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That video in the post seems to show Chrome is still significantly faster in half of the tests shown there. How is that possible? From what Servo was initially
by mtgx 9y ago
That video in the post seems to show Chrome is still significantly faster in half of the tests shown there. How is that possible? From what Servo was initially promising (even 3-4x the speed of old Firefox), it didn't look like Chrome would come close either.
Did they make that many compromises when "porting parts from Servo" to Gecko? What's hurting Firefox's performance so much that even after implementing Electrolysis and now Quantum, it still can't be a clear winner over Chrome in performance? Is it simply a matter of Google "being ahead" in performance tuning and having more engineers, etc, or is there something fundamentally wrong with Firefox's codebase compared to Chrome's codebase?
I wish Mozilla was more committed to rewriting Firefox in Rust. Or perhaps it would be better to have it as a completely new project, like they did with Firefox Focus, which by the way to me it seems faster than Firefox + ublock origin on Android, even though it only blocks trackers.
- Vinnl 9y agoI guess it mostly comes down to "performance is difficult, and optimisations for one use case might cause regressions for another". Note, though, that there's still more to come [1]. Also, I guess the state of Servo can tell you what a tremendous effort rewriting is, and why that would still take quite a while to finish. [1] "Project Quantum: There’s more to come" at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-developer-edition-fastest-firefox-ever/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-developer-...
- Eridrus 9y agoI look forward to seeing the rest land, but that video, while impressively fair, didn't really leave me excited to install Firefox.
- moosingin3space 9y agoThis release only includes the CSS components (Stylo) from Servo. The new rendering architecture, WebRender, is expected to land later.
- pcwalton 9y agoBrowser performance is not a single dimension. Nobody said Servo was going to be 3x-4x faster than (insert engine here) on every possible benchmark anyone could ever come up with. Rather, it's fast on the areas it focuses on.
- mtgx 9y agoIn case it wasn't clear, I was talking about these slides, which Mozilla itself showed a while ago: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA But, as others have said, we may be getting a more drastic increase in performance when the new rendering engine lands, too. I thought this included the new rendering engine, which is why I felt it was quite disappointing compared to those slides we saw before. But if it's only the CSS engine that makes its about twice as fast, that's quite a nice boost. Hopefully the new rendering engine will give it another 2x (at least on quad-core+ machines).
- mderazon 9y agoMaybe it's because most websites today optimize for Chrome / use Chrome in development? That might change in the future