[HN Gopher] Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
___________________________________________________________________
Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster
Author : jiripospisil
Score : 592 points
Date : 2020-09-25 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.google.com)
| pizlonator wrote:
| That's a nice Speedometer speedup! Really happy for the FF JS
| team, seems like they are on to something.
| spitfire wrote:
| Great. Now it's time to start throttling JS in browsers. Give
| them the equivalent of a few MHZ or a few seconds runtime to play
| with and no more.
| Kiro wrote:
| Yeah, that would be awesome for web games.
| noxer wrote:
| Link goes to google login page - please don't just don't ever do
| this again.
| bambam24 wrote:
| The question for firefox was never been is it fast. The question
| for firefox was always "why its using 10GB RAM?"
| Dahoon wrote:
| Good job! My FF with 10+ extensions only use 493mb with 4 tabs
| opened. What am I doing wrong?
| anthk wrote:
| Firefox was born as the light outsider from Mozilla once all
| non browsing functions were scrapped out.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I've literally seen people commenting that they don't use
| firefox because chrome seems faster. (...and also, how on earth
| did you get it to use that much memory? I'm sitting over 500
| tabs, albeit mostly unloaded, and 6 extensions, on a system
| with only 6GB installed)
| Miraste wrote:
| If you have the ram firefox will eat it, I've seen it use
| well over 10 before. Chromiums do the same thing, though.
| Dahoon wrote:
| BS.
|
| Currently browsing HN, Google groups, Gitlab x2.
|
| Extensions enabled:
|
| Bypass paywall, Decentraleyes, Youtube enhancer, Facebook
| containers, Flagfox, Google container, HTTPS everywhere,
| Location guard, Sponsorblock and Ublock Origin
|
| Only using a few hundred MB atm:
|
| https://imgur.com/i6DYG69
| Miraste wrote:
| You're responding to something I didn't say. GP was
| talking about memory usage with 500 tabs, with which
| Firefox will absolutely eat some RAM. Right now I have
| 200 and it's using 6.3gb.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| For everyone unable or unwilling to login:-
|
| Hi all,
|
| The SpiderMonkey (JS) team has been working on a significant
| update to our JITs called WarpBuilder (or just Warp) [0,1].
| Before we enable Warp by default in Nightly (hopefully next cycle
| in 83) we need your help dogfooding it.
|
| Warp improves performance by reducing the amount of internal type
| information that is tracked, optimizing for a broader spectrum of
| cases, and by leveraging the same CacheIR optimizations used by
| last year's BaselineInterpreter work [2]. As a result, Warp has a
| much simpler design and 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. The JS engine also uses less memory when Warp is enabled.
|
| To enable Warp in Nightly:
|
| 1. Update to a recent Nightly 2. Go to about:config and set the
| "javascript.options.warp" pref to true 3. Restart the browser
|
| We're especially interested in stability issues and real-world
| performance problems. Warp is currently slower on various
| synthetic JS benchmarks such as Octane (which we will continue
| investigating in the coming months) but should perform well on
| web content.
|
| If you find any issues, please file bugs blocking:
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613592
|
| If you notice any improvements, we'd love to hear about those
| too.
|
| Finally, we want to thank our amazing contributors Andre Bargull
| and Tom Schuster for their help implementing and porting many
| optimizations.
|
| Turning Warp on is only our first step, and we expect to see a
| lot of new optimization work over the next year as we build on
| this. We are excited for what the future holds here.
|
| Thanks! The Warp team
|
| [0] WarpBuilder still utilizes the backend of IonMonkey so we
| don't feel it has earned the WarpMonkey name just yet. [1]
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613592 [2]
| https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/the-baseline-interpreter-a...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| FWIW, it was already enabled for me in Nightly on MacOS -
| 83.0a1 (2020-09-25) (64-bit)
|
| Thanks for all of your hard work. Firefox forever!
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Tldr +~10%
|
| If only they could merge with V8 progress would actually reach
| everyone
|
| If mozilla wanted to be disruptive they should attempt to make
| https://github.com/graalvm/graaljs production ready. The JVM has
| gotten much more human resources at optimizations than either v8
| or smonkey and it is an open question how much could it
| outperform v8.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Pretty sure v8 gets a few orders of magnitude more attention
| and development resources than jvm and graal.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Pretty sure you don't know how many JVM implementations are
| out there since around 2000.
|
| By the way does V8 already handle TB sized heaps with 1ms
| pause?
|
| Or is able to scale down into embedded devices with hundred
| KB, while respecting real time constraints?
|
| Or able to have an implementation in JS itself?
|
| Or does V8 cache JIT code across sessions and improves it via
| additional PGO data gathered across the sessions history?
|
| I am not speaking of the same implementation here, rather a
| taste of what is out there on the Java world.
| arghwhat wrote:
| You are speaking of many different JVM implementations
| which are all specialized for one purpose.
|
| This is good and all, but splits finite resources even
| further without a shared benefit, and these variants have
| as much to do with each other as V8 has to do with
| Spidermonkey and JScript.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Competition is what drives progress.
|
| Monocultures stagnate and deple resources as everyone is
| happy with good enough.
| dpratt wrote:
| You're probably right about Graal, but there is no way that
| V8 has significantly more effort put into it than the JVM. At
| best, they're roughly similar, but I suspect that the JVM has
| quite a bit more development time and effort put into it.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Yep, just work on all those advanced JVM garbage collectors
| with various performance characteristics and trade offs is
| unmatched elsewhere in the industry.
| arghwhat wrote:
| I did not say that jvm historically hasn't gotten a lot of
| resources, but any innovation done there has been common
| knowledge for compiler developers for ages.
|
| V8 gets to benefit from all that research, while
| simultaneously having far more resources (now as well as
| for the past many years) to apply it, as well as do more of
| their own.
| dpratt wrote:
| Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, it seems like you're
| implying that the JVM, as of today, isn't the source of a
| lot of research or innovation. If that's true, you're
| incorrect. There's a _gigantic_ amount of money, time and
| people involved with it, arguably more than there ever
| has been, and it's only getting bigger.
|
| While you're correct that some of the knowledge that came
| out of building the implementation of the JVM has found
| its way into V8, there's still cutting edge work being
| done into extremely sophisticated JIT complication (with
| graal, arguably the best in the world) and the recent
| work on GC is frankly stunning.
|
| With recent JVM versions running zgc, it's typical to see
| sub-millisecond GC pauses, and that's only going to
| improve as they add more collection outside of safepoints
| and adding generational logic to it.
|
| Net/net, while you're correct that there's a lot of
| innovation and resources behind v8 today and they're
| doing fantastic work as well, don't discount the JVM.
|
| Yes, Java itself isn't a hugely interesting language, but
| the JVM is still arguably one of the most impressive bits
| of software ever produced and continues to be so.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The last thing I want in my browser is a JVM.
| remram wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > One day JS engines will add cryptographic signatures to
| replace the complex origin rules
|
| Signed HTTP exchanges might give you that already, AFAICT.
| sk2020 wrote:
| Maybe I'm just ignorant, but haven't browsers nearly become
| just a VM for JavaScript? Rendering documents is sometimes
| incidental. I'm not sure Swing would actually be worse than
| HTML5.
| remram wrote:
| Layout is actually difficult and offers a great many
| interesting problems when you try to parallelize it or
| efficiently use GPU acceleration. There are a lot of
| constraints and text is difficult to size and render.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Agreed, layout is probably more difficult problem and
| definitely the area with more potential for improvements
| ("forced reflow" anyone?) whereas JS engines are already
| at the point of quickly diminishing returns.
| hinkley wrote:
| Layout is automated (and hopefully repeatable)
| typesetting.
|
| The other thing Donald Knuth is famous for is getting so
| fed up with typesetting for his books, he created a
| document format to help him keep his sanity. And then
| went way way down that rabbit hole instead of finishing
| his book series. One might argue that's not sanity-
| preserving.
| foxdev wrote:
| Sometimes the detour is the journey.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Could the GeForce 3090 be fast enough to handle it?
| chungus_khan wrote:
| An Intel GMA 950 can handle accelerating browsers. It's
| less about raw power and more about just being able to
| efficiently split up the workload to get the page
| rendered and visible in as little time as possible.
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| There's already a VM. If Graal really brings better
| performance then I don't mind.
| vips7L wrote:
| I wonder if anyone is already trying to build that. A
| browser based on graaljs and java rendering engine. I
| wonder if you could take firefox mobile and do it. I'm
| assuming its html/css rendering engine is in Java/Kotlin.
| wenc wrote:
| We had that in the early days -- Java applets. But the
| paradigm was a little different because they were essentially
| Java programs and not JavaScript.
| 1f60c wrote:
| Why?
| coldtea wrote:
| The brower already has a VM, and from the same people and the
| same principles who made the Java JVM JIT and the fast
| Smalltalk one back in the 90s...
|
| Lars Bak, the v8 head:
|
| "In 1994, he joined LongView Technologies LLC, where he
| designed and implemented high performance virtual machines
| for both Smalltalk and Java. After Sun Microsystems acquired
| LongView in 1997, Bak became engineering manager and
| technical lead in the HotSpot team at Sun's Java Software
| Division where he developed a high-performance Java virtual
| machine.".
| hinkley wrote:
| I heard at one point that Hotspot had crossed a million
| lines of code. Looks like V8 is close to 2 million sLOC.
|
| The same source says SpiderMonkey is about 540k sLOC.
|
| Bak has learned a lot of lessons along the way I'm sure,
| and unless Cliff Click decides to write VMs again (sounds
| like he's semi-retired, doing something else) then he may
| be the best person for the job. But nobody's perfect. For
| me this is Exhibits A-C.
| wongarsu wrote:
| >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
| pizlonator wrote:
| They should all switch to JSC instead.
| vmchale wrote:
| Sounds like a challenge! Time to write JavaScript that's even
| more questionable.
| jjordan wrote:
| It's nice to see some actual good news involving Firefox. With
| all of the leadership and financial struggles lately, it's made
| me worry that the browser I've been using for the last 17 years
| doesn't have long to live. Hopefully that is not the case.
| st3fan wrote:
| Every single day hundreds of people are working on making
| Firefox better.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > years doesn't have long to live
|
| the market share is really worrying but OTOH Mozilla just
| secured another multi year deal with Google so in the short-
| medium term they are fine financially. I hope that a reason for
| all those projects cuts is at least partially creation of
| finacial reserves, in theory they do have enough cash and
| momentum to stay technologically relevant for at least 10
| years.
| josh2600 wrote:
| Google needs Firefox to exist for anti-trust reasons. If they
| don't buy fire fox's traffic, bing will.
| shultays wrote:
| I always wondered if firefox would actually change default
| engine if google stops the cash. It would remove some chunk
| of users at least imo, can firefox really afford it?
| sjwright wrote:
| They'd change the default for fresh profiles but they
| wouldn't dare overwrite existing installs. The former is
| a minor nuisance that would only cause minor grumbling
| but not affect market share. The latter would be actively
| hostile and cause significant loss of trust.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| They switched to Yahoo for a while.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Isn't that the very definition of a "trust"?
| ivancho wrote:
| Not according to some very well-paid lawyers, so I guess
| no.
| mancerayder wrote:
| The media autoplay forced on (with settings that don't turn it
| off in mobile or desktop) make me miserable and seriously
| considering using something else that isn't Chrome.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| What, Chrome has autoplay on? How can anyone stand that? It
| reminds me of IE7 with auto-installed toolbars that took 1/3
| of the screen.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Firefox does... and I can't turn it off. The websites,
| especially news sites, completely and utterly override the
| "off" settings for autoplay in firefox. And the dev team
| keeps changing the way those options are named as well as
| confusingly having a bunch of similarly named options. I'm
| confident that they're doing it on purpose because autoplay
| off hurts ad serving and it also probably pisses off
| traditional media sites trying to turn our browsers into
| TV's from the 90's blasting at us.
|
| I misworded my original. I wanted to say, I'm considering
| moving off Firefox, but not to Chrome.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Mozilla (the Company) has always had problems. They want to be
| something they're not. But the people on the Mozilla
| engineering team are top-notch and rarely affected by company
| drama (and probably feel the same way as you do about it).
|
| Mozilla is one of the few places you can do this specific type
| of really interesting engineering work, without having to be at
| Google/Apple/etc.
|
| (ex-Mozillian here :) )
| beagle3 wrote:
| Why ex?
| gkoberger wrote:
| I left 8 years ago! I loved it there, but left to start
| ReadMe.com.
|
| But I still love the people there (and created
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032 recently)
| capableweb wrote:
| Quick look at the profile (unless you recognize the name)
| reveals Gregory is the founder of ReadMe.com (when you guys
| moved from io?!), so supposedly ex to start his own
| company!
| gkoberger wrote:
| Last summer! It's the most expensive thing I own haha
| bigyikes wrote:
| Wow, did that help business, or was it more of a vanity
| thing? I was thinking domains didn't matter all that
| much.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I think pg sums it up the best:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
|
| "The problem with not having the .com of your name is
| that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your
| reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests
| you're a marginal company."
|
| I'd say there's a few major reasons: protecting the name
| and signaling we're a real company to larger
| corporations.
|
| For us, we also host websites that allows JS/CSS/HTML, so
| being able to put our assets on a separate domain helps
| with security issues.
| billiam wrote:
| Whew, that is the sentiment of a true plutocrat and
| elitist. You're weak unless you're rich and pay to rent
| in the good part of town. Sure, it's desirable to look
| serious to commercial partners and investors, but mostly
| it's an Internet branding tax. Most of your customers
| will Google your site.
| ulimn wrote:
| > Most of your customers will Google your site.
|
| And that's why seeing ".com" is important. You just
| proved his point, duh.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Yikes. It's just a business doing business things. You
| can put away the guillotine; it's just a domain name.
| ATsch wrote:
| 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 pipeline? Will they
| be able to execute the sweeping changes they'll need to do to
| stay within reach of blink long term? Or will they have to
| concede like opera and edge did.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Initially it was an option to become the engine, then after a
| time it simply became the place to try and engines and they
| said it would never be the "new" browser engine. It was a
| prototyping area.
| emayljames wrote:
| Successful parts of Servo where integrated in Gecko, as was
| intended. So, in a way Gecko is largely Servo.
| IainIreland wrote:
| > 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 their thumbs. I don't think Servo ever made
| up more than a small fraction of the overall Firefox
| workforce. They had to pick and choose their projects. Note,
| for example, that Servo embeds SpiderMonkey instead of
| writing its own JS engine from scratch:
| https://github.com/servo/rust-mozjs
|
| Don't worry! SpiderMonkey still has additional cool projects
| coming down the pipeline, none of which are dependent on
| Servo.
| coliveira wrote:
| Many people are badmouthing Mozilla because they disbanded
| the group working on their pet language, Rust, as if this
| was synonym for Firefox technology. There are many things
| that Mozilla does beyond working on Rust.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| No, just no. they were badmouthing Mozilla because they
| didn't like mozilla firing their rust resources while
| they continue to pay enormous amounts for a CEO and other
| higher ups while Firefox's market share is in a death
| spiral currently. The only thing that can save it is
| better branding and "gotta have it features" which Rust
| can bring, along with stability.
| cpeterso wrote:
| 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.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| > Or will they have to concede like opera and edge did.
|
| I am sad to say this, but I think it's only a matter of time.
| At this point, the list of parties driving Web standards
| basically consists of a whole bunch of organizations that
| rely on Blink, plus Apple and Mozilla.
|
| WebKit can probably hang on for a good long while because
| ~15% of user-agents are required by fiat to be WebKit.
|
| Gecko? At 5% marketshare, I fear it's dropped below the point
| where web developers are well-incentivized worry too much
| about making sure their sites run well on it. Which means
| that it's going to get increasingly costly for individuals to
| continue using Firefox.
|
| And, at the same time, actually making sure your site runs
| well on it is getting increasingly difficult. The rise of
| client-side JavaScript frameworks like React means that
| cross-browser issues have moved beyond easy-to-perceive
| things like ActiveX controls not being supported, or CSS
| rendering badly. Now the big problem is differences between
| JavaScript engines leading to annoying performance problems.
| And, if a developer is planning on doing the sane thing and
| relying mostly on libraries for their heavy lifting, there's
| just not that much that any individual can do about it.
|
| My sense, at this point, is that, going forward, the Internet
| does still have room for free, open, _community-driven_
| standards that aren 't tightly controlled by a small number
| of massive corporations. However, the Web (i.e., HTML, CSS
| and JavaScript) does not.
| toyg wrote:
| This is catastrophism. If Mozilla can make a browser that
| developers enjoy using as daily driver, developers will
| make stuff for it. If Mozilla can build bridges with
| framework makers, frameworks will work just fine. They just
| need to regain some of the focus that was squandered on too
| many moonshots and hazardous choices (FFOS, Pocket, etc).
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I think that that may no longer be enough. The elephant
| in the room is the Web taking over non-Web apps. If
| Electron is part of your deployment surface, you can't
| escape Chromium. If Cordova is part of your deployment
| surface, it's Chromium or WebKit. A nice UI on the dev
| tools is nice, but I imagine most people would take an
| acceptable UI over a nice one if the acceptable one is
| how you get a development environment that is more
| comparable to what life will be like in production.
|
| FFOS was a moonshot that burned a lot of resources, but I
| also suspect it's one of the few things that, had it been
| successful, could have guaranteed Firefox's long-term
| survival.
| toyg wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember a time when developers
| couldn't "escape" Internet Explorer 5. It took years of
| guerrilla but slowly things changed (yeah yeah, MS
| dropped the ball, but even after they picked it up FF was
| doing just fine). Marketshare is just one element in a
| complex story, and Electron is just one platform -
| although I agree that producing an "Electron killer"
| should probably be very high on the list of priorities.
|
| (And I still think FFOS was a silly move, because Mozilla
| will never be able to match the industrial muscle that
| FAANG can field. Mozilla on mobile can only succeed
| either by pushing harder to the court of public opinion
| (i.e. lobbying antitrust authorities to force Apple and
| Google to open up), or by partnering with another giant
| who wants to compete and can do the heavy lifting
| (Amazon, or FB, since Microsoft seems to have joined the
| monoculture for good).)
| notriddle wrote:
| > I'm old enough to remember a time when developers
| couldn't "escape" Internet Explorer 5. It took years of
| guerrilla but slowly things changed (yeah yeah, MS
| dropped the ball, but even after they picked it up FF was
| doing just fine).
|
| Google also advertised Firefox on their home page.
| [deleted]
| lewisjoe wrote:
| This is exactly what bothered me when I heard parts of
| Mozilla Devtools team were let go in the recent layoffs.
| It's as if they don't get the equation at all.
|
| Better devtools = More developers = More testing =
| Smoother website = More market share.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I doubt they get it. Otherwise they would have seriously
| invested in firefox dev tools years ago, when allmost
| every web dev switched to chrome. Instead off Firefox
| with firebug before that.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| Agreed - what I don't get is: (https://www.theregister.com/2020
| /08/14/mozilla_google_search...)
|
| <quote>
|
| However, our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to
| $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing
| internal discussions held earlier this year.
|
| (... snip ...)
|
| According to the organization's latest financial figures [PDF],
| $430m of its 2018 total revenue of $451m came from those
| internet giants - primarily Google, we understand. These deals
| were due to be renewed or renegotiated by November this year.
|
| As a non-profit open-source operation, Mozilla spends as much
| as it receives; its 2018 staffing bill was $286m with a
| headcount of about 1,000, or about $286,000 per person, on
| average.
|
| Despite the renewal with Google, which essentially guaranteed a
| continuation of its revenue for the next three years, Mozilla
| axed 250 of its techies on Tuesday, and shut down its office in
| Taiwan, blaming the "economic conditions resulting from the
| global pandemic."
|
| </quote>
|
| Their cost is probably much more than just staffing - but still
| - doesn't look that bleak? I get the non-ideal situation of
| being dependent on you competitor like that, but it _has_
| proven to be a robust source of income so far..:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio...
|
| Btw.. is there any way to format a pretty quotation on HN?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Re format, I mostly see people use markdown syntax.
|
| > This is not a real pretty quote.
|
| > But the good news is that even in uninterpreted form form
| markdown is pretty readable.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The syntax was in emails before Markdown. I will loudly
| declare that it was _invented in emails_ so that somebody
| will add the immediate predecessor, and so on until we end
| up at an original source.
| toxik wrote:
| News groups?
| mceachen wrote:
| Nope, email via arpanet (1973) preceeded usenet (1980).
| btilly wrote:
| The fact that email preceded usenet does not mean that
| things cannot have been invented in Usenet before they
| were invented in email.
|
| As a concrete example, :-) was invented on a bulletin
| board. See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm for
| the details.
| mceachen wrote:
| You're absolutely correct.
|
| I'm not ancient enough to say first-hand. I know that
| threaded replies in BBSes in the early 80s at least
| coincided with usenet threaded replies.
|
| I didn't have a proper email address until years later
| via my university.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| It's good for short quotes, but without hardwrapping I
| doesn't quite work for full paragraphs. (Hardwrapping is
| bad for narrow screens)
| Weebs wrote:
| Is there any way we as a community of users can help ensure
| Firefox remains viable in the event that Mozilla can no longer
| provide enough support?
|
| It seems a shame that such a loved & enjoyed project might fall
| wayside without significant financial backing. I would say I
| would love to help, but I have no domain expertise in
| browsers/rendering, or how I would develop enough to
| contribute.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Use it, and if you make websites make sure you support it
| just as well as Chrome.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah all you can really do is use it and suggest it to
| people. I do this and have made a few converts (along with
| helping with best extensions to get without getting in
| their way)
| HashingtheCode wrote:
| Firefox is a dead man walking.
|
| If you want privacy, use a FF fork called Librewolf
| Rolcol wrote:
| 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.
| HashingtheCode wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| The repo's members page [0] shows 9 users, and the first
| bullet point on its features page [1] is: _LibreWolf is
| compiled directly from the latest build of Firefox Stable.
| You will have the the latest features, and security
| updates._. You believe a small group of well-intentioned
| volunteers can continue the work of building and iterating
| a modern web browser were Firefox development to end today?
|
| [0] https://gitlab.com/groups/librewolf-
| community/browser/-/grou...
|
| [1] https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/docs/
| HashingtheCode wrote:
| It's possible, maybe not very likely but possible.
| Depends what happens to FF.
| Miraste wrote:
| No, it's not. Mozilla has 750 employees (not all of whom
| work on the browser, but still) and hundreds of millions
| of dollars and they're constantly struggling to keep up
| with Chrome. 9 part-time devs cannot do this.
| HashingtheCode wrote:
| They can. Maybe releases would be every 6 months but it's
| possible.
|
| Look at the following browsers: Otter Browser Min
| Qutebrowser Links Basalisk Surf Bromite (only has 7
| contributers)
|
| It is possible. Of course it's possible. Just depends if
| that situation were ever to occur, whether people would
| become passionate about that project
| Miraste wrote:
| We're talking about different things. I'm sure the
| LibreWolf team could develop a browser that meets some
| specifications and renders some websites some of the
| time. What they can't build is a Chrome competitor. It
| would become an often-broken hobby project only used by
| enthusiasts, like the others you've listed.
| random_dork1 wrote:
| > Firefox is a dead man walking.
|
| Dramatic.
|
| > If you want privacy, use a FF fork called Librewolf
|
| Thanks for the tip.
| Dahoon wrote:
| >[Coming soon!] LibreWolf builds for Microsoft Windows
|
| Oh well.
| est31 wrote:
| Nice! There's still cool cpp stuff going on in Firefox. This is
| one example.
|
| https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/js/src/jit/Warp...
| [deleted]
| LeSaucy wrote:
| That's a 3300 line cpp file, care to cite a specific example?
| winrid wrote:
| I was thinking new stuff was done in Rust. I guess Gecko is CPP
| only?
| richdougherty wrote:
| I think some Rust components have been written and integrated
| into Firefox. But the core Firefox codebase - including Gecko
| - is still C++ so it's not easy use Rust there.
|
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation
|
| On a related note, Chrome is looking at integrating Rust into
| its C++ codebase.
|
| https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-
| safet...
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Not true majority by far is done in c++. Easily confirmed by
| downloading the browser source and using a LOC analyzer to
| see how much code is done in which languages
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| acqq wrote:
| The 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 investigating in the coming
| months) but should perform well on web content."
|
| It seems it can in the longer term generally improve though, and
| simplifications are always better.
| est31 wrote:
| 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.
| pizlonator wrote:
| 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).
| jandem wrote:
| > It's a big deal and everyone who contributed should be
| super proud.
|
| Thanks! We actually haven't really analyzed Speedometer
| (and most other benchmarks) yet with Warp so I expect this
| number to improve the coming months. The design seems to be
| holding up well and we're really excited about building on
| this.
| pizlonator wrote:
| Happy hacking! It's good to see another JS compiler get
| brought up. I strongly suspect that our community hasn't
| yet found the _perfect_ kind of combo of tiers for JS;
| the more we try stuff the closer we will get.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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...
| bjoli wrote:
| If I were to squeeze 10% out of a project I had spent
| significant time and resources optimizing I would be
| thrilled.
| coldtea wrote:
| You and me yes. Users though not so much, because they
| already know the optimized previous performance, so they
| just see a meagre 10% over it -- that it's hard to
| optimize something already optimized and thus 10% is a
| feet is not relevant to their perception.
| thomaslord wrote:
| That fits into my definition of "significantly". It may not
| be a total game-changer, but if up to 15% isn't
| significant, where do we draw that line?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _but if up to 15% isn 't significant, where do we draw
| that line?_.
|
| It's not like we don't have a yardstick for actually
| noticeable speed updates. Pre-JIT JS to JIT JS for
| example was a big several times speedup. PHP 6 vs PHP7
| was several times as well (no JIT involved here, just
| other optimizations).
|
| 15% is only 'significant' in the context of an already
| heavily optimized program (which FF's JIT is). Not
| significant as in "the users will notice it".
| steffan wrote:
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Internal combustion engines might not be the best
| example. They've seen REALLY impressive gains in the last
| couple of decades. =)
|
| Today you can buy relatively affordable cars with 2.0
| liter engines pushing 300 or more horsepower and doing so
| with greater fuel efficiency than cars with much more
| modest output from ten or twenty years ago.
|
| (admittedly some of the gains in efficiency have been
| obscured by increases in vehicle weight)
| jacob019 wrote:
| I'm sorry friend, but 10% is a huge incremental
| improvement. This could save me hours over a year.
| coldtea wrote:
| "Hours over a year" doesn't sound huge.
|
| We've had export / fx processing improvements in NLE
| programs or 3D rendering for example that saved weeks
| over a year. PHP 6 to 7 got several times faster in
| common use-case workloads. And so on...
| floatingatoll wrote:
| What updated title would you propose?
| acqq wrote:
| > What updated title would you propose?
|
| I believe, per HN policies, the most appropriate would be the
| title from the page: "Dogfooding Warp"
| acqq wrote:
| Specifically:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
| linkbait; don't editorialize."
|
| The original title on the linked page is "Dogfooding Warp"
| and the title on this HN page is still, at the moment I
| write this, editorialized: "Firefox's JIT is getting
| significantly faster"
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Here is the link that doesn't require a Google login:
|
| https://archive.is/SFFph
| 5- wrote:
| thank you!
|
| interestingly a very similar link appears to not require a
| google login, but requires javascript:
|
| https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/1PHhx...
|
| i wonder what's going on.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| This did ask me to log in. It doesn't in private mode though.
|
| I think if Google detects that you've _ever_ logged into
| Google, it's trying to authenticate you when you visit a
| Google Groups page. Private mode is my default workaround for
| Google Groups links these days.
| dang wrote:
| Weird! But thanks - we've changed to that from https://groups
| .google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform/c/1PHhxBxSe....
| jiripospisil wrote:
| Thank you. Unfortunately it won't let me update the link
| anymore.
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Lower memory consumption too. This is good news, I am worried for
| the future of Mozilla and Firefox.
| coldtea wrote:
| Normally it would be good news. Given the recent news though, I
| feel more like commenting:
|
| Titanic's band also got much better musicians as they practiced
| more on the deck...
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I 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.
| cxr wrote:
| > Unless there is another foundation with a browser promoting a
| free and open internet, my vote will always remain with them.
|
| And therein lies the problem. No matter how bad Mozcorp is at
| doing what mozilla.org was supposed to be about, then as long
| as it exists, it will always manage to be a black hole
| swallowing up any enthusiasm and effort that might otherwise be
| put to good use.
| admiral33 wrote:
| Why does the ceo pay need to go down?
| Zekio wrote:
| Her pay is currently IIRC 2.4 million dollars a year
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Why does the ceo pay need to go down?
|
| Because salary X4 didn't result in financial performance X4,
| just 250 people fired.
| foobiekr wrote:
| 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.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| don't the USA have regulations for non-profits to spend a
| significant part of their income on their mission?
|
| Of course, this doesn't mean it's well spent, but it means
| some non insignificant part of the money benefits someone
| else.
| heartbeats wrote:
| What's the point in making JS faster if websites are just going
| to pile on another layer of React.JS dogshit abstraction to
| compensate? What Bill giveth, Andy taketh away.
| rattray wrote:
| 10% faster with less memory use and simpler code / data models -
| nice work! Excited to see the end result.
|
| Hopefully HN users on nightly are able to try it out and give
| feedback.
| indolering wrote:
| How does this impact security? Most of the proposals I've seen
| for improving Firefox's security requires more memory and the
| blurb on the mailing list cite that they require less type
| information.
| superkuh wrote:
| That's browsers for you these days. They ignore browsing features
| and concentrate on being a faster javascript engine for buying
| things and streaming video.
|
| I'd say more but that google groups link requires logging in to a
| google acount.
| GordonS wrote:
| What browser features do you think are missing? Other than
| perhaps some love for containers, I can't think of anything
| else I want for. In honesty, it feels like they've been making
| UI tweaks for the sake of it for a while now; if anything, I'd
| like some to be rolled back!
|
| I'm quite happy to see performance improvements - I'd love to
| see more on the memory reduction side of things too.
| squarefoot wrote:
| They well deserve some donations, and I just sent some quid, but
| would also buy some merchandise for me and gifts for
| friends/relatives if shipping costs make it worth, but apparently
| there's no way to purchase from them. A search brought some sites
| selling Mozilla branded items, but I'd like to be sure the money,
| or most of it, goes to the Mozilla Foundation. Any suggestions?
| Thanks.
| butz wrote:
| Would be great if Firefox set up monthly donations system on
| Patreon, OpenCollective or similar platform, and all donations
| would go directly to browser development.
| trynewideas wrote:
| As an open source project, there's no reason a fund to
| support Firefox development has to in any way involve
| Mozilla. It can exist independently and fund developers
| directly.
|
| If having a sustaining fund dedicated solely to Gecko/Firefox
| development, and it seems implicitly to specific elements of
| that development (ie. not those that directly or primarily
| benefit other Mozilla services) is truly important, don't
| wait on Mozilla to provide one for you to donate to. They
| don't have the incentive, or frankly the need, to do that.
| jonnytran wrote:
| I would totally pay a yearly subscription to support Firefox,
| ideally giving me access to hosted features like Firefox Send
| (end-to-end encrypted sending of files).
|
| I realize that people who would do so are a minority. But
| maybe that would help solidify the idea that, while Chrome is
| for Google, Firefox is for its users.
| toyg wrote:
| A bunch of random ideas:
|
| - partner with Dropbox to offer an integrated web-based
| filesystem and other file-oriented stuff like Send.
|
| - partner with bitwarden or 1Password to provide integrated
| authentication - the web desperately needs an open
| competitor to Google/Fb/Apple in this area, I'd definitely
| pay for this. They could probably just repurpose Persona.
|
| - rebrand Pocket (which, let's be honest, has pissed off
| too many people to ever succeed) and use it to build
| something like old del.icio.us, targeted to (web)
| developers.
|
| - make containers more mainstream. The FB-container addon
| is wildly popular, surely there are other applications that
| could be baked in.
|
| All these should be optional services that can be turned
| on, never again we should see the corrupted practices that
| gave us Pocket.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| They already have Lockwise.
|
| Pocket had millions of users already when Mozilla
| integrated it. A lot of people seem to like the
| recommended articles. The minority who know and care
| Mozilla was dishonest about why it was integrated 5 years
| ago would just keep criticizing Mozilla for not removing
| it.
| sp332 wrote:
| Just to be clear, it's the Corporation that makes Firefox, not
| the Foundation. There aren't many ways to give the Corporation
| money. Paying for a service, like the VPN or Pocket Premium, is
| all I can think of.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| It seems the Mozilla foundation don't use donations for Firefox
| development though:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...
| squarefoot wrote:
| That is bad, I hoped to be able to help in some way. They're
| underestimating how much their logo and a short description
| could help to boost the product adoption.
| notriddle wrote:
| In order for the two-company Foundation/Corporation system
| to be even remotely legal, they must actually operate as
| distinct entities. That means the Foundation and the
| Corporation have separate bank accounts, separate employee
| rosters, and, as a result, they can legally be taxed
| differently.
|
| If the Foundation started employing Firefox developers,
| they would have to convince the tax man that those
| developers were not de-facto employees of the Corporation.
| This would be very hard, because there would inevitably be
| chat logs where Corporation employees tell the Foundation
| employees what to do, because that's how code review works.
|
| What would be the point, anyway? The Google Search deal
| gives the Mozilla Corporation far more money than the
| Mozilla Foundation gets from donations.
| [deleted]
| antibland wrote:
| It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the
| average person. When I hear "the browser" discussed in almost any
| parlance, the implication is Chrome. It's rare to even hear
| someone say "Chrome," as it's the defacto choice for the non-
| mobile web. Convenience breeds ignorance.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the
| average person.
|
| Does the average person really need to understand JIT
| optimisations?
| robbyt wrote:
| No, but they enjoy faster performance that JiT optimization
| yields
| moonlighter wrote:
| That's technically true, but most average users probably
| don't care. It's like optimizing your car's fuel efficiency
| by changing your spark plugs more often. When was the last
| time you changed your spark plugs?
| 67868018 wrote:
| Every oil change
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Misfires on a spark plugs are pretty obvious though.
| Maybe changing the air filter or cleaning the intake
| manifold is a more apt comparison?
| damnyou wrote:
| Well, what actually happens is that there's less pressure
| on web developers to make their sites faster (in contrast
| to other business goals) and so we reach a new equilibrium
| where sites perform just as badly.
|
| Web developers aren't alone here, of course. It's the same
| story for systems software as well.
|
| In general, thinking in terms of equilibriums is helpful.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| to be fair most firefox people I know call it "my browser" as
| well
| [deleted]
| skybrian wrote:
| A 10-15% speed bump in CPU performance is certainly nice but in
| most cases it's not going to be something that users are
| consciously aware of. Web page performance varies a lot due to
| network performance, new versions of websites being deployed,
| different ads being served, and so on. This noise obscures
| things enough that it probably won't be easy to attribute a
| change in performance to the browser if you're not looking for
| it.
|
| But even if the users aren't aware of what changed, it will
| likely affect user behavior.
|
| For the better? Hard to say. Websites that load a little faster
| are a little more addictive.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If they want to actually improve user experience they can
| always include uBlock Origin by default - its permissive
| license should allow this just fine.
| avery42 wrote:
| I wonder if blocking Google Analytics by default would
| affect their default search engine deal with Google...
| Kiro wrote:
| I'm dealing with a Firefox issue where painting on canvas
| with a CSS filter is magnitudes slower than Chrome. It makes
| my app almost unusable for Firefox users. Improving the
| performance would certainly make users notice since it's one
| of the most common complaints.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Stuff like CSS filters is generally going to be down to
| lack of GPU acceleration or video driver shenanigans,
| though some obscure filters still run on the CPU. If you
| run a filter on the entire page for example (some addons do
| this) it pessimizes rendering in a bad, noticeable way.
| Kiro wrote:
| In this link about a similar (or same?) issue it sounds
| like filters are done on the CPU in Firefox unless you
| enable a flag but it may be outdated:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=925025
|
| > Safari and Chrome both do blur on the GPU Firefox does
| it in software unless WebRender is turned on. You could
| try turning on the gfx.webrender.all pref and that should
| improve things.
| justaguy88 wrote:
| Is there any way to directly donate to firefox (and not other
| mozilla related things)?
| openfuture wrote:
| Maybe some of those fired engineers could fork it. I'd pay 5$ a
| month for a non-google organization that is not lead by Marissa
| and is developing an open browser.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_based_on.
| ..
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| no
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