I had another look at FireFox the other day. Impressed with their editable layout and smooth interface. Less impressed with the Network tools pane in comparison with Chrome(chrome shows compressed/inflated size, can view and copy raw headers, etc). Still, it's in my to-do to give it some game time.
Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
131–140 of 338 posts
Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
#132Love hearing this. I have been a Firefox user since Netscape 5, if that makes sense. To me there might be some positives about Chrome but for me it is a culture / community issue. It is a foundation I am willing to support during the good times and bad, and I am not so hot about giving Chrome access to every keystroke I make.
While this may sound petty, one feature I'd really love to see come back in Firefox is the ability to see the refresh button match the style / movability of the back/home buttons. It is very annoying having to use precise clicking on the eeeency little arrow on the URL bar.
But thats the thing, even if I am annoyed by small issues or lacking features, I don't abandon a project based on that.
Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Inbox is also Chrome-only. It UA sniffs and tells you to download Chrome if you aren't using it.
For non-nefarious reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495939
btw, the Inbox team clearly didn't bother to contact Mozilla about the Firefox performance problem because Mozilla fixed the bug within a couple hours of it being reported on HN:
Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
#134Great work!
Improvements like this and Rust, is where I like seeing Mozilla spending their resources.
Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 for IE's touchscreen support. I keep holding out and using Chrome on my laptop for a few extensions and all of the bookmarks/passwords I have synced over the years, but IE makes Chrome look absolutely kludgy and clunky when it comes to performance and UI these days. It's a shame IE doesn't have a more approachable extensibility model...
Does IE run on anything but Windows these days? (Edit: Doesn't look like it. Alas.)
So what? Safari is also stuck in Apple land.
Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
#136"This puts us in a position of strength, so we can say "these benchmarks are not very interesting; let's talk about other benchmarks (e.g. asm.js-related) and language features" without being accused of being sore losers." But are asmjs benchmarks interesting? They are not representative of the vast majority of real-world JS, so wouldn't an asmjs-laden benchmark suite really be a case of optimizing for your own set o…
The vast majority of real-world JS don't need JITs to perform adequately, but heavyweight asmjs games are CPU-bound and it makes sense to optimize for them. Watching Firefox creep up on Chrome performance on the arewefastyet.com charts, all JS engines seemed to be converging on some performance asymptote. asmjs changes the rules of the game and break through for specific content.
Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
For non-nefarious reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495939
It's not nefarious on the part of the _developers_. They were given concrete goals. I wasn't privy to those, but it sure looks like those were: Must work in Chrome (Android) and on iOS, working elsewhere is nice to have but optional. They were also given deadlines. Then they proceeded, with no nefariousness, to deliver a product that works on Chrome and iOS and not elsewhere. I'm sure if they had more time or more pe…
I would like to see similar arguments given when Microsoft developers follow what their management orders them, but alas.
Note, not picking on you, just Internet in general.
Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could survive without processes-per-tab, if Firefox gave some hint – any hint! – which tabs are being naughty. Maybe just a per-tab counter of allocations, or timeouts, or DOM edits, or some other operation? Anything that serves as a proxy for "more active than average while not in foreground".
Yeah, Firefox really needs some sort of "top". Right now, idling, my Firefox is taking between 20% and 40% of my CPU. I'm sure it's some tab running some dumb javascript, but there's no way for me to figure out which one. Sad, because spidermonkey must know which window a javascript context is associated with, so it could feasibly keep track of run time.
SpiderMonkey itself actually has no concept of windows at all. So it doesn't know what window anything has to do with.
The browser itself does, though. Some sort of "top"-like utility is in fact being worked on, for both websites and extensions.
Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not nefarious on the part of the _developers_. They were given concrete goals. I wasn't privy to those, but it sure looks like those were: Must work in Chrome (Android) and on iOS, working elsewhere is nice to have but optional. They were also given deadlines. Then they proceeded, with no nefariousness, to deliver a product that works on Chrome and iOS and not elsewhere. I'm sure if they had more time or more pe…
I would like to see similar arguments given when Microsoft developers follow what their management orders them, but alas. Note, not picking on you, just Internet in general.
Yeah, people who think individual developers at Microsoft were trying be evil just aren't thinking clearly. Now upper management, on the other hand....
Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance
#140Firefox is awesome and I love it, but my one complaint after all these years is that I have to restart the browser every day. It's not the end of the world, but it's still frustrating, especially when I'm in the throes of debugging or important research. Over the course of a day, the browser becomes unresponsive and CPU usage idles at 10-15%. Restarting with the same tabs brings it down to 0%. Yes, I know, disable ad…
I've heard other people say this too, but it must be a workflow or use case thing. I run Firefox as my browser of choice on Linux, Mac, and Windows every day, and have for 10 years at least. I do remember a time when memory was an issue, but those problems have been resolved for a few years. I routinely have dozens of tabs open, often with Flash video or lots of javascript, sometimes 50 or more (with the excellent Tr…
Interesting that you are talking about RAM, but it's hard to beat Firefox memory usage among major browsers. I'm impressed on my computers how Firefox takes ~750 MB of RAM and Chrome with the same tabs takes ~1.4 GB RAM.
Kudos to the developers.