11–20 of 56 posts
Even with fixes, most people seem to be switching to Chrome. It's hard to beat Google's integration
Even with fixes, most people seem to be switching to Chrome. It's hard to beat Google's integration
Google's integration is actually the reason why I'd switch back to Firefox in a heartbeat if the performance kept up -- there's some serious privacy issues involved in browsing the web using a Google browser while logged in to a Google account.
Even with fixes, most people seem to be switching to Chrome. It's hard to beat Google's integration
Google's integration is actually the reason why I'd switch back to Firefox in a heartbeat if the performance kept up -- there's some serious privacy issues involved in browsing the web using a Google browser while logged in to a Google account.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find these statements amusing... As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems. More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and…
data=ordered certainly does have significant performance problems. Most notably, it causes fsync() to actually act like sync(), so flushing a single file to disk can potentially cause a flush of the entire disk buffer instead!
Part of Firefox's problem was that practically everything a user would do resulted in fsync() being called -- that's unnecessary and unreasonable. It's one thing to fsync() when one adds a bookmark, or saves a password. Doing it every time a link is clicked is just insane, and would pose a performance problem regardless of ext3's eccentricities.
Not to discount the work that Mozilla has been doing, but it seems like the "improvement" they added is actually just a workaround for distros that configure filesystems incorrectly. That is, his machine is configured to use an obsolete filesystem (ext3) in a mode with significant performance problems (data=ordered). There are numerous ways that a machine can be mis-configured such that it suffers from poor performan…
I find these statements amusing... As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems. More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and…
The problem is that, in ext3, not using data=ordered is also problematic - this time in terms of potential corruption and security issues. That's why even the people who brought you ext3 abandoned it years ago in favor of making ext4 do these things the right way. If you want reasonable fsync behavior, plus niceties like block-size awareness and trim/discard support, you need to use a modern filesystem.
A piece of software that embodies a broken approach to a solved problem is by definition obsolete, and that includes ext3. Please don't make claims about what's obsolete when you don't even understand the issues that would make it so.
Even with fixes, most people seem to be switching to Chrome. It's hard to beat Google's integration
Google's integration is actually the reason why I'd switch back to Firefox in a heartbeat if the performance kept up -- there's some serious privacy issues involved in browsing the web using a Google browser while logged in to a Google account.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's integration is actually the reason why I'd switch back to Firefox in a heartbeat if the performance kept up -- there's some serious privacy issues involved in browsing the web using a Google browser while logged in to a Google account.
Use Chromium if you complain about privacy
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find these statements amusing... As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems. More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and…
I would agree that calling ext3 obsolete is odd, but I don't know enough about the particulars of file system performance to understand why data=ordered is or is not problematic. This leads to the interesting problem of judging the opinion of several contradicting, but apparently similarly qualified people. I'm sure someone on HN is able to decisively explain: can someone do so?
Relatively early on ext3 was extended with "data=ordered" and "data=writeback" modes (with "data=ordered" being the default and recommended mode, as "data=writeback" is marginally faster but offers few consistency guarantees). In these modes only metadata changes are committed to the journal.
In "data=ordered" mode the filesystem attempts to guarantee that data will actually be written to the disk (not merely cached) before any related metadata writes occur, as opposed to caching and writing all data according to an outside schedule. Obviously, this also has certain implications for write performance.
I would say that Firefox was incontrovertibly broken in this case, but my views on the adoption of ext4 would probably be considered rather conservative. Regardless, ext3 isn't going away any time soon so this fix will be appreciated.
Even with fixes, most people seem to be switching to Chrome. It's hard to beat Google's integration