Comment by The_Colonel
9 months ago
I agree (apart from the popular hate on Firefox). Ladybird is promising and has a much bigger chance to make an impact than SerenityOS.
But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. Especially to have a chance to get close to the performance of Chrome and Firefox, it will need a large investment.
The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great.
Edit: Just saw a video from a few days ago talking about JS performance. Apparently the target is reaching JavaScriptCore performance, without JIT enabled. Disappointing, but understandable.
I don't think that was intended to be hate on Firefox itself, but hate on the general mismanagement of the project by Mozilla. Firefox itself may not be in the corner sniffing glue, but it often feels like much of the decision-making at Mozilla is glue-sniffing-fueled.
(Happy Firefox user here; I still don't understand why anyone who cares even the tiniest bit about privacy or an open web is using Chrome.)
Yeah, Firefox is expert on shooting its own foot, but Chrome is just sociopathic.
I will take the glue sniffing kid over a bully any time.
I think the Firefox hate is completely justified. At this point the only positive thing about Firefox is that "at least it's not Chrome".
As a Firefox user, this exactly.
The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on.
I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..
> I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..
I'd love to make the jump too, just that I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices. The other forks look to be desktop only.
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This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is the recommended extensions but that's tucked at the bottom of a page nobody uses anyways (everyone just googles the extension they want and grabs it from the web), but even that takes like 15 seconds once you know what setting it is in about:config. I actually don't even disable the two telemetry checkboxes because they're transparent about the data they take and what they do with it, so I'm happy to share it. You can easily do all of this in one or two minutes and it won't roll itself back.
With Windows you would be lucky to even have a supported method to disable their telemetry, and if you do get one it will probably be through an obscure series of registry edits that will ultimately get rolled back during a system update.
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I don't use it myself, but Librewolf is a pretty popular fork that attempts to be private out of the box and is usually updated pretty quickly.
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Agree, hopefully King Andreas can carry the torch ignited by Old Mozilla that was lost a few years back.
> The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great.
We're long past the time that we should be using one type of app for text plus a bit of Javascript and another for running apps that are hosted on a remote server. I would definitely use a fast, lightweight, privacy-oriented browser for sites like HN or viewing local HTML files.
> But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project.
I don't know much about this project and I have never used it. But in my experience as a developer and user of software I couldn't disagree more.
The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee.
Big communities are great when a project is in its maturity and mostly needs tending and slow evolution. They mitigate the risk of a single developer getting bored and walking away, or turning into a murderous wacko, or attempting to monetize the project to death. Not naming any names.
But when something is being built from scratch? Give me a single developer with a fat internet connection, alone in a cabin in the woods with a shed out back full of Red Bull :)
> The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee.
One person can get surprisingly far, but there's a limit beyond which no single human will scale. Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. You might be OK with a browser which has a noticeably subpar performance, but it will likely stifle mainstream adoption (which again, might be OK for you and that's fine).
> Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example.
There's no doubt in my mind that Andreas could achieve that by himself. He's worked professionally on webkit, and implemented a JS interpreter, a JS bytecode interpreter, and a JS JIT all by himself after all. Also let's not forget that V8 is open-source, all their optimizations are available for others to see and implement.
But to be clear this isn't a one man project, he hired a few contributors to work full time on it. Sure, it's a small team, but as said in sibling comments a small team has much more velocity.
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Andreas isn’t targeting V8’s JIT performance. The goal is to be roughly in line with WebKit’s performance with the JIT turned off.
The theory is that JS JIT compilers don’t actually improve real world performance on the majority of websites. This was apparently per the advice of the authors of Chrome’s and Safari’s JITs.
>or turning into a murderous wacko
A good example of truth being stranger than fiction.
Have to admit the Firefox hate is mostly irrelevant. its from a place of disappointment with Mozilla more than hate really.
I agree that the amount of work and competition LadyBird is facing from Chrome alone is staggering, but at the same time, I'll always root for the little guy in tech, since imo thats where real innovation comes from.
On recent hardware, how much "performance" do we really need? Wouldn't almost any compliant browser be basically good enough?
There's several decades-old sayings to the effect of what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away, or similar observations about the software side of computing spending all the hardware improvements and more.
To this general principle you can add browsers and websites; what the browser giveth, the websites taketh away. You may think browsers are slow... they really aren't! There's a staggering, even arguably insane, amount of optimization in there. But then we write websites that are barely adequate, and load them up with ad scripts that aren't even barely adequate, and blame the browsers for being slow.
Write yourself an old-school 1998-style static website without a big pile of fancy features, give yourself solid .css and .js caching and use it judiciously, and the browsers can blast content to the screen blazingly fast, for all the work it is doing.
If you even could feed a 2024 web site to a 1998 browser, you'd probably be able to eat a meal while it was trying to render facebook.
> You may think browsers are slow
I don't. I use uBlock Origin which blocks "ad scripts" and the like. My everyday machine is an old PC (older than 10 years) still on Win7, and everything is running just fine.
I also use a top of the line, recent PC on Ubuntu, mostly for development. Websites there feel instantaneous. I sometimes wonder what a subpar browser would feel like on that machine.
Maybe I should just try to run Ladybird on this to see how it goes.
So many apps have low-hanging fruit performance issues that don’t get addressed because they are judged to perform adequately in practice. Addressing them takes developer time, and not all developers have the skill set to do so (especially in a methodical way).
But, what if we had an AI agent dedicated to improving performance? It doesn’t need to be capable of solving every problem, but it could address the low-hanging fruit problems which aren’t hard to solve but nobody has time to look at.
As an embedded developer it always makes me sad to see physicists and engineers pushing the limits of physics to make faster hardware, just for devs to squander that power with lazy programming.
No, that's actually the point of faster chips: To make software development less challenging and cheaper.
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One would think so, but some browsers do not handle well repaints or do it prematurely. I've been testing a fediverse platform against a plethora of browsers, and I'm always surprised at the differences. It's not terrible, but some do take their time.
LadyBird author posted a couple of days ago a demo of twitter and he himself admitted that it's painfully slow.
To be fair, Twitter is painfully slow on other browsers as well due to only fetching and rendering the content after the page and javascript have loaded.
That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
As someone developing web games, my answer is no.
Web games are squarely outside "what do we really need" territory.
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