7 ms·

Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

81 points by felixr 13y ago

josteink 13y ago
> Welcome to famo.us > a javascript engine and framework that solves HTML5 performance And doesn't work in Firefox. Aweso.me!
- Zak 13y ago
  But the article says it's based on "a W3C standard that must be supported by all browsers". How can this be?
  - rangibaby 13y ago
    Probably using -webkit vendor prefixes (can't check for sure, on iPhone)
    - ajbetteridge 13y ago
      Article says "We use the CSS3 primitive -webkit-transform: matrix3d", so that'd be a yes
      - talmand 13y ago
        Except that for nearly every -webkit property there's a non-vendor version as well. There's the occasional -moz in there so it doesn't seem that would be the problem. It now redirects to famou.us/c/ in Firefox for me.
- rurounijones 13y ago
  Didnt seem to work in IE10 (Only other browser installed on this machine) either.
  - gburnett 13y ago
    I had a look in IE9. All I found were a couple of video demos. I was left to reflect on what it is to reinvent something.
- diydsp 13y ago
  Ah, is that why http://famo.us http://famo.us just looks like a blurry pile of laundry to me? But most importantly: didn't Intel release around this time last year JIT compilation of Javascript to run on their HID (GPU onboard CPU)? (wouldn't that make slow-execute javascript a non-issue?)
  - X4 13y ago
    Oh snap, thanks for reminding me of this. It's called ParallelJS. Here's a link to a demo video: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/intel-labs-river-trail-demo-video.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/intel-labs-r... :) I like the accent I'd recommend checking the Ajaxian article[1] that sums it up. You can find the source on Github [2]. You can play around with the River Trail interactive shell [3] too. -- [1] http://ajaxian.com/archives/intels-parallel-extensions-for-javascript http://ajaxian.com/archives/intels-parallel-extensions-for-j... [2] https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail [3] https://github.com/RiverTrail/interactive https://github.com/RiverTrail/interactive
  - Cthulhu_ 13y ago
    Well it would if Javascript execution speed was the issue, but as the article highlights, they're using Javascript to replace slow browser rendering, and the argument is that JS is, in the case of matrix transformations, 80% the speed of native C, and using that to replace the renderer for animations in a browser is faster than the native render. Of course, faster JS is never wrong.
camus2 13y ago
Vaporware. This stuff was announced years ago, we saw only one basic demo , they raised quite a lot of money though, yet there is no product today. What did they do with the money? Mr Doobs did the same demo, even better since he used the framework he created ,three.js : - http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodictable/ http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodict...
- bsaul 13y ago
  Same thought. Sent their link to a friend of mine, who said "hey, seems like i'm already registered to their beta...". That was one year ago, and he completely forgot about it.
InternalRun 13y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines comes to mind.
- patrickg 13y ago
  Yes. Thats why I rarely click on such titles.
  - i386 13y ago
    > Obviously, this isn't exactly the reinvention of the Web, but Famo.us has pushed JavaScript in a novel direction At at least they admit its just hyperbole... right?
- candydance 13y ago
  "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." I had to look it up, so this might save some others the trouble.
- corobo 13y ago
  My instant thought too
- jimzvz 13y ago
  What's the law for someone always mentioning Betteridge's law of headlines when a headline is posed as a question on Hacker News?
  - jafaku 13y ago
    "I wanna sound smart without too much effort" law of comments.
  - quarterto 13y ago
    Ahem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893
    - 13y ago
Hopka 13y ago
From the rather vague text I can imagine they are doing matrix multiplication in JavaScript and assigning the end result to a CSS transform. Instead of doing multiple transforms in CSS which is slower. The end result is smoother HTML5 animations but I haven't yet figured out where they reinvented the web.
- e12e 13y ago
  It's been a while since I looked at transition (and 3d transition) support from css -- but this sounds really counter intuitive -- shouldn't the browsers be able to make these changes themselves, in c++/c/hand-tuned machine code at that? http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-transforms/#transform-property http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-transforms/#transform-property "A transformation is applied to the coordinate system an element renders in through the ‘transform’ property. This property contains a list of transform functions. The final transformation value for a coordinate system is obtained by converting each function in the list to its corresponding matrix like defined in Mathematical Description of Transform Functions, then multiplying the matrices." On a side note: this looks like something that should work (transformation/transition) with javascript disabled -- we've (rather) recently gotten drop-down menus that don't require javascript -- seems like a bit of a step backwards to require javascript for (some uses) of basic transformations if that's being used as part of the essential ux for a page...
bradwestness 13y ago
If their performance claims bear out (which, we'll see) I could see this becoming a popular way to deliver apps and games to mobile devices without giving 30% of your income to Apple or whoever.
- zuppy 13y ago
  Does anyone really want that? Web is currently awful for mobile games: hard to interact with the content (see how scroll is handled in javascript) and low performance no matter how many tricks you do. Also, don't forget that you'll have to handle payments by yourself (and impulse shopping will not work if users will have to fill the credit card every time). edit: I've opened that page in Firefox, it won't show the demo. I guess it won't show it on IE also, but I haven't tried. So who's their target? 25% of the users?
kristofferR 13y ago
Their demo on http://famo.us http://famo.us is pretty impressive at least, it runs flawlessly smooth on my "ancient" iPad 2.
- diminish 13y ago
  so it doesn't work on firefox..
- Ygg2 13y ago
  It seems the demo doesn't work on FireFox, but does on Chrome. Firefox just redirects to http://famo.us/c http://famo.us/c
  - viraptor 13y ago
    This may have something to do with "We use the CSS3 primitive -webkit-transform: matrix3d, which lets us compute the composite matrix and skip the browser's renderer. No plug-in, no download, no hack." Yeah... "the vendor specific CSS3 primitive" and "no plugin, no download, massive hack". Would be a closer representation.
- MattBearman 13y ago
  Demo runs pretty slowly on my iPhone 4s, but really they need the same demo in raw CSS3 to compare speeds.
cpa 13y ago
There's a demo on their homepage: http://famo.us/ http://famo.us/
onion2k 13y ago
Sounds like they came up with a novel and impressive optimisation that everyone could benefit from, but decided to keep it to themselves and charge for it. So less "reinvent the web" than "go back to the way things were before the web" really. Whether or not there's anything wrong with that is left up to the reader. :)
- anon1385 13y ago
  Since when did 'the web' involve giving away all the source code and not charging people for things? Did Google open source their search engine and let anybody advertise on their site for free while I wasn't looking? I really don't understand this meme about the web being 'open'. Much of the native desktop software I use is open source. Practically none of the web services I use are open source. There is not much chance of a 'GNU project' for the web (i.e. reimplementing an open google and twitter and facebook and so on). Open source web services of significance are few and far between and when it comes to controlling our data usually the best we get is a proprietary API that may or may not get shut down or changed tomorrow. The web gave us RSS which was good[1] but since then it has been pretty much a non stop stream of proprietary APIs and platform lock-in. Even things built on RSS tend to be proprietary APIs rather than open standards: take Google Reader for example. Before it shut down it should have been trivial to pull your subscriptions out of it and point your clients at a new replacement rss-syncing server (like you can do with an email client). But it wasn't because there was no damn standard for that, just proprietary APIs as various people wanted to lock you into their cloud service. The standards that have emerged have been, of course, ones that generally involve lock-in to proprietary platforms, like OAuth. [1] interestingly many of the new generation of web developers seem to dislike RSS.
  - r0h1n 13y ago
    Since the headline was "reinventing the web" (a pretty ambitious, even bombastic goal), it would be fair to expect the solution to be open-source and/or free. Of course had the headline been "improving the web" or "making a faster web" then our expectations might have been different.
  - iand 13y ago
philhippus 13y ago
"We were 14 times faster than compiled C in Chrome..." I feel this part needs clarification. As I understand it the "in Chrome" part is key, as they were bypassing the browser and interpreting javascript through compiled C (matrix3d).
adam-a 13y ago
The demo doesn't work on Firefox 27.0a1 on my MacBook Pro. Any effort to reinvent the web needs to keep compatibility in mind. Tried it on my phone and the performance was good but still noticeably stuttering. Could be an interesting approach if they cut down the hyperbole and carry on improving.
swatkat 13y ago
Off topic: Why does it say Urasium Michael Arrington? Urasium was a typo in some Apple demo event. [0]https://twitter.com/onesleepynerd/statuses/344251077887131649 https://twitter.com/onesleepynerd/statuses/34425107788713164...
- egypturnash 13y ago
  Hmm, note that "Urasium" in the Apple demo has an atomic weight of 238.0289, while this one changes the weight to "Michael Arrington". I think the famo.us people may have been calling Michael Arrington an ass.
usernew1817 13y ago
I remember these guys, is it just me or have they been in beta for like 3 years
pavlov 13y ago
Is this just a closed-source ripo^H^H^H^H fork of Three.js? The example shown on famo.us is identical to MrDoob's Three.js example that uses CSS3: http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodictable/ http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodict... Edit: looks like it's the other way around -- according to MrDoob's G+ post from last year, he based his Three.js CSS3 example directly on the design created by famo.us: https://plus.google.com/113862800338869870683/posts/QcFk5HrWran https://plus.google.com/113862800338869870683/posts/QcFk5HrW...
- joetech 13y ago
  The first thing I did when I saw Famo.us last year was rip into the code. With a little persistence, you can pretty easily use the code without waiting for their release.
  - X4 13y ago
    I prettified the code myself too, but it's really unreadable. Have you extracted the parts into a nice library? Mind sharing your efforts? Honestly, without going into the source code, I was like, this is matrix transformation, this is matrix transformation.. then I saw matrix3d and I was like yeaah! I believe that no software can excel without a good mathematical foundation. What I see coming is that this approach will be extended by P2P Load-Balancing. Similar to what Bitcoin Hackers [1] were doing and still do [1]. -- [1] http://community.websense.com/blogs/securitylabs/archive/2011/12/20/bitcoin-miner-with-black-hat-seo-poisoning-campaign.aspx http://community.websense.com/blogs/securitylabs/archive/201... [2] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1364/how-can-i-stop-websites-running-an-integrated-bitcoin-miner-without-disabling-ja http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1364/how-can-i-st... PS: Page 3 on the article answers the headline: No!
sidcool 13y ago
|"I feel like we're working with a car that has a lawn mower for an engine" Metaphors are powerful.
Fuxy 13y ago
Seems browsers are obsolete and are now just getting in the way. People are trying to use every loophole and new technology possible to bypass features implemented in browsers. I think it's time browsers took a step back and gave more control to developers. It's time for a major rethink of what a browser should be/do.
- tomelders 13y ago
  I'm inclined to agree with you here. While I love HTML, CSS and Javascript it's not the right tool for where the web appears to be heading, which is essentially a transport layer for data that services apps. Mobile devices have turned the process of installing an app into something 'close enough' to the experience of browsing the web that I think a lot of consumers wouldn't notice if the twitter web site disappeared (except that would be big news, and they wouldn't be able to avoid all the complaining). Conclusion... I don't know, but I think our current concept of a browser and the web might be reaching the end of it's usefulness. More data needed.
- GrinningFool 13y ago
  "Seems browsers are obsolete and are now just getting in the way. People are trying to use every loophole and new technology possible to bypass features implemented in browsers." Warning: unpopular view ahead. It's a bit ranty, too. That's because we're hell-bent on doing everything in browsers in the first place. Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that write-once run-anywhere would become reality, damn the consequences. We just wouldn't call it that anymore - to do so would raise the spectre of desktop java which has essentially shit the bed. Instead, we'll call it "standards". It's a most peculiar definition of "standards" though. These standards are a shifting target, receiving regular modification. Every major vendor can claim compliance regardless of whether they are actually compliant - after all, vendor prefixes. And many front-end developers extoll the virtue of these 'standards', apparently believing that the libraries and tooling that hide the inconsistencies from them are actually a solution instead of a band-aid. We've been trying for "write-once-run-anywhere-but-don't-call-it-that" [WORABDCIT] for years. And we've made such progress - in another decade we may actually have consistent standard support across browsers. Of course, we haven't had this for the last decade so I'm not sure why we're perpetually hopeful that we will in the next. And that's not even getting into performance. Because these 'standards' are built atop so many layers that applications built on them can very, very rarely provide performance like an application actually built for a native platform does. Leading to a whole discipline of computer science with a goal of performance that merely approaches native speed on a consistent basis. Back when I first started in my career, I remember building native application UIs that were poorly coded, inefficient and bloated. Hell, I used MFC for love of K&R. Yet this crap still ran faster on a Pentium III than the majority of "web apps" run on the latest hardware. A native application is nearly always going to be faster than javascript through a browser. For most applications being developed, it will provide excellent performance - even on ARM -- without any tuning, tweaking, shortcuts, or loopholes. It will give an experience consistent with the rest of the platform, so that users aren't having to learn a new UI paradigm with every hot new app. You can even integrate technologies into a native app that still allow you to communicate with back-end components over http/https - go figure. A well-written native library is cross-platform (thanks to meaningful standards), so that only the UI bits would differ. The cost is more time building. A loss of some flexibility. Levelling up some basic skills, perhaps raising the barrier of entry a bit. A step back from RAD practices that have become so rapid that it's become common for a new "app" to be deployed knowing it will break under stress and worry about fixing it later. Not saying that this didn't happen before - but I am saying it wasn't accepted as the norm to the degree it is now. But nah. Native is yesterday. Why on earth would we want to take fullest advantage of modern hardware to provide a good user experience? Let's continue to reinvent the browser. We'll keep on with WORABDCIT because sooner or later, we're bound to come up with standards that are finalized and implemented consistently. Really. We will.
heijmans 13y ago
They are using CSS3 3d-transforms to create visual interfaces with good performance on modern browsers (including mobile). See: http://famo.us/ http://famo.us/ (BTW: It took me a while to figure out that if you close the dialog window, you can click the buttons at the bottom for more demo's.) Unfortunately they are only using the webkit-prefixed properties, so their demo doesn't work in Firefox or IE. I'm guessing they wrote their demo a couple of years ago and never updated it. There are some problems with CSS3 3d-transforms: 1) Text looks blurry, just look at the dialog window in the demo. 2) Some mobile devices (e.g. old iPads) have limited GPU memory. If you use too much (by setting 3d-transforms on large surfaces), the browser (or your app) will crash. By the way, the answer to the question in the title is: No. And if they don't open source their code, they won't get a lot of traction.
- heijmans 13y ago
  It seems that they will release their software as open source. I couldn't find what license famo.us will use.
fakeanon 13y ago
"Obviously, this isn't exactly the reinvention of the Web, but Famo.us has pushed JavaScript in a novel direction -- and has poked a large hole in the argument that native apps alone deliver the goods. It will be fascinating to see the new types of applications that emerge."
anonemouscoward 13y ago
Best way to 'pivot' out of wasting $400,000 of somebody else's money I've ever seen.
- Derikulous 13y ago
  Truth
dharma1 13y ago
I saw a video of the founder giving a talk, seems like they are hijacking css3 animations and doing matrix calcs better optimised than most css3 browser implementations Cool stuff but I wouldn't call it re-inventing the web
humanspecies 13y ago
Every sensational title that pops up is sure to disappoint you. These guys optimized some JS and you called it "reinvent the WWW". Ridiculous.
lrobb 13y ago
Does this headline come from the most awesome copywriter we've ever seen?
bergheim 13y ago
Having never heard of this before, I actually read this half-way through and thought it was a highly satirical piece, so I went back here before realizing it's not. The animations were pretty smooth anyway, but my cursor would skip frames over the content.
Jare 13y ago
Looks like a nice 3D tweening DOM engine. Related (and recommended) visits for people interested in that sort of thing: - http://hakim.se/ http://hakim.se/ - http://desandro.github.io/3dtransforms/ http://desandro.github.io/3dtransforms/ - http://glmatrix.net/ http://glmatrix.net/ As for the article... the author confuses "rendering" with "layout": - "the primary part we need to rewrite is the part of the renderer that creates and multiplies the matrices" - "We use the CSS3 primitive -webkit-transform: matrix3d, which lets us compute the composite matrix and skip the browser's renderer" Which leads to some absurd claims: - "We were 14 times faster than compiled C in Chrome" Before reality kicks back in: - "rendering goes through DOM" - "Obviously, this isn't exactly the reinvention of the Web" And this is how you sell a DOM scenegraph engine to people with more money than common sense: - "a W3C standard that must be supported by all browsers" - "all text in Famo.us applications is searchable" - "enable rapid application development" - "smooth, high-functioning UI across all platforms" - "one of several enabling technologies" - "allow enterprise users to touch-interact with big data analytics" - "spark a new breed of gamified enterprise apps"
cateye 13y ago
Looks like an easy to implement performance optimization for the browser. Feels like "This belongs in the browser source code, not in the application".
CmonDev 13y ago
Started really good: "Facebook is right. HTML5 isn't ready,"; "The fact is, it's the wrong tool,"; "We're years away from this being fixed.". ...then went downhill: "...and in JavaScript."
koenbok 13y ago
My prototyping framework http://framerjs.com http://framerjs.com uses the exact same approach, divs positioned with only css matrix transforms. Great for high performance animations. I've sometimes thought about building a full fledged ui framework on top of it but it doesn't work (exactly the same) in all browsers. And I suspect offloading everything to the gpu by default will lead to other sorts of performance issues but I'll have to test this. Framer also includes spring physics and is fully integrated with Photoshop. You should check it out if you build prototypes.
- koenbok 13y ago
  Check these for examples of performance: http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/GoogleNow/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/GoogleNow/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/NewsFeed/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/NewsFeed/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/Intro/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/Intro/index.html
  - X4 13y ago
    People should try the editor out: http://www.framerjs.com/editor/ http://www.framerjs.com/editor/
- tehwalrus 13y ago
  nice - I have to use chrome though, no examples seem to work in Firefox. Is that expected? EDIT: ahh, the http://famo.us/ http://famo.us/ example doesn't work in FF either, it redirects to a boring splash page. I didn't notice the redirect the first time!
- X4 13y ago
  Thanks for posting this here! Highly appreciated and relevant. I'll check this out, but why a Facebook Group?? Can't you just open an IRC Channel? I would definitely join and contribute back. I don't have a Facebook account and won't use it and I'm still very social. hmm, I guess many hackers don't have a FB account and hate using the Facebook Oauth Login on 3rd party sites.
- 13y ago
probablyfiction 13y ago
I just ran this on the LG G2 in chrome via a wifi connection, and it was noticeably slower than the desktop version, which is to be expected because of the way JS runs on ARM processors. "These guys" didn't reinvent the web; they just have a good PR connection. If someone can invent a way to have buttery-smooth HTML5 performance on mobile devices, they'll have solved a significant hard problem. This solution? It's just a hack.
logotype 13y ago
jesus christ. we are really in a tech bubble again. this is just ridiculous. the end is near!
njharman 13y ago
Without reading the article I can unequivocally answer > Did these guys just reinvent the Web? with NO, you hyperbolic twit.
- Samuel_Michon 13y ago
  Well, that’s just Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. Also, it’s an article on a website called ‘javaworld’.
  - iambateman 13y ago
    http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9wcxw5pU81rrf1eeo1_500.jpg http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9wcxw5pU81rrf1eeo1_500.jp... JAVAWORLD!!!!! lol.
fraction 13y ago
I'll just leave this here. Be warned, it's a VERY long article. http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/ http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...
wnevets 13y ago
Its quite terrible on this workstation, so I'm gonna have to go with a no. Also isnt offloading everything to the GPU a bad idea on mobile?
- DougBTX 13y ago
  Nope, it is a great idea on mobile, at least for iDevices and I imagine most Android devices. Especially with high dpi screens, leaving everything on the CPU is too slow.
  - wnevets 13y ago
    I think in one of the web performance talks by Addy Osmani he said it should be used sparely at best. Maybe I'll look it up to check
    - DougBTX 13y ago
      I'm coming at this from a native development perspective, so there are large gaps in my knowledge. In particular, I've not done any benchmarks, so take what I say with a large grain of salt. Any real performance advice will come down to comparing alternative ways of implementing a particular effect, rather than a blanket, "do this." My understanding is that when a browser renders a page, the output bitmap is kept in a render buffer, which then gets composited with other buffers when being written out to the display. Filling the render buffers is slow (largely on the CPU), and compositing is fast (largely on the GPU). Using the 3D transform effects moves elements on the page into separate buffers. Performance would be improved by having fewer buffers, and by re-drawing buffers less frequently. Best case is to have a single buffer rendered once, I think that's what you're referring to by Addy's suggestion. But, if you're going to have elements moving relative to each other, it is faster to render them both once, then re-composit multiple times on the GPU, rather than re-render the whole scene on the CPU each time there is a change. That at least is what I mean by, "moving computation to the GPU."
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  I'm gonna go with 'no'; GPU's should be a lot faster (read: more specialized), and thus more power-efficient than general-purpose CPU's. In theory. Disregarding optimizations in general purpose CPU's in mobile.
deftnerd 13y ago
Would using "-webkit-transform: matrix3d" allow a way for websites to use a computers GPU for computation? I.e. stay on a page to calculate pi, work on SETI analysis, or mine for bitcoins?
- X4 13y ago
  yes and that has been done already. I posted somewhere on this page links to it, in case you're interested.
asaarinen 13y ago
Hard to imagine what they could be adding to CSS3 transforms - composite transforms can be done efficiently without calculating them manually anyway (by using the DOM tree as a "scene graph"). I experimented with this some time ago as well [1] But even bigger question than the performance is, what kind of 3D user interface would be more effective in conveying a message than a clean, regular 2D website that everybody feels familiar with. Curious to see if they will bring some UI design innovations here [1] https://github.com/asaarinen/spherical-map https://github.com/asaarinen/spherical-map
swamp40 13y ago
Their homepage is pretty cool. Imagine if every element box was a website or picture.
daddykotex 13y ago
Ur : Micheal Arrington
myers 13y ago
I found "The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story" illuminating after hearing about Facebook moving away from HTML5. http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...
Sagat 13y ago
Wow, this Lu guy is going to be the world's first trillionaire, at only 21 years old. Kudos to him for inventing the Internet.

81 points by felixr 13y ago

> Welcome to famo.us > a javascript engine and framework that solves HTML5 performance And doesn't work in Firefox. Aweso.me!

Zak 13y ago
But the article says it's based on "a W3C standard that must be supported by all browsers". How can this be?
- rangibaby 13y ago
  Probably using -webkit vendor prefixes (can't check for sure, on iPhone)
  - ajbetteridge 13y ago
    Article says "We use the CSS3 primitive -webkit-transform: matrix3d", so that'd be a yes
    - talmand 13y ago
      Except that for nearly every -webkit property there's a non-vendor version as well. There's the occasional -moz in there so it doesn't seem that would be the problem. It now redirects to famou.us/c/ in Firefox for me.
rurounijones 13y ago
Didnt seem to work in IE10 (Only other browser installed on this machine) either.
- gburnett 13y ago
  I had a look in IE9. All I found were a couple of video demos. I was left to reflect on what it is to reinvent something.
diydsp 13y ago
Ah, is that why http://famo.us http://famo.us just looks like a blurry pile of laundry to me? But most importantly: didn't Intel release around this time last year JIT compilation of Javascript to run on their HID (GPU onboard CPU)? (wouldn't that make slow-execute javascript a non-issue?)
- X4 13y ago
  Oh snap, thanks for reminding me of this. It's called ParallelJS. Here's a link to a demo video: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/intel-labs-river-trail-demo-video.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/intel-labs-r... :) I like the accent I'd recommend checking the Ajaxian article[1] that sums it up. You can find the source on Github [2]. You can play around with the River Trail interactive shell [3] too. -- [1] http://ajaxian.com/archives/intels-parallel-extensions-for-javascript http://ajaxian.com/archives/intels-parallel-extensions-for-j... [2] https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail [3] https://github.com/RiverTrail/interactive https://github.com/RiverTrail/interactive
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  Well it would if Javascript execution speed was the issue, but as the article highlights, they're using Javascript to replace slow browser rendering, and the argument is that JS is, in the case of matrix transformations, 80% the speed of native C, and using that to replace the renderer for animations in a browser is faster than the native render. Of course, faster JS is never wrong.

camus2 13y ago

Vaporware. This stuff was announced years ago, we saw only one basic demo , they raised quite a lot of money though, yet there is no product today. What did they do with the money? Mr Doobs did the same demo, even better since he used the framework he created ,three.js : - http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodictable/ http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodict...

bsaul 13y ago
Same thought. Sent their link to a friend of mine, who said "hey, seems like i'm already registered to their beta...". That was one year ago, and he completely forgot about it.

InternalRun 13y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines comes to mind.

patrickg 13y ago
Yes. Thats why I rarely click on such titles.
- i386 13y ago
  > Obviously, this isn't exactly the reinvention of the Web, but Famo.us has pushed JavaScript in a novel direction At at least they admit its just hyperbole... right?
candydance 13y ago
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." I had to look it up, so this might save some others the trouble.
corobo 13y ago
My instant thought too
jimzvz 13y ago
What's the law for someone always mentioning Betteridge's law of headlines when a headline is posed as a question on Hacker News?
- jafaku 13y ago
  "I wanna sound smart without too much effort" law of comments.
- quarterto 13y ago
  Ahem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893
  - 13y ago

Hopka 13y ago

From the rather vague text I can imagine they are doing matrix multiplication in JavaScript and assigning the end result to a CSS transform. Instead of doing multiple transforms in CSS which is slower. The end result is smoother HTML5 animations but I haven't yet figured out where they reinvented the web.

e12e 13y ago
It's been a while since I looked at transition (and 3d transition) support from css -- but this sounds really counter intuitive -- shouldn't the browsers be able to make these changes themselves, in c++/c/hand-tuned machine code at that? http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-transforms/#transform-property http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-transforms/#transform-property "A transformation is applied to the coordinate system an element renders in through the ‘transform’ property. This property contains a list of transform functions. The final transformation value for a coordinate system is obtained by converting each function in the list to its corresponding matrix like defined in Mathematical Description of Transform Functions, then multiplying the matrices." On a side note: this looks like something that should work (transformation/transition) with javascript disabled -- we've (rather) recently gotten drop-down menus that don't require javascript -- seems like a bit of a step backwards to require javascript for (some uses) of basic transformations if that's being used as part of the essential ux for a page...

bradwestness 13y ago

If their performance claims bear out (which, we'll see) I could see this becoming a popular way to deliver apps and games to mobile devices without giving 30% of your income to Apple or whoever.

zuppy 13y ago
Does anyone really want that? Web is currently awful for mobile games: hard to interact with the content (see how scroll is handled in javascript) and low performance no matter how many tricks you do. Also, don't forget that you'll have to handle payments by yourself (and impulse shopping will not work if users will have to fill the credit card every time). edit: I've opened that page in Firefox, it won't show the demo. I guess it won't show it on IE also, but I haven't tried. So who's their target? 25% of the users?

kristofferR 13y ago

Their demo on http://famo.us http://famo.us is pretty impressive at least, it runs flawlessly smooth on my "ancient" iPad 2.

diminish 13y ago
so it doesn't work on firefox..
Ygg2 13y ago
It seems the demo doesn't work on FireFox, but does on Chrome. Firefox just redirects to http://famo.us/c http://famo.us/c
- viraptor 13y ago
  This may have something to do with "We use the CSS3 primitive -webkit-transform: matrix3d, which lets us compute the composite matrix and skip the browser's renderer. No plug-in, no download, no hack." Yeah... "the vendor specific CSS3 primitive" and "no plugin, no download, massive hack". Would be a closer representation.
MattBearman 13y ago
Demo runs pretty slowly on my iPhone 4s, but really they need the same demo in raw CSS3 to compare speeds.

cpa 13y ago

There's a demo on their homepage: http://famo.us/ http://famo.us/

onion2k 13y ago

Sounds like they came up with a novel and impressive optimisation that everyone could benefit from, but decided to keep it to themselves and charge for it. So less "reinvent the web" than "go back to the way things were before the web" really. Whether or not there's anything wrong with that is left up to the reader. :)

anon1385 13y ago
Since when did 'the web' involve giving away all the source code and not charging people for things? Did Google open source their search engine and let anybody advertise on their site for free while I wasn't looking? I really don't understand this meme about the web being 'open'. Much of the native desktop software I use is open source. Practically none of the web services I use are open source. There is not much chance of a 'GNU project' for the web (i.e. reimplementing an open google and twitter and facebook and so on). Open source web services of significance are few and far between and when it comes to controlling our data usually the best we get is a proprietary API that may or may not get shut down or changed tomorrow. The web gave us RSS which was good[1] but since then it has been pretty much a non stop stream of proprietary APIs and platform lock-in. Even things built on RSS tend to be proprietary APIs rather than open standards: take Google Reader for example. Before it shut down it should have been trivial to pull your subscriptions out of it and point your clients at a new replacement rss-syncing server (like you can do with an email client). But it wasn't because there was no damn standard for that, just proprietary APIs as various people wanted to lock you into their cloud service. The standards that have emerged have been, of course, ones that generally involve lock-in to proprietary platforms, like OAuth. [1] interestingly many of the new generation of web developers seem to dislike RSS.
- r0h1n 13y ago
  Since the headline was "reinventing the web" (a pretty ambitious, even bombastic goal), it would be fair to expect the solution to be open-source and/or free. Of course had the headline been "improving the web" or "making a faster web" then our expectations might have been different.
- iand 13y ago

philhippus 13y ago

"We were 14 times faster than compiled C in Chrome..." I feel this part needs clarification. As I understand it the "in Chrome" part is key, as they were bypassing the browser and interpreting javascript through compiled C (matrix3d).

adam-a 13y ago

The demo doesn't work on Firefox 27.0a1 on my MacBook Pro. Any effort to reinvent the web needs to keep compatibility in mind. Tried it on my phone and the performance was good but still noticeably stuttering. Could be an interesting approach if they cut down the hyperbole and carry on improving.

swatkat 13y ago

Off topic: Why does it say Urasium Michael Arrington? Urasium was a typo in some Apple demo event. [0]https://twitter.com/onesleepynerd/statuses/344251077887131649 https://twitter.com/onesleepynerd/statuses/34425107788713164...

egypturnash 13y ago
Hmm, note that "Urasium" in the Apple demo has an atomic weight of 238.0289, while this one changes the weight to "Michael Arrington". I think the famo.us people may have been calling Michael Arrington an ass.

usernew1817 13y ago

I remember these guys, is it just me or have they been in beta for like 3 years

pavlov 13y ago

Is this just a closed-source ripo^H^H^H^H fork of Three.js? The example shown on famo.us is identical to MrDoob's Three.js example that uses CSS3: http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodictable/ http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodict... Edit: looks like it's the other way around -- according to MrDoob's G+ post from last year, he based his Three.js CSS3 example directly on the design created by famo.us: https://plus.google.com/113862800338869870683/posts/QcFk5HrWran https://plus.google.com/113862800338869870683/posts/QcFk5HrW...

joetech 13y ago
The first thing I did when I saw Famo.us last year was rip into the code. With a little persistence, you can pretty easily use the code without waiting for their release.
- X4 13y ago
  I prettified the code myself too, but it's really unreadable. Have you extracted the parts into a nice library? Mind sharing your efforts? Honestly, without going into the source code, I was like, this is matrix transformation, this is matrix transformation.. then I saw matrix3d and I was like yeaah! I believe that no software can excel without a good mathematical foundation. What I see coming is that this approach will be extended by P2P Load-Balancing. Similar to what Bitcoin Hackers [1] were doing and still do [1]. -- [1] http://community.websense.com/blogs/securitylabs/archive/2011/12/20/bitcoin-miner-with-black-hat-seo-poisoning-campaign.aspx http://community.websense.com/blogs/securitylabs/archive/201... [2] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1364/how-can-i-stop-websites-running-an-integrated-bitcoin-miner-without-disabling-ja http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1364/how-can-i-st... PS: Page 3 on the article answers the headline: No!

sidcool 13y ago

|"I feel like we're working with a car that has a lawn mower for an engine" Metaphors are powerful.

Fuxy 13y ago

Seems browsers are obsolete and are now just getting in the way. People are trying to use every loophole and new technology possible to bypass features implemented in browsers. I think it's time browsers took a step back and gave more control to developers. It's time for a major rethink of what a browser should be/do.

tomelders 13y ago
I'm inclined to agree with you here. While I love HTML, CSS and Javascript it's not the right tool for where the web appears to be heading, which is essentially a transport layer for data that services apps. Mobile devices have turned the process of installing an app into something 'close enough' to the experience of browsing the web that I think a lot of consumers wouldn't notice if the twitter web site disappeared (except that would be big news, and they wouldn't be able to avoid all the complaining). Conclusion... I don't know, but I think our current concept of a browser and the web might be reaching the end of it's usefulness. More data needed.
GrinningFool 13y ago
"Seems browsers are obsolete and are now just getting in the way. People are trying to use every loophole and new technology possible to bypass features implemented in browsers." Warning: unpopular view ahead. It's a bit ranty, too. That's because we're hell-bent on doing everything in browsers in the first place. Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that write-once run-anywhere would become reality, damn the consequences. We just wouldn't call it that anymore - to do so would raise the spectre of desktop java which has essentially shit the bed. Instead, we'll call it "standards". It's a most peculiar definition of "standards" though. These standards are a shifting target, receiving regular modification. Every major vendor can claim compliance regardless of whether they are actually compliant - after all, vendor prefixes. And many front-end developers extoll the virtue of these 'standards', apparently believing that the libraries and tooling that hide the inconsistencies from them are actually a solution instead of a band-aid. We've been trying for "write-once-run-anywhere-but-don't-call-it-that" [WORABDCIT] for years. And we've made such progress - in another decade we may actually have consistent standard support across browsers. Of course, we haven't had this for the last decade so I'm not sure why we're perpetually hopeful that we will in the next. And that's not even getting into performance. Because these 'standards' are built atop so many layers that applications built on them can very, very rarely provide performance like an application actually built for a native platform does. Leading to a whole discipline of computer science with a goal of performance that merely approaches native speed on a consistent basis. Back when I first started in my career, I remember building native application UIs that were poorly coded, inefficient and bloated. Hell, I used MFC for love of K&R. Yet this crap still ran faster on a Pentium III than the majority of "web apps" run on the latest hardware. A native application is nearly always going to be faster than javascript through a browser. For most applications being developed, it will provide excellent performance - even on ARM -- without any tuning, tweaking, shortcuts, or loopholes. It will give an experience consistent with the rest of the platform, so that users aren't having to learn a new UI paradigm with every hot new app. You can even integrate technologies into a native app that still allow you to communicate with back-end components over http/https - go figure. A well-written native library is cross-platform (thanks to meaningful standards), so that only the UI bits would differ. The cost is more time building. A loss of some flexibility. Levelling up some basic skills, perhaps raising the barrier of entry a bit. A step back from RAD practices that have become so rapid that it's become common for a new "app" to be deployed knowing it will break under stress and worry about fixing it later. Not saying that this didn't happen before - but I am saying it wasn't accepted as the norm to the degree it is now. But nah. Native is yesterday. Why on earth would we want to take fullest advantage of modern hardware to provide a good user experience? Let's continue to reinvent the browser. We'll keep on with WORABDCIT because sooner or later, we're bound to come up with standards that are finalized and implemented consistently. Really. We will.

heijmans 13y ago

They are using CSS3 3d-transforms to create visual interfaces with good performance on modern browsers (including mobile). See: http://famo.us/ http://famo.us/ (BTW: It took me a while to figure out that if you close the dialog window, you can click the buttons at the bottom for more demo's.) Unfortunately they are only using the webkit-prefixed properties, so their demo doesn't work in Firefox or IE. I'm guessing they wrote their demo a couple of years ago and never updated it. There are some problems with CSS3 3d-transforms: 1) Text looks blurry, just look at the dialog window in the demo. 2) Some mobile devices (e.g. old iPads) have limited GPU memory. If you use too much (by setting 3d-transforms on large surfaces), the browser (or your app) will crash. By the way, the answer to the question in the title is: No. And if they don't open source their code, they won't get a lot of traction.

heijmans 13y ago
It seems that they will release their software as open source. I couldn't find what license famo.us will use.

fakeanon 13y ago

"Obviously, this isn't exactly the reinvention of the Web, but Famo.us has pushed JavaScript in a novel direction -- and has poked a large hole in the argument that native apps alone deliver the goods. It will be fascinating to see the new types of applications that emerge."

anonemouscoward 13y ago

Best way to 'pivot' out of wasting $400,000 of somebody else's money I've ever seen.

Derikulous 13y ago
Truth

dharma1 13y ago

I saw a video of the founder giving a talk, seems like they are hijacking css3 animations and doing matrix calcs better optimised than most css3 browser implementations Cool stuff but I wouldn't call it re-inventing the web

humanspecies 13y ago

Every sensational title that pops up is sure to disappoint you. These guys optimized some JS and you called it "reinvent the WWW". Ridiculous.

lrobb 13y ago

Does this headline come from the most awesome copywriter we've ever seen?

bergheim 13y ago

Having never heard of this before, I actually read this half-way through and thought it was a highly satirical piece, so I went back here before realizing it's not. The animations were pretty smooth anyway, but my cursor would skip frames over the content.

Jare 13y ago

Looks like a nice 3D tweening DOM engine. Related (and recommended) visits for people interested in that sort of thing: - http://hakim.se/ http://hakim.se/ - http://desandro.github.io/3dtransforms/ http://desandro.github.io/3dtransforms/ - http://glmatrix.net/ http://glmatrix.net/ As for the article... the author confuses "rendering" with "layout": - "the primary part we need to rewrite is the part of the renderer that creates and multiplies the matrices" - "We use the CSS3 primitive -webkit-transform: matrix3d, which lets us compute the composite matrix and skip the browser's renderer" Which leads to some absurd claims: - "We were 14 times faster than compiled C in Chrome" Before reality kicks back in: - "rendering goes through DOM" - "Obviously, this isn't exactly the reinvention of the Web" And this is how you sell a DOM scenegraph engine to people with more money than common sense: - "a W3C standard that must be supported by all browsers" - "all text in Famo.us applications is searchable" - "enable rapid application development" - "smooth, high-functioning UI across all platforms" - "one of several enabling technologies" - "allow enterprise users to touch-interact with big data analytics" - "spark a new breed of gamified enterprise apps"

cateye 13y ago

Looks like an easy to implement performance optimization for the browser. Feels like "This belongs in the browser source code, not in the application".

CmonDev 13y ago

Started really good: "Facebook is right. HTML5 isn't ready,"; "The fact is, it's the wrong tool,"; "We're years away from this being fixed.". ...then went downhill: "...and in JavaScript."

koenbok 13y ago

My prototyping framework http://framerjs.com http://framerjs.com uses the exact same approach, divs positioned with only css matrix transforms. Great for high performance animations. I've sometimes thought about building a full fledged ui framework on top of it but it doesn't work (exactly the same) in all browsers. And I suspect offloading everything to the gpu by default will lead to other sorts of performance issues but I'll have to test this. Framer also includes spring physics and is fully integrated with Photoshop. You should check it out if you build prototypes.

koenbok 13y ago
Check these for examples of performance: http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/GoogleNow/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/GoogleNow/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/NewsFeed/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/NewsFeed/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/Intro/index.html http://www.framerjs.com/static/examples/Intro/index.html
- X4 13y ago
  People should try the editor out: http://www.framerjs.com/editor/ http://www.framerjs.com/editor/
tehwalrus 13y ago
nice - I have to use chrome though, no examples seem to work in Firefox. Is that expected? EDIT: ahh, the http://famo.us/ http://famo.us/ example doesn't work in FF either, it redirects to a boring splash page. I didn't notice the redirect the first time!
X4 13y ago
Thanks for posting this here! Highly appreciated and relevant. I'll check this out, but why a Facebook Group?? Can't you just open an IRC Channel? I would definitely join and contribute back. I don't have a Facebook account and won't use it and I'm still very social. hmm, I guess many hackers don't have a FB account and hate using the Facebook Oauth Login on 3rd party sites.
13y ago

probablyfiction 13y ago

I just ran this on the LG G2 in chrome via a wifi connection, and it was noticeably slower than the desktop version, which is to be expected because of the way JS runs on ARM processors. "These guys" didn't reinvent the web; they just have a good PR connection. If someone can invent a way to have buttery-smooth HTML5 performance on mobile devices, they'll have solved a significant hard problem. This solution? It's just a hack.

logotype 13y ago

jesus christ. we are really in a tech bubble again. this is just ridiculous. the end is near!

njharman 13y ago

Without reading the article I can unequivocally answer > Did these guys just reinvent the Web? with NO, you hyperbolic twit.

Samuel_Michon 13y ago
Well, that’s just Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. Also, it’s an article on a website called ‘javaworld’.
- iambateman 13y ago
  http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9wcxw5pU81rrf1eeo1_500.jpg http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9wcxw5pU81rrf1eeo1_500.jp... JAVAWORLD!!!!! lol.

fraction 13y ago

I'll just leave this here. Be warned, it's a VERY long article. http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/ http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...

wnevets 13y ago

Its quite terrible on this workstation, so I'm gonna have to go with a no. Also isnt offloading everything to the GPU a bad idea on mobile?

DougBTX 13y ago
Nope, it is a great idea on mobile, at least for iDevices and I imagine most Android devices. Especially with high dpi screens, leaving everything on the CPU is too slow.
- wnevets 13y ago
  I think in one of the web performance talks by Addy Osmani he said it should be used sparely at best. Maybe I'll look it up to check
  - DougBTX 13y ago
    I'm coming at this from a native development perspective, so there are large gaps in my knowledge. In particular, I've not done any benchmarks, so take what I say with a large grain of salt. Any real performance advice will come down to comparing alternative ways of implementing a particular effect, rather than a blanket, "do this." My understanding is that when a browser renders a page, the output bitmap is kept in a render buffer, which then gets composited with other buffers when being written out to the display. Filling the render buffers is slow (largely on the CPU), and compositing is fast (largely on the GPU). Using the 3D transform effects moves elements on the page into separate buffers. Performance would be improved by having fewer buffers, and by re-drawing buffers less frequently. Best case is to have a single buffer rendered once, I think that's what you're referring to by Addy's suggestion. But, if you're going to have elements moving relative to each other, it is faster to render them both once, then re-composit multiple times on the GPU, rather than re-render the whole scene on the CPU each time there is a change. That at least is what I mean by, "moving computation to the GPU."
Cthulhu_ 13y ago
I'm gonna go with 'no'; GPU's should be a lot faster (read: more specialized), and thus more power-efficient than general-purpose CPU's. In theory. Disregarding optimizations in general purpose CPU's in mobile.

deftnerd 13y ago

Would using "-webkit-transform: matrix3d" allow a way for websites to use a computers GPU for computation? I.e. stay on a page to calculate pi, work on SETI analysis, or mine for bitcoins?

X4 13y ago
yes and that has been done already. I posted somewhere on this page links to it, in case you're interested.

asaarinen 13y ago

Hard to imagine what they could be adding to CSS3 transforms - composite transforms can be done efficiently without calculating them manually anyway (by using the DOM tree as a "scene graph"). I experimented with this some time ago as well [1] But even bigger question than the performance is, what kind of 3D user interface would be more effective in conveying a message than a clean, regular 2D website that everybody feels familiar with. Curious to see if they will bring some UI design innovations here [1] https://github.com/asaarinen/spherical-map https://github.com/asaarinen/spherical-map

swamp40 13y ago

Their homepage is pretty cool. Imagine if every element box was a website or picture.

daddykotex 13y ago

Ur : Micheal Arrington

myers 13y ago

I found "The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story" illuminating after hearing about Facebook moving away from HTML5. http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...

Sagat 13y ago

Wow, this Lu guy is going to be the world's first trillionaire, at only 21 years old. Kudos to him for inventing the Internet.