121–130 of 199 posts
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Stylo is now enabled in Firefox for Android's Nightly builds. You can install Nightly from the Google Play Store to see if Stylo makes a difference for the animation problems. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...
since when? I've been running Nightly for months.
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> most benchmarks Which benchmarks are you talking about? It depends on what those benchmarks measure. For example, a lot of the Quantum work was in user-percieved UI latency; unless the benchmark is measuring that, and I imagine that's a hard thing to measure, it's not going to show up. > Does Rust have a runtime penalty as Golang does? Rust has the same amount of runtime as C does: very very little. https://github.…
Not sure if this is normal, but I have very noticeable lag in the search/address bar autocomplete which does make the whole browser feel a bit slow (MacOS Sierra, using Developer Edition). And since we are here, the prompt/dialog windows in FF are still not native looking too. These are my two major complaints :)
On the other hand, if the disk is idle it is blazing fast.
I'm a huge, huge fan of Rust, Stylo, Servo, WebRender, etc. Hats off to everyone involved.
It's gratifying to see how successfully the same organization has learned from the debacle that was the rewrite from Netscape 4 to Mozilla in the first place. That time, they didn't release for years, losing market share and ceding the web to Internet Explorer for the next decade. Joel Spolsky wrote multiple articles[1][2] pointing out their folly. This time, their "multiple-moonshot effort" is paying off big-time be…
Wasn't the original Mozilla leading into Firefox wildly successful, though? It certainly put a dent in IE's market share. The opposite has been true for Chrome so it seems their recent history is not one of successful adaptation.
Chrome on the other hand is not stagnant, far from it. And Google is not letting Chrome stagnate.
Never mind that Google is using their marketing muscle to push Chrome every chance they get.
Just try downloading some shareware on Windows, and you are bound to get Chrome along for the ride. Hell, even Adobe offers Chrome as a Flash bundle even though Google is using Chrome to effectively kill Flash...
Congratulations, it's really an unparalleled performance of parallel performance.
Speaking of which: does anyone know if some new optimization land in the beta versions a couple of days ago? Or if some bug that caused delays on Linux got fixed? I updated my developer version yesterday and it was as if Firefox - already ludicrously fast compared to before - turned on the turbo booster. Obviously, I'm not complaining ;)
Of course it could be any incremental improvement instead of some big named feature.
> For example, register allocation is a tedious process that bedeviled assembly programmers, whereas higher-level languages like C++ handle it automatically and get it right every single time. Ideal register allocation is NP-complete, so a compiler can't get it right every single time. I'm not sure how good in practice modern compilers are at this, but would be curious to know if there's some asm writers who can actu…
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> I find it hard to justify developing Rust just for a web browser "just for", our browsers are already very complex. The browser is responsible for sandboxing and in effect taming the wild web.. and the web is not looking to become less wild :) in the future browsers will have to prioritize CPU time between tabs seeking to mine bitcoin, crazy ad schemes, and battery power. In terms of security, browser bugs scares m…
effectively, browsers are growing up to gain most of the same functionality as modern operating systems, with all the complexity that brings.
> Stylo was the culmination of a near-decade of R&D, a multiple-moonshot effort to build a better browser by building a better language. This is the most impressive, and useful aspect of all the recent work in Firefox. Rust is an amazing language. It really brings something new to the table with its borrow checker. The fact that rust was created as part of a greater effort to work on a web browser is amazing.
What I wonder, and I do not mean this in negative way, is whether this would have happened in a more commercially oriented organisation. Mozilla remains a foundation, and I consider Rust a fruit of their labour in itself. To put it another way, I find it hard to justify developing Rust just for a web browser. But if you consider it from the perspective of a foundation developing tools for the developer community as a…
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Not sure if this is normal, but I have very noticeable lag in the search/address bar autocomplete which does make the whole browser feel a bit slow (MacOS Sierra, using Developer Edition). And since we are here, the prompt/dialog windows in FF are still not native looking too. These are my two major complaints :)
I've noticed this on Windows. The new Firefox seems to be a bit more chatty to the disk. If some other process is hammering the disk then autocomplete gets really laggy. I suspect it is optimized for SSDs. On the other hand, if the disk is idle it is blazing fast.