181–190 of 349 posts
I'll be curious to see how this plays out. History seems to show that boosting performance later is a monumental challenge.
Early Chrome showed that Firefox was leaving a lot of performance on the table, and it took Firefox a long time to catch up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do mostly Python on my dayjob, but for low-level side-projects I've gotta say C++ with the C++17 or C++20 standard it's way faster to iterate with than say Rust or even something like Zig. For me iteration speed's a big selling point that (plus the fact that's easier to find contributors) might also be important for projects like these.
I’m puzzled by your comment. I am expert in Rust for almost a decade, but only mildly conversant in C++, and have no interest in actively learning more C++. Rust seems to me far easier to learn and get going in due in major part to its incontrovertibly superior standard tooling. I can’t see any place for any meaningful difference in iteration speed between the two, save that you may well have to iterate more in C++ d…
With Rust, though, it's as if someone looked at C++ compilation times (not to mention resource requirements) and said, "I think we can find a way to make it worse."
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> Yes, but they are replacing it bit by bit - I mean, they even started Rust for exactly that purpose. So (without being a huge fan of Rust) the decision to start a "greenfield" browser project in a memory-unsafe language is questionable IMHO... Maybe, but the speed with which SerenityOS, its programs and the browser has been implemented, with so few man-hours thrown at it kinda displays why C++ was chosen over Rust.…
> There is no comparable project in Rust that demonstrates just how quick you can go from "nothing" to Full-Fledged OS https://www.redox-os.org/
Doesn't that sort of prove my point?
I dunno if you've tried both SerenityOS and Redox - I have, and SerenityOS is just more complete and usable as a daily driver than Redox[1].
Redox developed over 7 years has less functionality than SerenityOS developed over 4 years.
[1] They both have a long way to go before being completely usable as a daily driver, but Redox has a longer way to go than SerenityOS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but they are replacing it bit by bit - I mean, they even started Rust for exactly that purpose. So (without being a huge fan of Rust) the decision to start a "greenfield" browser project in a memory-unsafe language is questionable IMHO...
It's not clear to me that they are replacing it bit-by-bit. https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/ I don't have an over-time series, but if you're willing to take my memory at its word Rust's percentage has hovered at around 10% for a while now. It seems to have actually gone down recently. Combine that with efforts like Servo being wound down and their team being let go, and it makes me wonder what the future of…
> So instead of [building the browser one feature/spec at a time], we tend to focus on building “vertical slices” of functionality. This means setting practical, cross-cutting goals, such as “let’s get twitter.com/awesomekling to load”, “let’s get login working on discord.com”, and other similar objectives. Seems similar to how Wine is developed: instead of just going down the list of API functions to implement, the…
And emulators that have gone this path have all regretted it, because they end up making hacks to make work, because everyone simply wants to play . Dolphin is still paying the price of that method years down the line. Project64 took years to unfuck themselves up, ZSNES is forgotten and overtaken by many more that have done the proper thing.
So, sure, you can get some initial usage. But making a browser isn't about being able to open twitter.com
What we all REALLY care about: they went with C++ and Qt https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird
Since “The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers” is depicted at the start of the article, I think it’s worth pointing out that its claim of W3C having 1,217 specs totalling 114 million words is wildly wrong, probably by 2–3 orders of magnitude in the total. The considerable majority of the documents considered were not specs or not web-relevant, and dozens of versions of the same thing were often counted. Source:…
Worth noting the discussion at the link. Given that he omitted huge specs like WebGL etc. I wouldn't say it's wildly wrong. But I'd love to somehow arrive at a better estimate.
Is WebGL needed? I've browsed the web for years with it disabled and have not suffered any inconvenience. I'd probably say it's not needed, but I'm a bit on the fence about it and can understand if people would disagree. All browsers implement XSLT, but is that actually needed for a functional modern browser? Maybe not? I can't remember the last time I've seen it used, but perhaps it is. And do you include HTTP? Or is that too low-level? Do you include PNG and SVG or just PNG? If you include SVG then why not PNG?
There are some obvious "we need this", some obvious "we don't need this", and a lot of unclear and somewhat subjective area. I do know that you can't really say "yes there's bad data, but it probably cancels out against stuff omitted"; if anything, it only underscored my point that the list is not good.
An uncurated or minimally curated document dump is not the correct approach in the first place, if you do that for SMTP you'd end up with a lot of irrelevant documents too simply because the specification is a few decades old and stuff gets superseded, some things never sees real-world implementations, things no one uses any more, etc.
I started making a better list when the article was originally posted, starting from "okay, let's just check what you need for a useful browser normal people can use every day" and ended up with a few dozen things, but I never really posted it as I wasn't quite sure that was fully correct either and because I never really figured out some of the questions above.
I think most of the complexity stem not just from the word count, but rather that everything interacts with everything else. Consider the relatively new "position: sticky" in CSS. Okay, great. But it doesn't work well with flexboxes, or RTL, or negative margins, or z-index, etc. etc. [1] Adding what seems like a fairly simple feature is quite complex because it interacts with so many things. It's not hard to imagine a fresh new HTML and CSS which allows all the features the current does but does so in a much simpler and orthogonal way, which would of course break backward compatibility and every website.
[1]: In 2020 anyway; I'm not sure on the current state; here are some of the links of my post from 2020 which like most of my posts I never finished:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1488080 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1498772 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519600 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1490487 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1488950 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1514291 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1528957 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1472602 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1455660 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1450601 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1424384 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1341643 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1526342 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519073 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1414874
Others have already mentioned performance is one of the hard part. Another aspect is that for any complex, large-scale project like browser, lots of, if not most of, effort is actually in the long tail: to make 90% or even 99% websites work probably is as hard as making the rest 1%. So while the team probably could cruise through when working on current gen spec and popular sites like Discord/Twitter, it's what left…
Is this something you know from experience or are you armchair guessing? If I recall correctly, the work Andreas did at Apple was mostly focused on performance, and Safari has long had a reputation for excellent performance. Maybe you’ve also done that type of work, but otherwise I’ll trust his judgement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule>