Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

21–30 of 141 posts

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#21
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yuck, they're bringing back the big wasted void along the top of my page? The fact that Firefox replaces the title-bar with tabs is my favorite feature of the darned thing.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer... you're welcome :)

This also highlights why Firefox's addon system is in some ways superior to Chrome's extensions - this would be impossible in Chrome.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#22
post #7

This is neat and all, but I wonder if things are really better moving to "in the browser." The discussion is of "upwards of 60% as fast as native." Is this using the same amount of processing power as native, or is this "67% as fast as native, using 200% of the CPU as a native solution?" I mean, I realize that processors and machines are only getting more capable. It seems silly to start requiring faster and faster p…

The same can be said for all development over the past 15-20 years. The reality is development time and cost is drastically lowered when intermediate developers can produce working software with minimal consideration toward optimization, lowering resource usage or decreasing overall package size.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#24
post #10

Epic Games and Mozilla are demonstrating how the Web is continuing to evolve as a powerful platform [..] And you're still using a youtube embed because a single, simple tag like is too effin' problematic. Yeah yeah, I get it. isn't relevant to gaming. WebGL and gaming are cool new stuff, is prehistoric crap nobody cares about anymore. The world has moved on.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#25
post #7

This is neat and all, but I wonder if things are really better moving to "in the browser." The discussion is of "upwards of 60% as fast as native." Is this using the same amount of processing power as native, or is this "67% as fast as native, using 200% of the CPU as a native solution?" I mean, I realize that processors and machines are only getting more capable. It seems silly to start requiring faster and faster p…

Especially considering that asm.js isn't really using a JS execution engine. You can smuggle a low-level machine code via any mechanism. As I understand, without asm.js specific optimizations, it doesn't really work. I know, it's a cute way to get some movement without the political nightmare of having to decide on a proper VM for the web. Since it's "just JavaScript", other browsers will run but be really slow, lead…

It is true that most other browsers don't have special compilers for asm.js, but they still tend to get pretty good performance out of it.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#26
post #7

This is neat and all, but I wonder if things are really better moving to "in the browser." The discussion is of "upwards of 60% as fast as native." Is this using the same amount of processing power as native, or is this "67% as fast as native, using 200% of the CPU as a native solution?" I mean, I realize that processors and machines are only getting more capable. It seems silly to start requiring faster and faster p…

Games performance is often GPU bound. If a driving language (C++, JavaScript of whatever else) is fast enough to compute application logic without delaying frames, it doesn't really matter if it is x% slower compared to some other language. GPUs in WebGL are programed using native shaders so there is no performance penalty for GPU computations.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#28
post #19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yuck, they're bringing back the big wasted void along the top of my page? The fact that Firefox replaces the title-bar with tabs is my favorite feature of the darned thing.

Chrome and current FF have the same "big wasted void" when not maximized. You need something you can grab to drag the whole window about, as opposed to a single tab. It goes away when maximized, and I'd hope Australis will stay the same.

Oh, right. I always keep FF maximized so I'd forgotten the empty-title-bar was visible in non-maximized forms.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#29
post #7

This is neat and all, but I wonder if things are really better moving to "in the browser." The discussion is of "upwards of 60% as fast as native." Is this using the same amount of processing power as native, or is this "67% as fast as native, using 200% of the CPU as a native solution?" I mean, I realize that processors and machines are only getting more capable. It seems silly to start requiring faster and faster p…

For a high level managed language, 67% would be pretty godlike. There are some C programs that are less than 67% the speed of their own -O2 compilations. If 67% native speed winds up being the average efficiency, that's plenty good enough for the vast majority of computing. As recent history has been teaching us, doing more with less has mainly to do with getting more mobile, distributed, and ubiquitous. We're quickl…

You ignored my 200% mark, though. If I could run this demo in the browser and it pegs all of my cpus, compared to running the same demo "native" and having half my system capable of idling, I'm not sure I see the win. Even if it gets to 100% of "native." (I hate that it sounds like I am claiming that is the case here, as I really don't know.)

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#30
post #19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yuck, they're bringing back the big wasted void along the top of my page? The fact that Firefox replaces the title-bar with tabs is my favorite feature of the darned thing.

Chrome and current FF have the same "big wasted void" when not maximized. You need something you can grab to drag the whole window about, as opposed to a single tab. It goes away when maximized, and I'd hope Australis will stay the same.

Oh wow, that's a nice touch. I'd never noticed that despite using it all the time, which I guess is a good sign.
Post reply on HN