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Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

theguardian.com

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Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#41

Post by vbezhenar »

simion314 wrote: post #27
scarface74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t Netscape the case study of why you shouldn’t do a full rewrite?

AFAIK Firefox is not doing a full rewrite but incremental refactoring then attempting to swap components. The unfortunate truth is that writing a browser is almost impossible because of the complexity, IMO we need a new version of the web that breaks compatibility, make everything strict(no longer ignore errors and guess a fix for them) no more 12 ways to center an element , for the legacy web we can use the existing…

Write websites with Wasm, render UI with WebGL or something similar. Implement JavaScript as a compiler to Wasm (which runs on Wasmitself), implement HTML+CSS renderer as a library which runs on Wasm as well. So basically your browser need to implement Wasm and WebGL which sounds reasonable task. Well, that's simplification, of course, it need to implement some HTTP API like XMLHttpRequest, local storage API and so on, but it's manageable.

Here's an example of website written with Rust and rendering all UI to canvas: https://makepad.github.io/makepad/ it works right now and it's very fast and smooth.

IMO tech for next generation web apps is already here and it's great.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#42

Post by worble »

idoubtit wrote: post #8
hoptank wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest Mozilla do instead? Mozilla don't just fund the development of their own products they also fund research [1] and other projects [2]. [1] https://research.mozilla.org/research-grants/ [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/grants/ In a perfect world Mozilla would be funded by donations. I donate to Mozilla but it's a pittance compared to what they get from Google.

All of the non-research grants were in 2006-2013. Has Mozilla stopped this policy of semi-random funding of external projects? Some of these grants surprised me. For example, $270,000 for the translation and accessibility of the USA presidential election of 2012.

Do you mean their MOSS grants? They gave $50,000 to Godot this year.

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-m...

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#43

Post by k1m »

dageshi wrote: post #29
just_observing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Guardian has gone downhill in the last few years, just like the rest of UK mainstream news reporting. They have rolled over to do whatever the Government wants not reporting - take Assange for example. Their coverage is practically non-existent. I used to buy The Guardian every day, then I subscribed digitally. And then when their reporting slid downhill, I stopped subscribing. I still read it - but block their d…

The more likely explanation is that people got tired of Assange's story and so the articles didn't get the clicks to justify covering them any more. The Guardian can get more clicks with a steady drip of vegan opinion pieces, stories laughing at Tories and the dreadfulness of brexit so that's what they'll do. Same as the Telegraph will feed its readers "the glory of Boris", "forwards unto brexit" and "Good lord look…

That's not a likely explanation when it comes to Assange. The Guardian has been terrible, and even its previous star reporter Glenn Greenwald (who won them a Pulitzer on the Snowden reporting) has been extremely critical. See for example https://theintercept.com/2019/01/02/five-weeks-after-the-gua...

Brought up again earlier this month: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1191681248453943296

That piece of fake news from the Guardian has been shared more than 25,000 times on Facebook.

I don't agree that honest reporting on Assange simply won't get clicks. But sensational fake news certainly does.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#44

Post by zzzcpan »

sharpneli wrote: post #19
radarsat1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it technically enforced though, I am curious. I mean, if I wrote an application that downloaded text files and rendered the text to the screen, I am sure that would be possible. If I wanted to add images to draw next to the text I am sure it is feasible. So how can one technically prohibit doing that? Implementation-wise, how is a web browser really that different from e.g. a video game? Or is it only policy-e…

One cannot have writeable executable memory on iOS (apple can, we cannot). Thus one cannot make a JIT compiler for js and thus pages are slow. Game engines such as Unity use il2cpp to go from the C# stuff into C++ that can be statically compiled as running the C# as bytecode would be too slow without a jitter.

> One cannot have writeable executable memory on iOS (apple can, we cannot).

> Thus one cannot make a JIT compiler for js and thus pages are slow.

Lack of JIT doesn't slow down pages much. I believe the difference is so small that it might even be possible to be faster without JIT for most pages, especially on low power devices, it's only computation heavy pages that are going to suffer and even then it's not like you can't optimize common patterns statically ahead of time.

It doesn't mean that it's a good idea to invest into it, you are still under Apple's mercy and they clearly don't want competing browser engines.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#45

Post by The_rationalist »

Jonnax wrote: post #9
The_rationalist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Integrating chunks of chromium code into gecko should massively reduce their maintenance costs. E.g spidermonkey is sub-par to v8 since so many years. If mozilla invested the money it invest into spidermonkey, into v8, the web would be faster for everyone. Should I repeat? The web would be faster for everyone. Nodejs servers too and also electron apps. We would also get new js features, faster. But mozilla doesn't se…

The point of opensource is to follow along with the leader?

It is to make synergies through code sharing. Let's fork the Linux kernel into a redundant implementation and take half kernel developers in order to slow down progress by a factor of two.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#46

Post by jeltz »

dageshi wrote: post #29
just_observing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Guardian has gone downhill in the last few years, just like the rest of UK mainstream news reporting. They have rolled over to do whatever the Government wants not reporting - take Assange for example. Their coverage is practically non-existent. I used to buy The Guardian every day, then I subscribed digitally. And then when their reporting slid downhill, I stopped subscribing. I still read it - but block their d…

The more likely explanation is that people got tired of Assange's story and so the articles didn't get the clicks to justify covering them any more. The Guardian can get more clicks with a steady drip of vegan opinion pieces, stories laughing at Tories and the dreadfulness of brexit so that's what they'll do. Same as the Telegraph will feed its readers "the glory of Boris", "forwards unto brexit" and "Good lord look…

Pretty much. Click metrics like this might become the death of journalism. I used to read a lot of news but have stopped due to how every news paper became more and more about click bait and about appealing to the audience. Sure, I presume I too clicked on more news until I one day stopped reading entirely.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#48

Post by jeltz »

ppfrc wrote: post #11
idoubtit wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the non-research grants were in 2006-2013. Has Mozilla stopped this policy of semi-random funding of external projects? Some of these grants surprised me. For example, $270,000 for the translation and accessibility of the USA presidential election of 2012.

Just imagine not being from the US, donating to Mozilla so they improve Firefox, and they instead spend the money on translating the USA presidential election.

Yes, this is the reason I would never donate to Mozilla. They do way too many unrelated things. I only donate to smaller more targeted projects.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#49

Post by k1m »

The Guardian website is horrible when it comes to tracking. They don't tend to mention that in their privacy-focused articles.

Here's a tweet that sums it up:

'The irony is real... @Guardian headline, "The Guardian view on privacy online: a human right", while allowing trackers to spy on their readers.'

https://twitter.com/Ghostery/status/989543132349034499

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#50

Post by jillesvangurp »

edpichler wrote: post #24

Mozilla really has a big challenge. It is hard to compete with such powerful companies, creating a sustainable business with their mission without succumbing to ads or stopping to protect user privacy. It looks like an unfair game. I like the Brave business model. I wish to have the same with Firefox.

Too bad they built Brave on Chromium instead of Firefox. Which of course given that the company is run by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich is a bit of a shame.

Firefox is showing that they are more than technically competent to keep up with Chromium and deliver great performance and functionality. With the work they are doing rewriting Firefox component by component in Rust, Google will have their work cut out keeping up in terms of performance using their C++ implementation. Competition is good.

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