17 ms·

JavaScript performance, WebAssembly, and Shared Memory in Microsoft Edge

211 points by hellojs 9y ago

mtycholaz 9y ago
Better performance is always good. Excited for shared memory to come to JavaScript.
srikz 9y ago
Great improvements! I also notice that Edge is more stable now and doesn't freeze as much as before (still happens). Also, I am not sure if it is Google breaking standards or if some feature not interpreted correctly in Edge but, Gmail still has some bugs on Edge (e.g., keyboard shortcut to add label doesn't automatically get the textbox in focus. In previous version, the text would be printed outside the box) I hope more sites test on Edge and not just on Chrome. Congrats to the team! Hope to see Edge decouple from Windows releases soon (as announced during Windows 10 launch)!
- josteink 9y ago
  > I hope more sites test on Edge and not just on Chrome. "Look for your friends, but trust not to hope. It has forsaken these lands." Seriously. I use Firefox as my main browser and I'm at the point where I'm surprised if anyone tests anything in anything except Chrome, or if they even realize such test-targets exist at all. Standard response to bug-reports? "Just use Chrome. Works for me!", "It's just Firefox. Low importance." Etc. From the glory days of web-standards following IE's demise, this profession has sunk gutter low.
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    Yeah. It boggles my mind how quickly and totally the amnesia has set in; where the same crowd who vilified IE and the web monoculture it created is perfectly fine with "Just use Chrome" as a solution. I've seen people seriously claim that every browser should use WebKit and all the other rendering engines should be thrown out, and that this would be "for the good of the web". What?!
    - pcwalton 9y ago
      > I've seen people seriously claim that every browser should use WebKit and all the other rendering engines should be thrown out, and that this would be "for the good of the web". What?! This has been a meme for years now. I remember John Resig suggesting this in 2013—ironically, right before the Blink fork that ended mainline WebKit dominance.
      - dherman 9y ago
        Wasn't it Joe Hewitt?
        pcwalton 9y ago
        I'm thinking of http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engines/ http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engine...
    - jhpriestley 9y ago
      This would leave the browser world with one high-quality, open-source implementation as the de facto standard. I don't think this is so self-evidently awful. There are a number of big open-source projects in this sort of position, like git, TeX, linux, GHC. What is special about browsers that we need multiple competing implementations of the standard?
      - soperj 9y ago
        git really? there are tons of big projects that don't use git. Java for instance.
        graphememes 9y ago
        They use it when multiple people code on the same codebase. It's either in Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket and uses git. I haven't seen someone use anything other than git in a long time, and those that do are ancient projects.
  - hashhar 9y ago
    I've seen things go the other way around. As an example, use Chrome Canary to browse https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/its-like-tweeting-but-you-cant-use-the-letter-e https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/its-like-tweeting... and then use Firefox Nightly. Chrome can barely manage to keep up with scrolling while Firefox chugs along nicely. The only issues Firefox has are when you get to media handling and non-standard APIs from Chrome. 99.9% of websites "work" on all browsers though and I haven't seen any need to run Chrome for a specific website (Google Docs used to be a case but not anymore).
    - esprehn 9y ago
      I filed this bug here http://crbug.com/713982 http://crbug.com/713982 This is a behavioral difference with Firefox. Chrome is currently blocking scrolling on the JS inside the wheel event handler which appears to be very slow on the linked website. Firefox is only blocking on the JS for the first event inside the scroll gesture and asynchronously scrolling after which hides the very slow JS handlers. This is an interesting case because the Chrome behavior lets sites implement certain effects without lagging behind scrolling while the Firefox behavior favors smoothness of scrolling over JS effects synchronized with wheel handlers. In any case, Chrome is currently working towards switching to the Firefox behavior which will make sites like this scroll much more smoothly.
  - mbell 9y ago
    > It's just Firefox. Low importance. Well, the reality is that it is low importance. Firefox is down to ~2.5% of our traffic, Firefox is bleeding users badly. It's also not always a simple fix. In our current code base we have more workarounds for FF bugs than any other browser, and some of them are pretty nasty. e.g. monkey patching `getComputedStyle` to get around this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 So it tends to come down to whether or not it's worth carrying a bunch of technical debt to support a dying browser, not a simple choice and not a matter of sticking to web standards.
    - hutzlibu 9y ago
      "to support a dying browser" Wow, this is the first time I read FF being described as a "dying browser". Even though I don't think so and other sources https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... say about 12% market share, the fact alone that someone describes it like that, is very sad ...
      - gnaritas 9y ago
        It used to be much higher than 12%, so it is actually a dying browser.
      - mbell 9y ago
        > say about 12% market share 12% of desktop, ~5-6% of total. 3 years ago it was ~18% of total, there is certainly a consistent downward trend in usage.
        hutzlibu 9y ago
        No doubt about the down thing, I also rarely use FF nowdays, but a downtrend is a different thing from "dying". Plus, I am optimistic about servo ...
    - pcwalton 9y ago
      > In our current code base we have more workarounds for FF bugs than any other browser, and some of them are pretty nasty. e.g. monkey patching `getComputedStyle` to get around this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 In that case, Blink and WebKit are changing to Firefox (and Edge)'s behavior, because it makes more sense. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1813 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1813
  - qudat 9y ago
    Another reason for this is tooling. No one I know develops on Firefox, mainly because of how amazing Google Chrome's developer tools have become over the years. It's not even close. So yes, developers use Chrome because Google has an entire team dedicated to make their tooling cutting edge for developers.
    - pikzen 9y ago
      The developer tools on Firefox Developer Edition(Aurora) are miles ahead on most things aside from the network view, to be fair. Just because they're not integrated into default firefox doesn't mean Chrome is the absolute best.
  - tannhaeuser 9y ago
    What are you talking about? I'm using FF without any trouble at all on both desktop and mobile for each and everything, and so do many others, for its support of uBlock origin if nothing else. Also, the iOS devices out there have only Safari-Webkit.
    - johnnydoebk 9y ago
      There are some hipster web-sites built by amateurish developers who manage somehow to make them work correctly in Chrome only. I've faced those too and after reporting the bugs (like horizontal scrolling of menus) the reply is usually something along the lines of "most of our users prefer Chrome, so we won't fix it".
  - lacampbell 9y ago
    Standard response to bug-reports? "Just use Chrome. Works for me!", "It's just Firefox. Low importance." Etc. I remember wanting to use Italki, but their website wouldn't let me input my credit card details when using firefox. I mentioned it to their support team, and they just suggested I use chrome. I guess they're big enough that my lack of custom won't hurt, but I figured that since "inputting numbers into a field" was already a solved problem in front end web development, that they might as well sort it out.
  - Touche 9y ago
    A good step would be if browsers other than Chrome had decent devtools built in.
  - tn135 9y ago
    That attitude can work only for enterprise applications where people get paid to use the application. Not when you are a consumer app. We test even on Safari.
  - cdata 9y ago
    As a long time web developer, I worked through IE dominance. I was a Firefox early adopter and advocated for it amongst friends and family for years. Furthermore, I am very unhappy about the state of the landscape today. One browser should not be dominating all the others; it is an imbalance in the order of the web. The hyperbole in your comment kinda kills me though. The glory days of web standards that you are talking about were largely glorious because Firefox came out from left field and started implementing standards and new features at a high velocity compared to Microsoft's IE. Firefox started to beat IE in tooling and platform features, and it was open source to boot. Firefox even had the edge on IE with regards to security (to be fair the bar was low in those days). All of these details greatly endeared Firefox to me. As a web developer, I loved Firefox for what it stood for and also what it enabled me to do. Chrome is "winning" the web browser game by taking the pages out of Firefox's playbook. Chrome is open source. Chrome is heavily involved in the standards process. Chrome takes a lot of credit for pushing browsers towards evergreen release cycles. Chrome offers the best developer tooling. Chrome implements standardized web platform features at a rapid clip. I hate that Chrome is dominating the market. But I don't hate Chrome, and I definitely don't think the status quo today is worse than the one during the Internet Explorer regime. I hate it because it shows that there is a tremendous imbalance in the resources spent on other browsers compared to Chrome. I hate it because I don't think that the ecosystem is as great as it could be if the developer mindshare was more distributed across different browsers. It's easy to forget that the "bar" for "gutter low" was set a long time ago by a company (M$) that decided the web was boring and could die for all it cared. I think it's simplistic and misleading to suggest that the situation today comes close to that.
    - sangnoir 9y ago
      I too was an early-ish Firefox proponent, it was way ahead of IE on features (but behind Opera - the ads made opera unattractive to me). The devtools were revolutionary (Firebug!). Somewhere along the way, Mozilla lost momentum/focus - Chrom(e/ium) is what Firefox should have been. Hopefully Mozilla will find it's way again someday soon, for the moment I'm using Chromium- which I switched to primarily for the devtools.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
lorenzosnap 9y ago
really really amazing
masterleep 9y ago
It's unfortunate that IE 11 is still in such widespread use compared to Edge. Looks like IE 11 will be the boat anchor for web tech for a couple years at least.
- lucasmullens 9y ago
  There's a light at the end of the tunnel. Once IE 11 is mostly gone, everyone will be on an 'evergreen' browser that auto updates. Once we're there, new features won't take 10 years to be usable.
  - jdhawk 9y ago
    > Once IE 11 is mostly gone Except Mobile.
    - goatlover 9y ago
      And mobile is kind of important.
    - my123 9y ago
      Mobile is Edge-only.
    - flukus 9y ago
      You mean the mobile world doesn't get updates or that IE is somehow relevant in the mobile world?
  - vmasto 9y ago
    Unfortunately, I don't think it's fair to call Edge evergreen. Updates to Edge come via OS updates, which can be quite a hassle and many corporate environments might not perform at a regular basis. This article goes into more depth: https://www.scirra.com/blog/173/just-how-evergreen-is-microsoft-edge https://www.scirra.com/blog/173/just-how-evergreen-is-micros...
    - pitaj 9y ago
themihai 9y ago
Great to see WASM!
romanovcode 9y ago
What I really wish is for them to make decent developer tools. Other than that I love Edge!
- nozzlegear 9y ago
  Just curious, what would you like to see improved? Personally, I'd like dev tools to be more reliable/stable. Seems like half the time I use them in Edge they just randomly crash, freeze up, slow the entire browser to a crawl, or the network tab stops working with some obscure message until the next system reboot. (I ask as somebody that is unaffiliated with Microsoft, but uses Edge as the daily driver.)
  - romanovcode 9y ago
    Performance and ease of use. - The tabs are way too small - The console input is super awkward - HTML element viewer could show registered events (like Firefox does) - It can be better looking
jrcii 9y ago
Until it's run on an OS that respects its users (ie no more native spyware/"telemetry", ads in the file browser) I couldn't care less.
sqeaky 9y ago
It is cool reading about the algorithms they introduced, and they are clever, but I am curious about how much of a difference they made. Are they any benchmarks to go with this?
manigandham 9y ago
Why is this still tied to OS releases?

211 points by hellojs 9y ago

Better performance is always good. Excited for shared memory to come to JavaScript.

Great improvements! I also notice that Edge is more stable now and doesn't freeze as much as before (still happens). Also, I am not sure if it is Google breaking standards or if some feature not interpreted correctly in Edge but, Gmail still has some bugs on Edge (e.g., keyboard shortcut to add label doesn't automatically get the textbox in focus. In previous version, the text would be printed outside the box) I hope more sites test on Edge and not just on Chrome. Congrats to the team! Hope to see Edge decouple from Windows releases soon (as announced during Windows 10 launch)!

josteink 9y ago
> I hope more sites test on Edge and not just on Chrome. "Look for your friends, but trust not to hope. It has forsaken these lands." Seriously. I use Firefox as my main browser and I'm at the point where I'm surprised if anyone tests anything in anything except Chrome, or if they even realize such test-targets exist at all. Standard response to bug-reports? "Just use Chrome. Works for me!", "It's just Firefox. Low importance." Etc. From the glory days of web-standards following IE's demise, this profession has sunk gutter low.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  Yeah. It boggles my mind how quickly and totally the amnesia has set in; where the same crowd who vilified IE and the web monoculture it created is perfectly fine with "Just use Chrome" as a solution. I've seen people seriously claim that every browser should use WebKit and all the other rendering engines should be thrown out, and that this would be "for the good of the web". What?!
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    > I've seen people seriously claim that every browser should use WebKit and all the other rendering engines should be thrown out, and that this would be "for the good of the web". What?! This has been a meme for years now. I remember John Resig suggesting this in 2013—ironically, right before the Blink fork that ended mainline WebKit dominance.
    - dherman 9y ago
      Wasn't it Joe Hewitt?
      - pcwalton 9y ago
        I'm thinking of http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engines/ http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engine...
  - jhpriestley 9y ago
    This would leave the browser world with one high-quality, open-source implementation as the de facto standard. I don't think this is so self-evidently awful. There are a number of big open-source projects in this sort of position, like git, TeX, linux, GHC. What is special about browsers that we need multiple competing implementations of the standard?
    - soperj 9y ago
      git really? there are tons of big projects that don't use git. Java for instance.
      - graphememes 9y ago
        They use it when multiple people code on the same codebase. It's either in Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket and uses git. I haven't seen someone use anything other than git in a long time, and those that do are ancient projects.
- hashhar 9y ago
  I've seen things go the other way around. As an example, use Chrome Canary to browse https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/its-like-tweeting-but-you-cant-use-the-letter-e https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/its-like-tweeting... and then use Firefox Nightly. Chrome can barely manage to keep up with scrolling while Firefox chugs along nicely. The only issues Firefox has are when you get to media handling and non-standard APIs from Chrome. 99.9% of websites "work" on all browsers though and I haven't seen any need to run Chrome for a specific website (Google Docs used to be a case but not anymore).
  - esprehn 9y ago
    I filed this bug here http://crbug.com/713982 http://crbug.com/713982 This is a behavioral difference with Firefox. Chrome is currently blocking scrolling on the JS inside the wheel event handler which appears to be very slow on the linked website. Firefox is only blocking on the JS for the first event inside the scroll gesture and asynchronously scrolling after which hides the very slow JS handlers. This is an interesting case because the Chrome behavior lets sites implement certain effects without lagging behind scrolling while the Firefox behavior favors smoothness of scrolling over JS effects synchronized with wheel handlers. In any case, Chrome is currently working towards switching to the Firefox behavior which will make sites like this scroll much more smoothly.
- mbell 9y ago
  > It's just Firefox. Low importance. Well, the reality is that it is low importance. Firefox is down to ~2.5% of our traffic, Firefox is bleeding users badly. It's also not always a simple fix. In our current code base we have more workarounds for FF bugs than any other browser, and some of them are pretty nasty. e.g. monkey patching `getComputedStyle` to get around this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 So it tends to come down to whether or not it's worth carrying a bunch of technical debt to support a dying browser, not a simple choice and not a matter of sticking to web standards.
  - hutzlibu 9y ago
    "to support a dying browser" Wow, this is the first time I read FF being described as a "dying browser". Even though I don't think so and other sources https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... say about 12% market share, the fact alone that someone describes it like that, is very sad ...
    - gnaritas 9y ago
      It used to be much higher than 12%, so it is actually a dying browser.
    - mbell 9y ago
      > say about 12% market share 12% of desktop, ~5-6% of total. 3 years ago it was ~18% of total, there is certainly a consistent downward trend in usage.
      - hutzlibu 9y ago
        No doubt about the down thing, I also rarely use FF nowdays, but a downtrend is a different thing from "dying". Plus, I am optimistic about servo ...
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    > In our current code base we have more workarounds for FF bugs than any other browser, and some of them are pretty nasty. e.g. monkey patching `getComputedStyle` to get around this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 In that case, Blink and WebKit are changing to Firefox (and Edge)'s behavior, because it makes more sense. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1813 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1813
- qudat 9y ago
  Another reason for this is tooling. No one I know develops on Firefox, mainly because of how amazing Google Chrome's developer tools have become over the years. It's not even close. So yes, developers use Chrome because Google has an entire team dedicated to make their tooling cutting edge for developers.
  - pikzen 9y ago
    The developer tools on Firefox Developer Edition(Aurora) are miles ahead on most things aside from the network view, to be fair. Just because they're not integrated into default firefox doesn't mean Chrome is the absolute best.
- tannhaeuser 9y ago
  What are you talking about? I'm using FF without any trouble at all on both desktop and mobile for each and everything, and so do many others, for its support of uBlock origin if nothing else. Also, the iOS devices out there have only Safari-Webkit.
  - johnnydoebk 9y ago
    There are some hipster web-sites built by amateurish developers who manage somehow to make them work correctly in Chrome only. I've faced those too and after reporting the bugs (like horizontal scrolling of menus) the reply is usually something along the lines of "most of our users prefer Chrome, so we won't fix it".
- lacampbell 9y ago
  Standard response to bug-reports? "Just use Chrome. Works for me!", "It's just Firefox. Low importance." Etc. I remember wanting to use Italki, but their website wouldn't let me input my credit card details when using firefox. I mentioned it to their support team, and they just suggested I use chrome. I guess they're big enough that my lack of custom won't hurt, but I figured that since "inputting numbers into a field" was already a solved problem in front end web development, that they might as well sort it out.
- Touche 9y ago
  A good step would be if browsers other than Chrome had decent devtools built in.
- tn135 9y ago
  That attitude can work only for enterprise applications where people get paid to use the application. Not when you are a consumer app. We test even on Safari.
- cdata 9y ago
  As a long time web developer, I worked through IE dominance. I was a Firefox early adopter and advocated for it amongst friends and family for years. Furthermore, I am very unhappy about the state of the landscape today. One browser should not be dominating all the others; it is an imbalance in the order of the web. The hyperbole in your comment kinda kills me though. The glory days of web standards that you are talking about were largely glorious because Firefox came out from left field and started implementing standards and new features at a high velocity compared to Microsoft's IE. Firefox started to beat IE in tooling and platform features, and it was open source to boot. Firefox even had the edge on IE with regards to security (to be fair the bar was low in those days). All of these details greatly endeared Firefox to me. As a web developer, I loved Firefox for what it stood for and also what it enabled me to do. Chrome is "winning" the web browser game by taking the pages out of Firefox's playbook. Chrome is open source. Chrome is heavily involved in the standards process. Chrome takes a lot of credit for pushing browsers towards evergreen release cycles. Chrome offers the best developer tooling. Chrome implements standardized web platform features at a rapid clip. I hate that Chrome is dominating the market. But I don't hate Chrome, and I definitely don't think the status quo today is worse than the one during the Internet Explorer regime. I hate it because it shows that there is a tremendous imbalance in the resources spent on other browsers compared to Chrome. I hate it because I don't think that the ecosystem is as great as it could be if the developer mindshare was more distributed across different browsers. It's easy to forget that the "bar" for "gutter low" was set a long time ago by a company (M$) that decided the web was boring and could die for all it cared. I think it's simplistic and misleading to suggest that the situation today comes close to that.
  - sangnoir 9y ago
    I too was an early-ish Firefox proponent, it was way ahead of IE on features (but behind Opera - the ads made opera unattractive to me). The devtools were revolutionary (Firebug!). Somewhere along the way, Mozilla lost momentum/focus - Chrom(e/ium) is what Firefox should have been. Hopefully Mozilla will find it's way again someday soon, for the moment I'm using Chromium- which I switched to primarily for the devtools.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

lorenzosnap 9y ago

really really amazing

masterleep 9y ago

It's unfortunate that IE 11 is still in such widespread use compared to Edge. Looks like IE 11 will be the boat anchor for web tech for a couple years at least.

lucasmullens 9y ago
There's a light at the end of the tunnel. Once IE 11 is mostly gone, everyone will be on an 'evergreen' browser that auto updates. Once we're there, new features won't take 10 years to be usable.
- jdhawk 9y ago
  > Once IE 11 is mostly gone Except Mobile.
  - goatlover 9y ago
    And mobile is kind of important.
  - my123 9y ago
    Mobile is Edge-only.
  - flukus 9y ago
    You mean the mobile world doesn't get updates or that IE is somehow relevant in the mobile world?
- vmasto 9y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't think it's fair to call Edge evergreen. Updates to Edge come via OS updates, which can be quite a hassle and many corporate environments might not perform at a regular basis. This article goes into more depth: https://www.scirra.com/blog/173/just-how-evergreen-is-microsoft-edge https://www.scirra.com/blog/173/just-how-evergreen-is-micros...
  - pitaj 9y ago

themihai 9y ago

Great to see WASM!

romanovcode 9y ago

What I really wish is for them to make decent developer tools. Other than that I love Edge!

nozzlegear 9y ago
Just curious, what would you like to see improved? Personally, I'd like dev tools to be more reliable/stable. Seems like half the time I use them in Edge they just randomly crash, freeze up, slow the entire browser to a crawl, or the network tab stops working with some obscure message until the next system reboot. (I ask as somebody that is unaffiliated with Microsoft, but uses Edge as the daily driver.)
- romanovcode 9y ago
  Performance and ease of use. - The tabs are way too small - The console input is super awkward - HTML element viewer could show registered events (like Firefox does) - It can be better looking

jrcii 9y ago

Until it's run on an OS that respects its users (ie no more native spyware/"telemetry", ads in the file browser) I couldn't care less.

sqeaky 9y ago

It is cool reading about the algorithms they introduced, and they are clever, but I am curious about how much of a difference they made. Are they any benchmarks to go with this?

manigandham 9y ago

Why is this still tied to OS releases?