Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Engineering code quality in Firefox

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 155 posts

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#21

Post by gsnedders »

webmobdev wrote: post #7

I 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 ver…

Presto wouldn't be so memory efficient on today's web; web applications typically ran into plenty of places where memory consumption was worse in Presto versus WebKit, for example. (A simple example here is that each DOM Node was larger in Presto than any other browser, if I'm not forgetting.)

But ultimately a lot of this comes down to different considerations: when the majority of your revenue comes from companies who care about running on limited devices, of _course_ the company invested more in running well on them. And I wouldn't hold up Presto as a great example of modularity or the ability to embed the rendering engine in other projects.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#22

Post by Bnshsysjab »

djanogo wrote: post #4

I 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…

I’ve gotten in the habit of killing Firefox before going to bed, the processes seem to run away and peg the CPU periodically throughout the night. It seems to be generally Facebook, but other JS heavy sites have similar issues.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#23

Post by alephnan »

We had an "open-ended" project in an undergraduate Computer Security course to discover a 0-day in Firefox. The professor (a researcher, not lecturer, by trade) didn't really have a curriculum, and said this artifact accounted for 70-80% of our grade.

Trying to compile Firefox was already a challenge. That, and each compile took an hour. IIRC, Firefox is built on some esoteric architecture / design pattern that's definitely beyond the scope of design patterns undergraduate students are familiar with.

By the end of the term, no one discovered a 0-day, unsurprising considering half the class didn't even try. There were 90 students in the class, and I ended up being the only person to produce a JS payload that would crash Firefox in one of the newer HTML5 libraries. It's neither a zero-day or exciting or profitable vulnerability though.

Realizing everyone in the class would fail, the professor changed the grade of this project to only account for 30% of the grade. I spent most of my time on this project while disregarding the rest of the busy work for the class. In the end, I got a C grade while my peers who didn't even attempt to tackle this project received higher grades.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#24

Post by vikramkr »

alephnan wrote: post #23

We had an "open-ended" project in an undergraduate Computer Security course to discover a 0-day in Firefox. The professor (a researcher, not lecturer, by trade) didn't really have a curriculum, and said this artifact accounted for 70-80% of our grade. Trying to compile Firefox was already a challenge. That, and each compile took an hour. IIRC, Firefox is built on some esoteric architecture / design pattern that's def…

That makes no sense as a class design - are there so many zero days in firefox that are so easy to find that you can expect undergrads to casually find enough that you can base 70% of the class grade on it?

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#25

Post by vkou »

alephnan wrote: post #23

We had an "open-ended" project in an undergraduate Computer Security course to discover a 0-day in Firefox. The professor (a researcher, not lecturer, by trade) didn't really have a curriculum, and said this artifact accounted for 70-80% of our grade. Trying to compile Firefox was already a challenge. That, and each compile took an hour. IIRC, Firefox is built on some esoteric architecture / design pattern that's def…

I'm sorry that your professor treated their instruction as an open-ended research project.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#26

Post by vkou »

rstefanic wrote: post #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.

Having worked on codebases that are more than 10 million LOC, I'm surprised that Firefox's functionality fits into such a small amount of code.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#28

Post by acdha »

mschuster91 wrote: post #10
djanogo wrote: post #4

I 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…

> 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 :(

In the absence of any evidence of this — have you looked at the open source releases? — why is that more plausible than a team employed by a hardware vendor which cares deeply about user experience and battery life prioritizing use of the platform features and talking with other teams at the same company? Part of what makes things like Firefox' compositor work hard is that they support multiple other platforms so the Safari team can easily be ahead without anything underhanded simply by virtue of not needing to support 4 major platforms.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#29

Post by jimbob45 »

vikramkr wrote: post #24
alephnan wrote: post #23

We had an "open-ended" project in an undergraduate Computer Security course to discover a 0-day in Firefox. The professor (a researcher, not lecturer, by trade) didn't really have a curriculum, and said this artifact accounted for 70-80% of our grade. Trying to compile Firefox was already a challenge. That, and each compile took an hour. IIRC, Firefox is built on some esoteric architecture / design pattern that's def…

That makes no sense as a class design - are there so many zero days in firefox that are so easy to find that you can expect undergrads to casually find enough that you can base 70% of the class grade on it?

Every teacher wants to be the next Jaime Escalante. Sometimes they take their idealism too far.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#30

Post by acdha »

webmobdev wrote: post #7

I 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 ver…

Opera felt small and fast because it did less and ran websites doing less. If you look at an old site in a modern browser, it's much faster; if you even could run a modern site in an old browser, you'd see just how many optimizations you're taking for granted — not to mention things like high-quality text rendering which fully supports Unicode and complex scripts.
Post reply on HN