That’s a nice Speedometer speedup! Really happy for the FF JS team, seems like they are on to something.
Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
51–60 of 286 posts
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The last thing I want in my browser is a JVM.
The JVM actually had a lot of features that are slowly appearing in JavaScript. Standard bytecode format (like WebAssembly), security/authentication (origin, content security policy)... One day JS engines will add cryptographic signatures to replace the complex origin rules and they will unify the WebAssembly workflow with the JavaScript code pipeline and we'll have a full JVM again.
> One day JS engines will add cryptographic signatures to replace the complex origin rules
Signed HTTP exchanges might give you that already, AFAICT.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#53I believe in Mozilla.and their products. as much as they need to get their admin/ceo pay down.as much as they need to adjust the new Android Firefox UI Unless there is another foundation with a browser promoting a free and open internet, my vote will always remain with them.
Why does the ceo pay need to go down?
Her pay is currently IIRC 2.4 million dollars a year
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#54I believe in Mozilla.and their products. as much as they need to get their admin/ceo pay down.as much as they need to adjust the new Android Firefox UI Unless there is another foundation with a browser promoting a free and open internet, my vote will always remain with them.
The problem with your view is that the purpose of most nonprofits, as revealed by their actual spending, is to act as a well-paying job for their administrators and a volunteer/exploitation scheme. They aren’t really about the mission. This is as clear as it could be for Mozilla.
There's a catch-22 in there, a touch of cynicism, which I understand. However, ideally you want well paid employees who are not exploiting volunteers? I doubt there are many stats on this, but my experience is that most nonprofits don't exploit volunteers.
Firefox rolls out solid releases and improvements, month after month. Presumably that means that their employees are doing something good somewhere? I know there are a ton of essential volunteers too, but the project would struggle without a paid core and infra.
As a developer and as a user, I get a lot of value for free out of Firefox. I barely do anything to give back, except perhaps to try and 'push it forward' in the FOSS project I am partially paid to work on. In our project, I get a bit rattled when people say we are going against their interests, when we have to make choices to ensure the financial stability of the project, and also to respond to requests from the greater (less-vocal) community. I'm obviously partial, but I'll give Firefox/Mozilla the benefit of the doubt.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#55The current title ("significantly faster") on HN is suboptimal. What is there written relating the speed is that the new implementation: "improves responsiveness and page load performance significantly (we're seeing 5-15% improvements on many visual metrics tests). Speedometer is about 10% faster with Warp." "Warp is currently slower on various synthetic JS benchmarks such as Octane (which we will continue investigat…
5-15% on web content is significantly faster to me. Also, like many people, I mainly use my browser for visiting websites instead of running things like Octane, but obviously it would be nicer if Octane were faster too.
Yeah. That’s a massive speedup for Speedometer. It’s a big deal and everyone who contributed should be super proud.
JSC is pretty well tuned for it, finding a 0.5% speedup is hard. So seeing 10% speedups is impressive and rare. Of course, it’s possible that they are just catching up so they found the low hanging fruit - but also possible that they can leapfrog JSC (I haven’t measured if this gets them there or not).
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it will take more time to say that for certain. Warp is an exception, but most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go. I think the thing to be worried about is: what will happen when they run out of stuff that's already in the…
> most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go. This is not the case. Servo worked on big experimental moonshot projects. They had some major successes (Stylo, WebRender), but the rest of the Firefox team wasn't sitting around twiddling…
This is correct. Servo's Stylo parallelized CSS parser shipped in Firefox's "Quantum" performance release, but a huge part of the overall performance improvement came from profiling the whole system. Fixing lots of small hot spots in Firefox frontend and Gecko really added up. It's easy for tiny performance regressions to creep in here and there.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#57[flagged]
>If only they could merge with V8 progress would actually reach everyone Having two competing implementations forces both into a performance competition, and encourages work on standards to ensure compatibility. Firefox switching to V8 might help in the short term, but long term it would likely be to the detriment of everyone
They should all switch to JSC instead.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
5-15% on web content is significantly faster to me. Also, like many people, I mainly use my browser for visiting websites instead of running things like Octane, but obviously it would be nicer if Octane were faster too.
> 5-15% on web content is significantly faster to me. Is it though? Would you even notice it? If there was an already short processing action, e.g. 1 second, now it would be 850ms -- hardly noticable. If there was some long processing action, say 5 minutes, now it would take 4 minutes and 25 seconds. Hardly something to write home about in either case...
This is pretty mature technology, and like most mature technologies, there aren't going to be a lot of 50% improvements any more.
Look at CPUs or the Internal Combustion Engine. After 120+ years, it still improves, but you're looking at single-digit percentage points if that.
I'm not aware of a lot of things that could magically improve browser performance, but if you do, you have a great opportunity for a unicorn startup.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#59Firefox is a dead man walking. If you want privacy, use a FF fork called Librewolf
You claim it's dead, but suggest using a fork that can't hope to keep up if Firefox dies? They benefit from all the architectural improvements done to Firefox, including this.
You don't have a high opinion of the LibreWolf team.
Did you know that I can still use a web browser from the last decade to surf websites? Yup.
Even if FF dies, the codebase is opensource and continue to be developed.
Re: Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
#60I believe in Mozilla.and their products. as much as they need to get their admin/ceo pay down.as much as they need to adjust the new Android Firefox UI Unless there is another foundation with a browser promoting a free and open internet, my vote will always remain with them.
Why does the ceo pay need to go down?
> Why does the ceo pay need to go down?
Because salary X4 didn't result in financial performance X4, just 250 people fired.