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There is something magical about Firefox OS

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Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#221

Post by azakai »

pkolaczk wrote: post #210
azakai wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two orders of magnitude? That can't be explained by the difference between C and JS. There must be some other difference, like which algorithms are used, or that the C one relies heavily on inline assembly or such. The expected difference between C and JS should be more like one order of magnitude in the worst cases (and much better in the best).

Well, I could agree if I saw any computational-heavy JS application (and not a microbenchmark) doing well compared to native counterpart, especially on multicore. So far, I found only the one I cited - and the fact is, it is damn slow. While JIT is getting better over time, you are soon going to hit the law of diminishing returns - the JIT is already extremely sophisticated, but still being a few times slower on aver…

> Well, I could agree if I saw any computational-heavy JS application (and not a microbenchmark) doing well compared to native counterpart, especially on multicore.

For example, BananaBread compiles 120,000 lines of code of a C++ 3D game engine, including AI and physics and so forth. It also uses 3 cores during startup processing

The difference between JavaScript and C++ is less than one order of magnitude, and note that this is a hard case to optimize for JS engines since LLVM inlining creates huge functions that JS engines just give up on optimizing currently. So that the game ends up still running as fast as it does in JS is a nice surprise.

There are also lots of other compiled examples of real-world code, like Box2D and Bullet. Typically the speed of JS compared to C is 5X-10X slower, again, much of it because of large functions not being fully optimized.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#222

Post by mtgx »

azakai wrote: post #181
pkolaczk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how come e.g. www.circuitlab.com which is a simulator written in pure JS is two orders of magnitude slower on Chrome or Firefox than native *SPICE implementations in C? It is actually even much slower than the already pretty slow Falstad's Java applet.

Two orders of magnitude? That can't be explained by the difference between C and JS. There must be some other difference, like which algorithms are used, or that the C one relies heavily on inline assembly or such. The expected difference between C and JS should be more like one order of magnitude in the worst cases (and much better in the best).

If you're working on Bananabread, can you check why it's not working on Chrome, the latest stable version? I get an Oops message. I use Windows 7 x64, Core i7 laptop with Nvidia 555m GT .Also just installed Nvidia's latest driver, though I haven't rebooted yet. Could that be it?

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#223

Post by ink_ »

The mozilla project has really pulled it's socks up of late, some of the stuff from the labs: Very awesome Shumway - https://github.com/mozilla/shumway Very awesome PDF.js - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/pdfjs/ IHeartCode - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/iheartcode/ Prospector Experiments - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/prospector/ Gladius - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/gladius/ EntropyWave - https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/entropywave/

And by all accounts FF itself has had some serious work done to sort close the performance gap between it and Chrome.

I love Chrome, it's a top notch browsers, only the omnibox (addressbar) seems be deliberately designed to inflict pain and suffering on the user. You could be forgiven for thinking that it's been deliberatly in some kind of bizarre social experiment. Does anybody here prefer it to the Firefox Awesomebar?

I'm seriously considering switching back to FF. God.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#224

Post by TwistedWeasel »

omarqazi wrote: post #194
cs702 wrote: post #77

According to this blog post, Firefox OS is already providing native-like performance in a standard JavaScript+HTML+CSS environment. (By "native-like" I mean fast enough that the application will feel native to users.) If this is true, then I would agree Firefox OS is a game changer, because it means that ALL modern web applications can run unmodified at native-like speeds on mobile devices. The number of apps availab…

Watch the video. That's not native performance. It will never be native performance, because there will always be the layer of the rendering engine between your application and device. The best they'll ever do is "close enough to native that you don't notice", and they're certainly not there yet. And the number of apps is already in the millions? Give me an example of one app out there that's in the same ballpark of…

never say never.

Technology evolves and in time hardware improves to a point where the performance difference between native code and something that runs through an intermediate layer is not noticeable in a user interface (although there will always be a difference, it just wont be be relevant any more).

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#225

Post by azakai »

mtgx wrote: post #222
azakai wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two orders of magnitude? That can't be explained by the difference between C and JS. There must be some other difference, like which algorithms are used, or that the C one relies heavily on inline assembly or such. The expected difference between C and JS should be more like one order of magnitude in the worst cases (and much better in the best).

If you're working on Bananabread, can you check why it's not working on Chrome, the latest stable version? I get an Oops message. I use Windows 7 x64, Core i7 laptop with Nvidia 555m GT .Also just installed Nvidia's latest driver, though I haven't rebooted yet. Could that be it?

I am aware of a bug in Chrome where the Chrome tab will crash after you play for a while or reload the tab. But in a new tab you should be able to play for a few seconds ok - is that what you are experiencing?

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#226

Post by a3_nm »

nathan_long wrote: post #138
polshaw wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key is making it easy for users to 'reset' the device to stock FxOS. I would hope the firefox brand was strong enough to keep carriers from releasing their own variants to avoid mozilla's requirements.

This. The Firefox OS license for carriers should be "you can modify our OS however you like, but you must take no steps to keep users from installing a clean one, nor penalize them for doing so."

> This. The Firefox OS license for carriers should be "you can modify our OS however you like, but you must take no steps to keep users from installing a clean one, nor penalize them for doing so."

If Firefox OS is to be open source (OSS-compliant), then you can't impose this sort of restriction.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#227

Post by jff »

_urga wrote: post #31
robhawkes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the comment, I really appreciate it! To be clear, I'm not educated in business so my thoughts are my own (potentially naive) conclusions. However, there are some very sound business decisions behind us chosing to go with Brazil first, and to go with cheaper, low-end devices. I'm sure they know what they're doing more than I do! As an aside, we do have versions of Fx OS running on high-end devices and it ru…

You are right to start with low-end devices: Get it running brilliantly on cheap hardware. Don't waste anything. Make the OS efficient. Do things in the most direct way possible with a minimum of red tape. Expose the bare metal to Javascript. Put the bare minimum features in the OS and let open source grow around that.

Addendum: Don't fall into the Linux trap. Don't start off being "great on old hardware!" but eventually grow so huge as to need the same specs as modern Windows (my i7 laptop with 4 GB of RAM runs like crap, thanks Debian). Do things in a straightforward way, but in such a way that you can expand without tacking on loads of extra code.

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#229

Post by [deleted] »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #153
andrewcooke wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it doesn't really work like that. emerging markets have people as rich as rich americans and they know about, want, and own iphones. (i live in s america and would love the kind of thing being described. but i am pretty odd and currently use a dumbphone that cost $20 - i know plenty of people with fancy phones here. so i would like what you suggest to work, but in practice i think people would perceive it as aimed at…

I think that getting my cool, trend-leading designer friends is possible - apple is not undefeatable. And while google is not very evil, Mozilla is nearly saint-like in comparison. So, yes we do all live in the same global media village, but things will change. It will be harder to knock Apple off top spot in the US or UK because of the installed base. But the battle for hearts and minds is at the top of the market -…

[deleted]

Re: There is something magical about Firefox OS

#230

Post by mburns »

nemetroid wrote: post #126
pkolaczk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how come e.g. www.circuitlab.com which is a simulator written in pure JS is two orders of magnitude slower on Chrome or Firefox than native *SPICE implementations in C? It is actually even much slower than the already pretty slow Falstad's Java applet.

The term "native-like" means "with a responsive interface" these days.

And access to hardware, and with a common, system interface (native widgets) not custom or third-party UI widgets.

Seems like a completely accurate definition. As responsive as expected, similar looking and integrated as expected, and able to access the unique parts of my phone.

What is missing, other than having a different build/compile process?

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