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Comment by The_Colonel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

Yes, or Waterfox [1].

[1] https://www.waterfox.net/

Thanks. Finally got around to installing Librewolf and it works great.

Sensible defaults as Firefox should be.

I will definitely second this. I moved over to librewolf last year and love it. I’m glad Mozilla is staying in business though. I know not every organization has my beliefs and I can live with that

> 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.

FYI, you can use a desktop fork and mobile Firefox with Firefox sync.

source: I do that with floorp and Firefox for android.

also just realized that waterfox does have an android version [1], if you want you use the same fork on desktop and android

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.waterfox.a...

Not to hang around like a bad smell every time they come up, but just think it’s worth noting they are not open source anymore, instead being “source available”. Really gives me the old school “greenwashing” vibes Microsoft used to do with their Shared Source licenses. Poor showing considering they used others work to get to where they are, then shut the door when others started doing the same.

I would say feel free to give Waterfox a try - I’ve tried to strike the balance of useable web and privacy, with the added enhancement of Oblivious DNS enabled by default.

In this case I had completely missed the bad smell, so I appreciate the comment cause it prompted me to look up the whole situation. yikes. I was already planning on moving to another fork soon since I wasn't using most of floorp's power features, so this just expedited that.

Also from your language it sounds like you're a Waterfox dev? If so thanks for all your hard work on open source software! I haven't tried waterfox in years, I will definitely give it a go after uninstalling floorp.

True, it's very handy... but can't Chrome do it with a Google account ? (I really don't know)

To me the really seeling point of firefox is being able to switch off search suggestions. Now the bar only searches opened Tabs, history, bookmarks and I can tab into them quickly. If nothing turns up, pressing Enter will still launch a search. Being able to do casual navigation without having to go through a search engine is a killer feature (and it's better for the planet).

Not only tab but you can search directly into opened Tabs/history/bookmarks with the right %/^/* symbols !

EDIT : Almost forgot, it only really shines with that extension that prevent searches to turn up in your history --> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...

> I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices.

I would love to use that functionality, but... How?!? Once you have a gazillion tabs open on your phone, the “Open tabs from other devices” (or whatever it's called) menu item on the desktop just shows an endlessly spinning spinner. :-( So maybe via bookmarks... But where's the “Bookmark all open tabs” menu item in FF for Android???

Anyone got any tips?

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.

> 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

It’s wild to me that this is being presented as if it’s not a big deal.

Shows how far the goalposts have moved in this conversation.

It's not a big deal. They're easy to disable and easier to just ignore. It just doesn't matter in the way that you want me to panic over.

How big a deal it is depends on what you're comparing to. Yeah, at first, when I read his post, I was wondering if it was a joke or something, with so many checkboxes in different places. Then I got to the point about Windows and realized he's right: compared to Windows, all those steps in Firefox actually aren't that bad, and actually stay unchecked unlike Windows which happily changes things back.

> all those steps in Firefox actually aren't that bad, and actually stay unchecked

Not really, they keep adding new checkboxes that are of course checked by default.

Source? You may be thinking of Windows.

Thank you. And I would even say that settings aren't really even in different places, they're all either on the Settings page or on the element in question. New tab settings are on the new tab page, and you disable the pocket button by right clicking the pocket button. Not exactly rocket science, especially compared to Windows.

I cannot tell if this is sarcasm or not.

It isn't. I can without any sarcasm disable all of that in about a minute or two, and for the most part see no reason to do so in the first place (the worst bit is probably sponsored links on new tabs but that's also the easiest to remove). Acting like this invalidates the existence of the whole browser is what makes no sense to me.

Also Windows configuration is terrible.

"Acting like this invalidates the existence of the whole browser is what makes no sense to me."

They market themself as standing for the open and free web and digital rights and privacy and what not. And then have the browser spying on every user by default with integrated ads.

So sure, you and me deactivate it, but a common person who just fell for the marketing and who does not even know what "telemetry" is, will have it enabled. The only reason I use their browser is, because there is no alternative - yet.

Transparent telemetry is not spying. I'll agree that the ads are annoying but they're about as unobtrusive as you can make them. This is not the catastrophe you believe it to be, and even if it were, the big scary evil worse-than-Google Mozilla allows forks and Librewolf exists.

"Transparent telemetry is not spying. "

It is not transparent, if the information is hidden in the settings under a unclear name.

Its usage and the data it collects are not malicious or done to track you. "Data collection" is arguably a clearer name than telemetry to the average user and is clearly labelled, and can be disabled in a single checkbox in settings. It is transparent.

"Its usage and the data it collects are not malicious or done to track you."

There is tracking also for ad purposes activated by default in firefox. A recent developement. Before the tracking was ocasionally and hidden under "studies". Firefox in its default settings spies on its users and sells this data to advertisers - that is the situation.

On the frontpage FF is advertised as privacy friendly and there is 0 indication that FF itself will also track you.

If that is transparent to you, than we can just agree to disagree.

"by just searching "studies" isn't "just", to have to remember the option names and be certain you remember them all (and not miss the newly added ones), it's not that trivial of a hurdle

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.

Seems like Andreas doesn't have the same delusions of ridiculing the army of (pretty smart) Chrome/V8 devs by doing the same job just on his own. His own goal is to achieve the performance of non-JITed JavaScriptCore - i.e. an optimizing interpreter.

Matching V8's perf would be infeasible, but couldn't a small team get within an order of magnitude of V8's perf for a decent chunk of websites? How much slower is Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS?

It's much, much slower than JITed v8: https://bellard.org/quickjs/bench.html

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?

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.

That sounds like a feature, not a bug.

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.

As someone developing web games, my answer is no.

Web games are squarely outside "what do we really need" territory.

That's not up to you to decide.

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.

Exactly. What people also miss that the complexity grew considerably because of the need to cover many more "edge" cases. 30 years ago, you could assume a rough display size (fixed layouts) and DPI (no scaling needed), assume ASCII / ISO-8859-1, assume that the user is able-bodied and doesn't need accessibility features, target just DOS etc.

There is also a lot of accidental complexity which you might be able to get rid of only by BC breaks, unfortunately.

Don't forget, back in the early days of the WWW, web pages weren't mostly annoying ads. These days, this is very, very important, so we dedicate a lot of computing resources to it.

No, it really isn't. The point of faster chips is for the user to be able to do more things and do them faster (without having to wait for the computer). This may mean more complex software that uses the added capabilities to do actually useful stuff that would not have been feasible before. It does not mean meaninglessly squandering performance on layers of abstractions because that takes slightly less developer time.

The point of faster chips is to make computer programs faster. We've increased performance a thousandfold and yet programs almost always take more than a frame (16ms) to update. Once everything is rendering at absolute 60FPS (and actually, 144FPS would be nice), and the hardware is reasonably cheap (Raspberry Pi cost perhaps), then the point is to make software development cheaper.

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