jgraham

15 ms·

91.
by jgraham 8y ago
I really don't think that mercurial is very good at hiding the internals. Consider a common operation; asking for the commit history. If you type `hg log` you get something very close to a prettified view of the internal datastructure
92.
by jgraham 8y ago
Pretty sure it must be percentage of the 1997 value, otherwise it's hard to understand how the scale can accomodate both house prices and population in a single set of units.
93.
by jgraham 8y ago
People might also be interested in the Guardian article [1], which concentrated on the precipitous decline of Puffin numbers in Shetland. Compared to places where the drop has not been so steep, it seems that the birds are having to travel
94.
by jgraham 8y ago
So rather than just blaming authors for their choices, it seems more worthwhile to look at the structural issues that lead people to make certain choices. The Free Software movement was originally aimed mostly at personal freedom; the freed
95.
by jgraham 8y ago
> Just another BDFL, that's it. I think a lesson to take from this is that the concept of a "BDFL" doesn't really stand up. Putting an individual in charge dramatically increases the chances that they will suffer some
96.
by jgraham 8y ago
It is true that very occasionally features are removed from the web platform. It is also true that the incentive structures that exist hugely favour not removing features or otherwise breaking existing content. For a feature to be removed t
97.
by jgraham 9y ago
Talking about "the issue" is a misunderstanding of how performance of complex software works. Overall performance is the result of the entire codebase, and there can be a varieety of ways that performance problems can manifest for
98.
It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech(wired.com)
33 points by jgraham 9y ago|22 comments
99.
by jgraham 9y ago
It seems to me to be overly simplisitc to take a specific event and say "that's the decisive moment where it all went wrong". Technically Presto had some unique features; for example the inturruptable script engine allowed th
100.
by jgraham 9y ago
(I worked at Opera during the WebKit/Chromium transition and work at Mozilla now. But in both cases I'm just a normal individal-contributor type employee with no special insight into strategy or decision making). There are always
101.
by jgraham 9y ago
There has been a lot of progress recently on the web-platform-tests project [1]. This is a cross-vendor effort to improve interoperability on the web platform through testing. Historically the process for building web-platform features has
102.
by jgraham 9y ago
I'm pretty sure that SqlAlchemy has caused more grief and frustration than any other single library. After all if I didn't know about the excellence of SqlAlchemy, maybe I wouldn't get so cross when I have to do anything non-
103.
by jgraham 9y ago
FWIW my last project was in Rust, and the current one is in Python (with which I have more experience), mostly due to Python having some useful libraries for what is mostly an exercise in gluing together different external systems. Despite
104.
by jgraham 9y ago
That's mostly a horrible accident though. In retrospect what we should have done is released version 1.0 about 7 years ago when the parser was more or less fully compliant with the spec at the time and just been prepared to bump the ve
105.
by jgraham 9y ago
Presto (the old Opera engine) had a mode called "delayed script execution" which would speculate even harder than the gecko/servo approach. As I understand it — which might well be incorrectly — it would continue treebuilding
106.
by jgraham 9y ago
Unfortunately the reality is that a double digit percentage of all sites rely on document.write [1]. Whilst it's true that a lot of usage is advertising, it's also used for functionality in sites like Google Docs. Perhaps with a l
107.
by jgraham 9y ago
There seems to be a certain amount of confusion on this thread, so just to be sure that it's clear, Selenium itself will continue to work with future releases of Firefox. This means that existing WebDriver-based browser automation rema
108.
by jgraham 9y ago
FWIW Mac jobs are also often capacity-limited on Mozilla infrastructure. It's not unusual to have thousands of jobs waiting on hundreds of machines, which leads to multi-hour queues at peak times. Fundamentally the problem with CI test
109.
by jgraham 9y ago
Well, yes, a low level protocol is going to have at least the same features as a higher level protocol implemented in terms of it. However I think you should mention the significant disadvantages of using a nonstandard API: * Doesn't g
110.
by jgraham 9y ago
Oh, apparently there's already a flag you can pass to the binary to enable headless mode, and geckodriver already supports setting those, so adding a separate option seems unnecessary. I thought it was just an environment variable.
111.
by jgraham 9y ago
Would people find it helpful if I add a `headless` capability to `moz:firefoxOptions` in geckodriver so that passing in `{capabilities: {alwaysMatch: {moz:firefoxOptions:{headless: true}}}}` when starting a session will start the browser in
112.
by jgraham 9y ago
[I was the original author of much of html5lib] Yes, http://speed.pypy.org/comparison/ has html5lib parsing (an old, static copy of) the HTML5 spec as a benchmark. It's about 3x faster than CPython, which is to sa
113.
by jgraham 9y ago
This is true and they ought to have retracted that. However if you apply the principle that you should boycott — at least least refuse to pay for — all publications that have ever published a misleading article on an important topic, then y
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by jgraham 10y ago
I think this slightly understates the "business development" problems with developing a new OS, and a mobile OS in particular. It turns out that there are certain apps that, if they are not available on your platform, are immediat
115.
by jgraham 10y ago
Well a key property of Selenium is that it's cross-browser. Whilst it's nice to imagine that the web is in a position where running all your tests in some version of Blink means that your site will work on Firefox/Edge/S
116.
by jgraham 10y ago
To understand the constrains we have here, a ballpark figure is that we run a million tests per commit across all platforms (this is based on counting test files, so doesn't account for the fact that some files can contain thousands of
117.
by jgraham 10y ago
I would be astonished if Servo is usable as a mass-market web browser in 12 months. Writing a rendering engine is hard because there is quarter of a century of legacy to deal with. By the metric of "can I use this for 100% of my brow
118.
by jgraham 10y ago
Unfortunately the new title seems to be misleading in a different way. There is no "project to replace gecko with servo". There is a project to advance gecko so it is state of the art in browser engines. Much of the current state
119.
by jgraham 10y ago
But they aren't landing patches on "stable", but on the upstream development branch (i.e. mozilla-inbound/central). Since it seems more reasonable to view tor browser as a release branch of firefox than as a development
120.
by jgraham 10y ago
That is very unclear. Some studies suggest it isn't, but a recent metastudy reached very different conclusions [1]: > Bicycle helmet use was associated with reduced odds of head injury, serious head injury, facial injury and fatal h

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