA unless they also go and buy spectrum. Because no one is going to allow this phone on their network.

They need to buy some 4G spectrum and then this becomes interesting. Until then its just a failed project.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#38

Post by MatthewPhillips »

stcredzero wrote: post #32
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wiki page doesn't do a good job explaining it, but what they're aiming at is mobile devices. Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript. So a web application would be your phone dialer, a web application could access your NFC chip. All of the capabilities they're going for is stuff that's in the pipeline in W3C, they want to create an OS to accelerate the process (…

Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript. I would love to hear more about the security model.

Browser asks the user for permission to do stuff, the really sensitive stuff is pushed back to happening on click events, the even more sensitive stuff runs through code validation. What extra security is needed than what we already have with the above?

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#39

Post by runjake »

dman wrote: post #29
runjake wrote: post #28

My first question is why? Do they have a real vision other than "me too"? Does anyone else remember when Phoenix was first released to fight bloated browsers? Now it is that bloated browser and running an OS developed around its technologies isn't too appealing to me. Find your roots before you start off on some other project if you hope to have any significant success.

What is your definition of bloat - size of download, application startup times, number of features, speed while being used, memory usage? Firefox 5 without addons does not seem to be bloated to me by any of the above definitions. In terms of featuresets just for reference - Netscape communicator used to ship with a mail client, browser, news client, html editor and a calendar.

not so much the size of the download, but all of the rest, yes.

I feel that Firefox is nearly at the point Netscape was at the point Phoenix (the original name of Firefox) came into being.

5.0 does seem a little faster.

For what it's worth, I still run Firefox (5.0) on a regular basis, including as I post this comment.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#40

Post by starwed »

hollerith wrote: post #35
owenmarshall wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has made memory overhead a serious priority in the Fx7 & Fx8 development cycles, with some impressive results: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31

FF 7.0a2 (got Jul 24 from the Aurora channel) is less responsive than FF 3.6 was on my machine -- although I cannot be sure that the unresponsiveness is due to memory pressure rather than, e.g., insufficient parallelism of the UI relative to the part that executes Javascript.

I think you can help them in this -- they're starting to gather UI responsiveness metrics. If you're seeing especially bad UI lag, they'd probably like you to run those metrics to help them figure out what is going on.

http://blog.mozilla.com/ted/2011/06/27/measuring-ui-responsi...

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