Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance • Hacker News Board

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#201

Post by skrowl » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 1:50 PM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #40

taf2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is actually any evidence they use Chrome for much more than 1. disrupt IE/MS - i can say for certain they originally backed Firefox for this effort and only decided to split away to build chrome in the first place because they felt starting fresh they could build a better core and i believe they did. 2. enabling more people to build on the web, enables more of their ads to be shown. Firefox achiev…

1) Google never backed Firefox with a billion-dollar-a-year advertising campaign like they have Chrome for several years now. 2) It's not an accident that Google's webservices work best (sometimes only) in Chrome. They're way past the "disrupt IE" goal. They're into the "tightly couple our web service and Chrome and try to force out other options" goal.

You are correct. If you try to go to inbox.google.com, it says "Sorry, this only works in Chrome."

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#202

Post by cddotdotslash » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 2:03 PM UTC

e12e wrote: post #117

cddotdotslash wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow me to speak from the mindset of a consumer. The average consumer doesn't care about Firefox's data storage policies or how much they cooperate with the government. They care that things just work and are fast enough. For me, the convenience of Google Chrome comes from the fact that it is tightly integrated with all of Google services. I can use one Google account to log into my browser, access my email, set up…

I'd be much more interested in what you think personally, than what "a consumer" might think. I'm perfectly aware that a lot of the things that matter to me, doesn't seem to matter to a lot of people. Do I understand you correctly, in that: 1) You use gmail and Google calendar, therefore 2) You want your passwords, extensions, bookmarks and browser history synced by the same provider that provides your email and cale…

Well personally, I am probably not the average HN reader in that I have little problems giving up personal information in exchange for access to new services, free services, etc. So in that regard, Google more or less fits my mindset. As far as improving, I don't know - Firefox is already an excellent browser that is fast, secure, and pretty standard-compliant. It definitely beats IE.

What I've been trying to communicate is that I think the general consumer tends to be drawn to tightly integrated services - one provider can handle their email, their calendar, their browser, their phone's OS, etc. While this raises issues within the HN-crowd, my anecdotal evidence* supports the fact that the average user has little knowledge or desire for efforts to "protect their privacy." In general, they trust Google and don't have a need to switch. I've yet to convince anyone to switch from Chrome to Firefox over privacy arguments, but I have managed to get almost everyone I know to switch from IE to Chrome simply by telling them "it's Google."

* Family, friends, and family's co-workers

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#203

Post by coldtea » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 2:04 PM UTC

skj wrote: post #198

lucian1900 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so evil about Google?

It doesn't matter. (disclaimer: googler) I see it as a hubris against the idea that Google claimed to not be evil, and the fact that evil is such a poorly defined concept, and whether or not Google meets the bar depends entirely on the values of the perceiver. Many perceivers, for instance, miss the distinction between "Don't be evil." and "Don't do evil.". The former is a mindset, strategy, and intention, while the…

>Many perceivers, for instance, miss the distinction between "Don't be evil." and "Don't do evil.". The former is a mindset, strategy, and intention, while the latter is impossible for a corporation with 50k employees.

No, we perceive the disctinction just fine. Some of us just believe Google does "evil" with mindset, strategy, and intention...

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#204

Post by mnutt » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 2:11 PM UTC

kristiandupont wrote: post #113

mnutt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generate maybe 60 tabs a day, and finally came to the conclusion that I was using tabs incorrectly. Tree Style Tabs is great, but I found that I was using tabs as combined bookmarks + todo list. So I wrote a Firefox addon that pops up a sidebar every morning and steps through every tab prompting me to either close it or save it as a bookmark. (with tags) It has definitely helped with this vague uneasy feeling I hav…

Is that available online?

It's not quite ready for other people to use yet, but the source is available at https://github.com/mnutt/tabbers-anonymous.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#205

Post by CalRobert » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 2:12 PM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #125

rdtsc wrote: post #3

I have been very impressed by Firefox lately. Kudos to the whole team at Mozilla. Just about 5 years ago, it was looking to me like it was the end of Firefox. It was Chrome all the way. New features were coming out one after another. Faster rendering. Safe process isolation for each tab. Looked better. But I just switched back last month. It happened kind of randomly. Saw an announcement of a new release ( 33, I thin…

TBH, the fact that bookmarking has not been completely separated from browsers makes me very sad. I know I can use a cloud service like pinboard.in. A universal bookmark sharing format would make the world a much better place. The fact that importing and exporting is still a thing sucks. Give me a content addressable store upon which multiple indices and management tools can be built and give me a way to choose how t…

Owncloud has a really nice plugin for this. All you need is a simple bookmarklet and you can tag bookmarks and access them anywhere

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#206

Post by lucian1900 » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 2:21 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #203

skj wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. (disclaimer: googler) I see it as a hubris against the idea that Google claimed to not be evil, and the fact that evil is such a poorly defined concept, and whether or not Google meets the bar depends entirely on the values of the perceiver. Many perceivers, for instance, miss the distinction between "Don't be evil." and "Don't do evil.". The former is a mindset, strategy, and intention, while the…

> Many perceivers, for instance, miss the distinction between "Don't be evil." and "Don't do evil.". The former is a mindset, strategy, and intention, while the latter is impossible for a corporation with 50k employees. No, we perceive the disctinction just fine. Some of us just believe Google does "evil" with mindset, strategy, and intention...

I would suggest that those of you that believe that are deluded.

What possible motivation could they have for being "evil", comic book style?

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#207

Post by vertex-four » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 2:21 PM UTC

shadowmint wrote: post #160

wyager wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is effectively impossible to have an unsafe memory access error in Rust. The compiler eliminates a huge variety of bug types, including null pointer dereferences, use-after-free bugs, memory leaks, etc. All arrays are bounds-checked and rust encourages good programming practice like using abstracted list-processing mechanisms (like mapping instead of loops) and algebraic types instead of e.g. null pointers.

It is effectively impossible to have an unsafe memory access error in Rust Please, don't say that. Lets be reasonable. Rust is great, but Rust code crashes and segfaults too, just like any language, programs have bugs, and those bugs can cause program failure. Rust just has less of them, because it has a smart compiler. ...but it's not right to suggest that it has none. Remember: There is no way of ensuring that a ru…

> There is no way of ensuring a rust program does not contain any unsafe code.

Sure there is. There's a compiler lint available which can disallow "unsafe" code, i.e. code which is able to create null pointer errors (and thus segfaults).

Of course, the standard library will always contain a bunch of unsafe stuff - but at least it's shared between every project, and any bugs can be fixed once, and assuming it's correct any non-unsafe code that depends on it is memory-safe.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#208

Post by wingerlang » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 2:24 PM UTC

josteink wrote: post #195

wingerlang wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went back to FF after using Chrome since its release, for about 2 weeks before I was fed up with it not playing every youtube video.

So because of non-standard DRMed content, you decided that the best way of preventing that to be a problem in the future is to install the only non-standard browser which renders this non-standard DRMed content from the same provider? Would you even considered that if that one provider was anyone but Google? No? If so, why do you give Google a free pass?

It just said "cannot play video", did not inspect why because it said something about a plugin, and it made me annoyed, so I switched. This page http://www.youtube.com/html5 had only 2/6 checkmarks in FF.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#209

Post by mdellabitta » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 2:37 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #135

eru wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Safari is available for OS X and Windows.

Re: Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance

#210

Post by StillBored » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 2:40 PM UTC

Igglyboo wrote: post #17

As soon as firefox gets per process tabs in stable I'll switch back, I really want to switch from chrome but that's a deal killer for me.

  As soon as firefox gets per process tabs in stable I'll switch back

As strange as it sounds, this is a reason why I don't use chrome as my "default" browser. I seem to find the web sites that leak resources and leave them open in tabs (one of my projects at work is a big culprit too). With firefox a runaway tab or two simply results in a single CPU pegged at 100% and max about 2GB of ram consumption. With chrome it will peg out a couple CPU's and eat RAM until my machine goes into swap. Usually this happens while I'm gone so simply unlocking the screen is a painful process as everything gets swapped in.

In other words I prefer having to kill firefox on a regular basis because its run out of RAM, than to have to reset my machine because its taking 10 minutes to unlock the screen.