Engineering code quality in Firefox
hacks.mozilla.org
Engineering code quality in Firefox
1–10 of 155 posts
Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox
#2I appreciate the acknowledgement of needing to tolerate previously acceptable conditions while scanning and remediating those same conditions point forward.
I wish IT auditors understood this concept better.
Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox
#3> Our next major challenge: We are dealing with 21 million lines of code.
I think I just fail to understand the true complexity of a browser, but how is Firefox 21 million lines of code? How can a browser be 21 million lines of code? That just seems so large for what a browser does.
Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox
#4I was thinking about Firefox development quality while trying to figure out why the f does Firefox CPU usage fluctuate between 1 and 5% with one background tab open and only one plugin installed (containers). The same URL when opened in safari goes to 0.1% or 0.0. I tried to look up dom timeout config settings and tried to set aggressive timeouts, but in the end I gave up.
There must be something fundamentally wrong if apps can't stfu and be at 0% while in background with simplest use case. I am going back to close app's when I am done using it.
Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox
#5> Our next major challenge: We are dealing with 21 million lines of code. I think I just fail to understand the true complexity of a browser, but how is Firefox 21 million lines of code? How can a browser be 21 million lines of code? That just seems so large for what a browser does.
What doesn't a browser do these days.
Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox
#6> Our next major challenge: We are dealing with 21 million lines of code. I think I just fail to understand the true complexity of a browser, but how is Firefox 21 million lines of code? How can a browser be 21 million lines of code? That just seems so large for what a browser does.
Chrome is 25M, so they are close.
Yeah i think its too much as well.
Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox
#7I am glad they are looking into this:
Sorry for the following rant, but I really don't think of Firefox browser when I think of code quality. (Still don't even though it has improved a lot in some areas).
When it comes to browsers, I still feel the old Opera browser (presto), that had more features, was blazing fast and small in size (in memory) is a very good example of a finely engineered software. In the early versions they really cared about optimizing for performance, using less memory and less power (on mobile devices) - I am amazed that years after, modern browsers are bloatier now than ever and just don't seem to care as much about these aspect as much as Opera did.
Questions like how modular is Firefox, how easy is it to customize Firefox (add or remove feature from the code), how easy is it for someone to use the Gecko rendering engine in their own project etc. all kind of indicate the bloatier, messier nature of the code within Firefox (in my opinion).
It's like browser developers now a days only care about adding more features (read bloat) without considering any constraints ...
Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox
#8> Our next major challenge: We are dealing with 21 million lines of code. I think I just fail to understand the true complexity of a browser, but how is Firefox 21 million lines of code? How can a browser be 21 million lines of code? That just seems so large for what a browser does.
It doesn't seem that crazy to me. Calling them web browsers is kind of anachronistic at this point. Just the JS engine itself seems like it would be massively complex. It's a VM with a JIT compiler which I can only imagine is quite cumbersome to implement securely
Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox
#9> Our next major challenge: We are dealing with 21 million lines of code. I think I just fail to understand the true complexity of a browser, but how is Firefox 21 million lines of code? How can a browser be 21 million lines of code? That just seems so large for what a browser does.
I think you’re underestimating what browsers do. They have an incredibly performant and highly-tuned VM, an extremely flexible and powerful layout engine, a comprehensive set of media players, and that’s not even talking about networking, security, and UI.
Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox
#10I was thinking about Firefox development quality while trying to figure out why the f does Firefox CPU usage fluctuate between 1 and 5% with one background tab open and only one plugin installed (containers). The same URL when opened in safari goes to 0.1% or 0.0. I tried to look up dom timeout config settings and tried to set aggressive timeouts, but in the end I gave up. There must be something fundamentally wrong…
Chrome has the same issue. The thing is, Safari is deeply connected to OS X and its internals to save as much energy as possible. Apple can do this and tie the code to the specific hardware, kernel, and what else matters that Safari runs on as they control everything. Chrome and Firefox cannot.
I would not be surprised if someone tells me that parts of Safari hook into private APIs in the kernel, the graphics driver and the other parts of the graphic and input stack to achieve the (measurable!) performance advantage over other browsers. For me personally, this is uncompetitive behavior that should be punished, but oh well, anti-trust legislation isn't exactly something that got much use over the last decades :(