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Engineering code quality in Firefox

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Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#91

Post by sondr3 »

thayne wrote: post #66
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…

> Trying to compile Firefox was already a challenge. That, and each compile took an hour. At first glance, this sounds terrible. But when compared to software projects of comparable size, Firefox is hardly unique. Compare to compiling Chromium for example, or even the Linux kernel.

I think at scale (according to Wikipedia the 5.6 release has ~33M lines of code) the Linux kernel might be one of the easiest (and quickest) projects to compile[1].

[1]: https://techgage.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Compile-Perf...

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#92

Post by mschuetz »

bergheim wrote: post #49

I just wanted to say that, despite a few mishaps, firefox is what _everybody_ on hn should be using. I can give my browser-time credentials, but really. Firefox is amazing. Care for the open web, fear ie6, and at the same time enjoy firefox!

I wish I could recommend Firefox but I can't because it cripples performance of the things I'm working on, namely streaming and rendering large 3D data.

I'm using Firefox privately at home but for work, including work@home, I'm using almost exclusively Chrome. Chrome is just so much faster and the developer tools so much more polished than Firefox. DataView is 40 times slower in Firefox, and I'm using it quite extensively to read binary files. There is a Uint8Array hack/workaround that lets you write your own DataView that is 4 times faster in Firefox, but 10x slower in Chrome, so it's not an alternative I'm going to use.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#93

Post by Ndymium »

lsh wrote: post #64
GeorgeWBasic wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The source code of Opera Presto is out there on the net I don't suppose it's been open-sourced, has it? It would be great to have an alternative browser engine out there, instead of just three (or two and a half, depending on how you count Blink and Webkit).

No, but there is an effort to recreate it with the Otter Browser: https://otter-browser.org/

Otter browser uses WebKit, so it's not a new engine.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#94

Post by exdsq »

juskrey wrote: post #89
dbmueller wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people still can be harmful even being in good faith That's a general truth. You make it sound like people choose academia to somehow cheat the system and profit from free student's work or whatever. Make a real case for you thesis then.

People choose academia to be within (zero-sum) system and project the same expectations to students, while real life success is about being out of any system. Hence the harm.

People don't 'choose academia to be within a zero-sum system and project the same expectations to students'. My partner and most of my friends are or have been in academia and the one common thing is a real passion for their subject of choice and industry doesn't offer the same flexibility to focus on it.

Being suspicious of those who voluntarily become academics is odd.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#95

Post by Bnshsysjab »

eitland wrote: post #77
Bnshsysjab wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Calendar has had some serious issues with doi g something weird in the background. At some point Google search results page also would spinn up one core on my machine one or twice a minute if left unattended but last I saw that was years ago. (FWIW I don't use Google search much these days, so it might slip by without me noticing.)

I don’t understand why tabs are allowed to mindlessly peg CPU, especially after the wave of crypto miners

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#96

Post by random42 »

juskrey wrote: post #70
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…

He is neither a researcher nor teacher - typical academic parasite. Makes a bet on trendy advanced task and, if it works, lets you be a coauthor. If it does not - no big deal some naive student spent 1/2 year on something virtually impossible w/o deep industry experience.

No need to get nasty.

You don't know him at all, apart from a short anecdotal incident, where even OP does not portray him in a bad light.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#97

Post by why_only_15 »

gsnedders wrote: post #18
m463 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the f does Firefox ... same URL when opened in safari It would be interesting to compare the safari budget/manpower. Even given that, I would imagine safari only has to support one-ish OS, and probably has help from the OS group.

The WebKit team is smaller than the corresponding team at Mozilla, even if you look at the subset of of identical roles across both organizations (and e.g. ignore those working on the Firefox network stack). That said, it's worthwhile remembering that WebKit does very much maintain all the abstractions to be cross-platform (and Apple do still maintain a Windows port), even if it does try and leverage plenty of OS lib…

as of the last time i recall the window server had some special treatment for safari to try to optimize various things -- is that true?

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#98

Post by why_only_15 »

skohan wrote: post #83
aschatten wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern day browsers are essentially VM with rich customizable GUI.

This is something I really deplore about the state of modern software development. Taken collectively, it's mind-boggling the amount of waste there is in terms of memory and CPU (i.e. energy) usage by running a huge portion of consumer software in the browser. We could achieve the same result so much cheaper, with better performance and UX, by putting a serious effort into a set of standards for handling code from an…

The biggest thing you would probably be sacrificing is development time for every engineer involved. The html/css/js stacks have had unimaginable amounts of manpower invested, more so than any UI stack in history. This has made them much easier to learn and manipulate. Throwing away all of that would be a very hard sell.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#99

Post by webmobdev »

sfink wrote: post #47
webmobdev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presto wouldn't be so memory efficient on today's web; I disagree. (I continued to use the last version of Opera Presto for a few year even after it was abandoned, and it continued to outperform other browsers on both platforms - Windows and macOS, though the macOS version was a bit more buggy). Let's not forget that Presto already supported a lot of HTML5 features(1) before it was abandoned. (Even today, it works…

> But let's not forget that Opera browser earned its reputation for being blazing fast, its tiny size and its low memory consumption on the desktop platforms long before it became a popular browser on the mobile platform. Just about all of the major browsers earned their reputation for being blazing fast, tiny, and using little memory. And those attributes are well-deserved at their launches. Then real-world pressure…

P.S: I hope you didn't feel attacked because of my harsh opinions in my prevoius reply to you. My ire is directed at the Mozilla foundation, and not at contributor employees like you who help to build a useful software.

Re: Engineering code quality in Firefox

#100

Post by kiplkipl »

dontbenebby wrote: post #79
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…

You can’t arbitrarily change the syllabus to a student’s detriment. I’d have argued up the chain.

They'd have ignored you. I went through something similar myself. The barrier to exit for students is so high that colleges have little incentive to care about pleasing them.
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