Robert O'Callahan

If you want to understand what's going on, then go to the source. Either read the Microsoft documentation or read the documentation coming from an actual browser vendor working on this. At Mozilla, we talk about what we're doing so you're likely to get the best information with us. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/02/building-firefox-f… and http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/129/

You can read this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XPCOM/XPCOM_changes_in_Gecko_2.0 Overall, the changes are great and a long-time coming. As someone who embeds Gecko as a foundational technology for our application, the changes have been pretty bumpy as of late. Next year, I'm hoping the codebase will stabilize. I'm especially looking forward to the new single-HWND rendering code: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/10/bye_bye_hwnds.html

Asa responds to Schmidt's quote in more detail here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/followup_on_schmid…

The issue is that Microsoft will not give access to the API's on ARM systems that are required to do this. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/05/firefox-on-windows… "Here's what's going on. For Windows on X86, Microsoft is giving other browsers basically the same privileges it gives IE. It's not great that you don't get those privileges (certain API access) unless you're the default browser and I think that's deeply unfair (a post for later,) but at least we're able to build a competitive browser and ship it to Windows users on x86 chips. But on ARM chips, Microsoft gives IE access special APIs absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won't give to other browsers so there's no way another browser can possibly compete with IE in terms of features or performance. This is in direct violation of the promises they made to developers, users, and OEMs about browser choice in documents which mysteriously disappeared from Microsoft's site -- remember this? I sure do."

You need platform-specific APIs to give you direct access to the relevant hardware, which you then need to be able to use efficiently. Yes, and Firefox already has platform-specific Direct3D and OpenGL backends. Remember that a browser today needs to be able to accelerate not just video but all content and compositing, so they already have to put in that investment. The investment in video is just an additional delta. I'd rather see applications just feed the bytestream to the OS to decode using the best means available, even if it means support for new codecs is a bit slow. (Although an OS-level codec plugin architecture like QuickTime Components can get you software decoding for new or obscure codecs.) Hm. "I'd rather see applications just feed the HTML to the OS to render using the best means available, even if it means support for new HTML features is a bit slow. (Although a engine-level plugin architecture like ActiveX or NPAPI can get you some sort of rendering for new or obscure features.)" How is your assertion materially different? If my GPU has a high-quality, high-speed H.264 decoder, I shouldn't have to worry about which browsers will use it. They should all default to the OS-provided decoding and playback methods unless there are sound technical reasons not to. If I want to use a new codec that's not supported by the fixed-function decoder, I shouldn't have to worry about which web browsers have bothered to include the necessary OpenCL code to decode on my…

Well, I still call bullshit. Especially if this is the best you can come up with. Let's see: http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/ We have exactly two references to "security" : And I want that not only altruistically, but also because I want the crazy awesome video (animation, peer-to-peer, *security*, etc.) ideas that will come from having more people, with more perspectives, fully participating in the internet. and (about 60% of our users are on Windows XP, which provides no H.264 codec), *to security* (exposure of arbitrary codecs to hostile content), and to user experience None of them even slightly imply that the Mozilla team thinks H.264 is insecure. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.ht… This is an FAQ or rant if you will, which goes on and on about why Mozilla does not want to implement H.264. Oh yes, not one single word about security This one: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.htm… indeed discusses security. It is however not geared towards H.264, but towards Microsoft's DirectShow. Using this article as a reference regarding Mozilla's stand on security on H.264 is at best a stretch and at worst intellectually dishonest. I'm calling "do your homework, lest you look like a badly-informed fanboy". I never thought of myself as a fanboy, but be my guest to dive into ad-hominem, when you're out of arguments. In addition. I'm rather an uninformed fanboy then…

Sigh! When did the Mozilla ever claim that they do not ship H.264 because it's insecure? Mike Shaver and Robert O'Callahan both -- during the early attempt to frantically spin this as more than just an ideological PR stunt -- pointed to security as a reason why they didn't feel comfortable delegating to other software. See the following posts: http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/ http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.ht… http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.htm… Of course, they did eventually come clean and admit this was just a naked ideological PR stunt. O'Callahan's quote about the fact that delegating to OS codecs would mean giving up Mozilla's control -- sorry, "leverage" -- over what users can do with their own computers is particularly telling, especially in a debate that's ostensibly about "freedom". I'm calling bullshit, badly disguised as a strawman. I'm calling "do your homework, lest you look like a badly-informed fanboy".

The right to express outrage is not an absolute. See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/2014/04/speech_and_conseque… for what I consider some obvious limitations on it. You're saying there were no instances of item #1 on my list, and I believe you are correct. However, there certainly were instances of item #2.

I was a bit surprised to see Mozilla admitting that HEVC exists without smearing it. If only they could be this impartial in their video comparisons. Instead we had to endure the embarrassing spectacle of them trying to argue that Theora was competitive with H.264[1]. [1] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/theora_video_vs.ht…

As an early user of Chimera/Camino, Phoenix/Firefox and Safari, the way I recall it was that KHTML was too good at standards, hence causing practical problems with actual web content which was built for IE. (A big part of Mozilla's energy at that time was in evangelizing websites to actually use standards and not block them for no reason, but they'd also done a lot of reverse engineering) I also vaguely remember David Hyatt saying that they (edit: and by they I mean the Safari team that he'd moved from Mozilla to join) had taken some component from Gecko though I can't remember the details and his old Surfin Safari blog at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt seems to have been superceded by the Webkit team's Surfin' Safari blog and it now just gives a broken redirect.

They are building a "Metro style enabled desktop browser" (see http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/02/building-firefox-f… which has a lot more power than Metro apps.

Apparently the big change is to use Visual Studio 2010 for the Windows builds. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/01/end-of-firefox-win…

> the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness. : > I've recently been running into a number of "benchmarks" where some rendering engines achieve better performance by simply doing the wrong thing because the right one would be "too slow". […] This is not exactly an isolated incident; a number of the performance issues I've run into recently in Gecko have had to do with correctly handling edge cases that this particular open-source engine happens to just not handle.[1] 1. Boris Zbarsky. "Performance vs. correctness tradeoffs". Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days. 2009 October 18. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020267.html

We already knew sunspider was outdated last year: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/some_sunspider_num… It's funny that Google should criticize a benchmark on 'not reflecting the real world' when their own V8 includes machine translated Scheme (how many websites actually do that?) test. Making the sunspider test run more times doesn't make it any better, all it does is tune the benchmark to look better for their particular JIT settings. They spend more time compiling and optimizing the javascript, which can only be taken advantage of after many runs, rather than being smart and balancing optimization time with how much gains you get from actually running with the optimizations.

Usually comments like yours are the result of relying on precise setTimeout()/setInterval(). Firefox has a very coarse-grained setTimeout/setInterval (it's capped at 10ms) compared to WebKit. Mozilla can't change this easily as it breaks the web and hurts power management. I just took a cursory glance at blockbattle.net's source and it may well be the problem. Thankfully, FF4 has a solution: mozRequestAnimationFrame(). This explanation [1] should be required reading for everyone doing games and animations in JS. [1]: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/08/mozrequestanima.ht…

Surely the correct thing to do would be to lobby to have these tests removed from Acid3 in favour of the separate font tests. Webkit had to request changes to the tests in in Acid2. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_04.html#008011

That's some very bad reporting from the Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Simeonov reached out to the chief executive of Mozilla, who put him in touch with Jay Sullivan, vice president of products at Mozilla. The two spoke on June 9... The software was removed from the Firefox prototype on June 10." But in fact the software was removed on June 8, before the conversation between Sullivan and Simeonov. Here is the Mercurial changeset: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/76e9dd2d9322 Unfortunately, the WSJ reporter looked at the date of a Bugzilla comment, rather than the date of the change it was discussing. This was pointed out by Mozilla security engineer Jesse Ruderman, who provides more details in the comments here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2010/12/did_we_kill_a_do_…

Original post from Asa Dotzler: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/11/why_do_they_think_… The linked pcpro article doesn't add anything of value.

JavaScript will never support threads in the usual sense, as long as /be has his say: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/02/threads_suck.h… So JS won't need fine-grained locking in the foreseeable future.

Somehow I got it in my head that jwz implemented it. And I'm not the only one. But I can't find actual proof of the evil deed, and jwz in fact denies it -- although he does take credit for adding "MilSpec blinking". It seems that at worst jwz was responsible for eventually adding it to the linux version of Mozilla. While the original implementor fessed up last year, and actually got into mozilla's credits for it at long last: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2009/03/credit_for_blink.… Urk, now I'm remembering one time when I walked by jwz somewhere in SoMa, and thought "if he wasn't on the other side of the street already, I'd have to cross to avoid that evil blink tag creator". And now I'm feeling all regretful. Will the pain that tag inflicted on the world never cease? (BTW, Microsoft are responsible for marquee.)

How much does human interest cost? I couldn't resist thinking about this a bit more. Something comparable would be firefox's double-page New York Times ad, which apparently cost about $200k (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007103.html) and certainly reached a lot of non-mathematicians. Even though Perelman's action has generated quite a bit of press attention, my gut feeling is he could have paid for even more attention if he chose to use the prize money to raise awareness directly. That said, if he really wanted to get maximum exposure, he could continue to ignore the prize for almost a year, but accept it at the last minute and then spend it all on ads telling the world how corrupt academic mathematics is ;)

Interesting read on why Firefox won't ship with H.264: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.ht…

ECMAscript 4 was supposed to bring these features to Javascript, but it ended up dead due to standards-committee politics: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ecmascript-edition-4-brendan-speaks-out http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/10/open_letter_to… http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-future-of-ecmascript-3-is-4

I don't think this is an assumption: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.ht… http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.htm… I always thought it was a mistake that <img> wasn't extensible (e.g. Mozilla would display PNG with <img> but for IE you'd need <embed> or <object>) and I think that mistake is being perpetuated with <video>.

Here are some articles from Mozilla explaining their Javascript tracing: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/07/tracemonkey-overview/ http://ejohn.org/blog/tracemonkey/ http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey_ja… These are tangentially related to the article topic, but gives you some sense of what tracing does.

Read the comments from: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.ht… Robert's opinion is that flash is equally evil, but dropping it would be even more damaging than never supporting h.264, so the damage is already done.

You're right. In the blog post http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/if_you_have_nothin… all he says about the matter is: > And here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)

I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster, Then why haven't they made it as fast as a grad student volunteer did in 2 months for FireFox [1]? This kind of stuff has been pretty well researched in the past couple of decades :-P 1. Scroll to "How We Did It", here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey_ja…

Sources: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/1865 http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/02/how_many_linux.htm…