Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

For a lot of web apps, including the one I'm working on, the JS interpreter isn't the bottleneck, or even close. Basically, anything involving rendering or the DOM is orders of magnitude slower than pure JS computation. So what's the point of optimizing function call and loop overhead? For what real-world apps will this make a noticeable difference?

When we ran our app in FF3 for the first time, we were dismayed to find that, after all the talk about browser performance improvements, it had actually gotten a lot slower (especially when scrolling) [~]. As far as I can tell, they're optimizing the wrong stuff. It's possible that our app is unique, but I doubt it. To judge by Google, many people appear to be experiencing the same thing.

[~] Safari 3, on the other hand, sped up our app considerably.

Edit: The only person I know of who's raised this issue is John Resig: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-stack/

View on HN

> … what's the point of optimizing function call and loop overhead? For what real-world apps will this make a noticeable difference?

It will make a difference in real-world apps which are currently impossible because they would perform poorly. It will become reasonable to start putting real number-crunching into browser-side JavaScript code—things like crypto, physics calculations, etc. As one example, JavaScript games are going to get a whole lot better in the next couple of years.

(Not to say that they shouldn’t be optimizing DOM access, or scrolling speed, or whatever.)

What you're saying is reasonable - for apps that don't need much UI. I wonder, though, how many real-world examples there are of apps that people have tried and failed to write in Javascript for this reason.

For those of us working on things where the UI requirements are more intensive, little progress has been made. Perhaps the pure JS stuff is getting more effort because it's more glamorous?

>Perhaps the pure JS stuff is getting more effort because it's more glamorous?

funny you mention that, but I think a lot of things are driving by glamour or fashion.

Although in this case its clearly an engineering achievement, so kudos, and its great to have 2 competing and excellent open source browsers.

But still... glamour...

Thanks for bringing this to the light.

I'm sorry to say that Firefox has become more about the marketing and less about the code - they're too worried about looking good in the benchmarks and raising their mass-market appeal than about true good code and user experience.

From JS benchmarks to SSL certificates (http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=339) to false advertising of FF3's memory consumption (http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/firefox-3-is-still-a-memory-ho...) - it's all going downhill.

I have my beefs with Mozilla, but to say they aren't focusing on code is crazy. The stuff they're doing (especially with the native JS compilation) is very difficult stuff that honestly has a chance to change all browsers for good.

I have good friends on their *Monkey teams and can say without a doubt that there's a lot of impressive code going in there. Stuff that someone absolutely needs to be doing-- and it's all available for free.

I agree I'm also annoyed with FF memory consumption and some stability issues I've had lately, but I can't disagree more firmly on the quality of the code they have. Without much research, you can find code at Mozilla that's better than what major for-profit companies are producing out of their R&D-- and it works across a dozen platforms.

I think he was using words loosely - I have the same problem. Namely, this isn't nerds working on something awesome anymore. It's marketing. Old Firefox wouldn't have done something stupid like break a world record: it didn't need to. It was all about finding a browser that you liked and using it.

Then the fucking browser wars started, and all of us fucked away hours on it, and Firefox/Google took notice and started playing the game, which was a shit move.

So the coding is still good, no doubt, but Firefox has become a movement rather than a piece of software.

Is there anything wrong with marketing? Sure on one hand you could say they "sold out". But underneath all the open source and hackers they are a company... a for profit company at that. They are pushing a product that is superior to the current standard and are forcing inovation that might have taken significantly longer had they not become a serious threat. So if a few tactics like setting world records helps spread the word and make the internet better, I'm all for it.

I would love to see Firefox become the industry standard. It will force other browsers to start playing by the rules, mainly living up to standards and working harder to make a better product. Competition is what creates better products. When you have a monopoly or are the only major player in an industry you aren't as innovative. You don't need to be. Look at the cell phone market pre iPhone... now everything is touch screen and has internet...

It's wrong when you do it in a weaselly way.

The thing that most pissed me off was their "Firefox vs. Safari" comparison chart, where Firefox got points in things like "encourages developing standards" and a ton of things that AREN'T web browsing. Their marketing has NOTHING to do with how good the browser is, EVERYTHING to do with pure glam. Same with setting a world record. That did nothing to prove anything, nothing to counter the criticism that Firefox was getting for things.

And, not to get all fanboyish, but Firefox is an inferior product. Opera is slimmer and faster, and yet can do far more out-of-the-box. On the Mac, as alluded to before, Safari is a godsend. Firefox looks wrong, it's too cluttered, it doesn't support two-finger scrolling well or three-finger navigation at all. And the team almost certainly knows this. Yet they've ignored constantly the fact that they're making an inferior product and continue to market their product as the best there is. Which, at least on OS X, it's not.

I think the thing that I like most about Steve Jobs is when, in a marketing interview, he said, "Apple TV might not work. Other people have tried and failed. There's every chance this will fail too. In which case we'll improve again." Apple is famous for marketing, but it's famous for marketing in a more honest way: they don't lie about their product. Firefox and its developers do. That's what's wrong with their marketing.

I'm glad you're not running Firefox. Google's money enables more programmers to work on it, marketing allows it to grow market share which puts pressure on IE and less directly to make the web more standard. The loss of your idea of some sort of purity is a nothing price to pay for turning Firefox into a force for the advancement of the web.

This is not my experience. Moving from FF2 to FF3 I saw noticeable improvements in the application responsiveness, especially in moving DOM objects around the window (ala draggable dialog boxes full of objects), mouse event handling, and in generation of new DOM children. While at the same time FF3 was using less memory.

Yeah whilst this does mean some computation expensive things can be pushed to the client more (without plugins) - I think you are right. Most real world disappointment with browser rendering performance is DOM related. Eg large grids in data intensive applications.

You realize that John Resig works for Mozilla and probably has at least a little input in what FF is optimizes.

I hope so. But that hardly follows from the fact that he works there.

what's your app?

It's a kind of spreadsheet.

Edit: I realized my reference to Resig might be misleading. It's a post from Feb 2008 about browser optimization in general, not FF3. The point is that he talks about how browser optimization has to include rendering and DOM operations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com