Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

brendaneich.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 42 posts

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#31

Post by kibwen »

pcwalton wrote: post #30
kibwen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know which code Brendan was using, but using the http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ implementations I ran some tests of my own: Performance counter stats for './nbody.gcc_run 50000000' (5 runs): 6232.525219 task-clock # 0.999 CPUs utilized ( +- 0.09% ) 533 context-switches # 0.086 K/sec ( +- 0.43% ) 1 CPU-migrations # 0.000 K/sec ( +- 66.67% ) 166 page-faults # 0.027 K/sec ( +- 0.15% ) 27,385,819,080 cycles #…

Change the sqrt call to use the sqrtf32() intrinsic. That's the modification we made to make nbody fast.

The branch I'm on has already updated shootout-nbody.rs for the new intrinsics, which is the reason that it takes just 7 seconds instead of 11. :)

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#32

Post by Offler »

azakai wrote: post #25
OrsenPike wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair though Chrome was started from scratch in 2007/2008 whereas Firefox has a lot of legacy stuff still hanging around from the early 2000s.

Chrome was started off of WebKit, which also has legacy from many years earlier. Both WebKit and Gecko have code that dates to before the year 2000 in fact. This is pretty much expected for a huge multimillion line C++ codebases, like all web browsers currently are. All have crufty parts (not sure why GP thinks one browser has nicer code overall? That's not my opinion based on the code I've read.)

V8 was new and WebKit was still a newer codebase than Gecko.

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#33

Post by Offler »

Executor wrote: post #13
Offler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The security restrictions regarding add-ons make sense, I believe Chrome has just recently adopted them due to the browser being owned by hacked websites. Thunderbird was a silly waste of resources and should have been shelved well before they did. In balance I'm quite happy Mozilla exist and have been generally positive.

Can you explain you disdain for thunerbird? I'm using it as my main email program and am quite happy with ti.

Mozilla have limited resources and a large number of more important projects that could do with those limited resources.

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#34

Post by seanmcdirmid »

noelwelsh wrote: post #14
wslh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare Google Research against Mozilla Research. Google is really moving computer science forward, just look at their papers and real implementations (disclaimer: I am not a Google fan). If you compare the Google Chrome source code vs Firefox you will quickly understand how miles ahead Google is.

My opinion is that what Mozilla produces in the domain of programming languages is superior to what Google produces in the same domain. I make no claims comparing the two outside this domain. Google has far more resources than Mozilla, and produces loads of great stuff in many domains. I use both browsers daily (Aurora specifically, for Firefox) and have no preference between them. I have no opinion on their source c…

Google has been pretty influential in PL, especially in the PL/systems domain (MapReduce); just because they aren't designing so many mainstream languages doesn't mean people like Jeff Dean aren't putting their PL skillz to work. In fact, many of the heavy hitters at Google have PL backgrounds and do a lot of PL work, they are just pragmatic and realize that not all PL work involves overtly new languages.

And then there is what Holzle, Bak, Bracha, etc...are doing with Dart; and of course Pike with Go.

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#35

Post by nnethercote »

pnt wrote: post #2

Rewriting the browser stack in an evolving language feels like trying to shoot the moon. However, I hesitate to bet against Mozilla when it comes to impossible rewrites.

Yep. It's a high-risk project, but the pay-off could be huge (both for programming languages and browsers) if they pull it off.

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#36

Post by potch »

wslh wrote: post #15
simonw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Their transition from an open source project to an organization receiving millions from the Google search box." You can be both things. Generally it's nice to be paid for your work. "The restrictions (based on security reasons) to install an extension from a site different than mozilla addons" If someone convinces you to install a malicious browser extension (easily done in a world where people will click OK on basi…

> If someone convinces you to install a malicious browser extension (easily done in a world where people will click OK on basically anything) they can spy on and control everything you do online. Do you think then that for example desktop software must be installed from a central company like Microsoft because someone can convince you to install it from every website? And also: do you think that Mozilla was really do…

I work for Mozilla, but speak for myself. If you think it was about control, then you don't know how Mozilla works. We fight larger players with one arm tied behind our back because of our commitment to making things open and interoperable. We do it gladly, because we know that sometimes our reference implementation won't be the best implementation, and even if we fail, we want the tech to live on. Every day I have or overhear a discussion about making certain what we build doesn't privilege our own solutions over others. Are we perfect at this? No. Sometimes security of our users trumps a completely level playing field. But every time we have to slightly close a technology, know that it's done extremely begrudgingly.

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#37

Post by fuzzix »

pohl wrote: post #17

As Peter Norvig argued, design patterns are bug reports against your programming language. Does anybody know what the actual quote is? I love this.

An aside, but I like this series of articles on design patterns in Perl, first here:

http://www.perl.com/pub/2003/06/13/design1.html

"If a pattern is really valuable, then it should be part of the core language"

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#38

Post by gabriel »

fuzzix wrote: post #37
pohl wrote: post #17

As Peter Norvig argued, design patterns are bug reports against your programming language. Does anybody know what the actual quote is? I love this.

An aside, but I like this series of articles on design patterns in Perl, first here: http://www.perl.com/pub/2003/06/13/design1.html "If a pattern is really valuable, then it should be part of the core language"

You know I was also thinking in Perl yesterday when I read this and this is definitely a Perl idiom.

I really believe you get a lot better at seeing the benefits of patterns when you try to apply them in different languages and different contexts.

Are patterns something we should try to transcend in our learning? Meaning, you really do need to know them before you understand how to dismiss them in favor of something else?

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#39

Post by BrendanEich »

wslh wrote: post #20
Executor wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain you disdain for thunerbird? I'm using it as my main email program and am quite happy with ti.

I explained it: it has important bugs and the team instead of saying "won't fix" said "it didn't occur".

I agree with you on some Thunderbird bug particulars, and I weighed in and in at least two cases helped turn things around:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668655

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478468

Sorry I was not earlier on the scene to help -- people are supposed to mail me when my early warning systems don't see a problem in the community.

Honest question: did you try to intervene or get involved in any of these cases?

/be

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#40

Post by BrendanEich »

wslh wrote: post #24
fabrice_d wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can install extensions from any site. You'll only get an additional prompt if you're not installing from the mozilla add-on site. You can think it was about control, but this could not be farther from truth. I work for mozilla

An additional prompt means less conversions. There are alternative methods that Mozilla could do, like bringing a Mozilla certificate to host the extension in your own site without an extra prompt.

And how would we decide to whom to extend the certificate? To whom should we entrust "conversions"?

You are talking around the larger problem, which is a huge one for many extension and app ecosystems (e.g. Google Play, where weak-AI scanners fail to stop malware and spamware).

Mozilla uses community review, which works much better but is of course imperfect, a human thing.

No one that I know of has solved this larger problem. I would be interested in research pointers and tips (not complaints).

/be

Post reply on HN