Talks to Watch

Servo Architecture: Safety and Performance

12K views · Jan 19, 2017 · 45:05 · 3 HN recommenders · 3 mentions · discussed 2017

Jack Moffitt presents the architecture of Servo, Mozilla's experimental browser engine written in Rust, focusing on parallelism across cores, GPUs and SIMD and the safety properties gained from Rust.

Why Hacker News points people here: HN recommends it as an exciting look at how a browser can be rebuilt for performance and safety, including the WebRender ideas that fed into Firefox Quantum.

“This video is one of the most exciting I have seen with regards to web browser performance, and it's Mozilla”HN comment, 2017

What Hacker News said 3

Strongly recommendsyoasif_Jan 2017

“This video is one of the most exciting I have seen with regards to web browser performance, and it's Mozilla”

Exciting talk on web browser performance from Mozilla.

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There seem to be a lot of people that are saying "oh, without XUL based extensions, Firefox is just a (worse) Chrome clone, so I might as well just use Chrome." I think what they might be missing is that Mozilla's conclusion is a lot like the people seem to be thinking here -- even though Chrome doesn't have the fancy extensions that are possible in Firefox, many many more people are using Chrome than Firefox, because they see it as a better Firefox. Clearly, that has something to do with either security or performance, where Firefox has a perceived lag. Mozilla is actively working to improve performance, and you may not want to switch to Chrome after all, because Chrome may instead be the poor man's Firefox (I personally think this is already the case, simply because with my 679 open tabs, Chrome would simply kill itself [44 loaded]). This video is one of the most exciting I have seen with regards to web browser performance, and it's Mozilla: this video More info on what this means for Firefox: link TL;DR: What if even with the missing XUL extensions, you wouldn't want to switch to Chrome, because Firefox was just plain faster?

in “I cannot continue working on my add-ons” · view on HN
RecommendsNiLSPACEApr 2017

“Here is another great talk”

Great talk including a bit on Quantum around 25:30.

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If you have the time there is a nice talk about WebRender: link Here is another great talk: this video At ~25:30 he'll also talk a bit about Quantum. In a nutshell WebRender is used to send a web page to the GPU which will paint all divs, borders, shadows, images etc. Currently WebRender is the only component I'm aware of that is inside Firefox Nightly. It's still behind a config though.

in “Mozilla and Microsoft are rebuilding their browsers’ foundations” · view on HN
RecommendslkbmOct 2017

“I also recommend Metajack's talk on WebRender in Servo”

Metajack's talk on WebRender in Servo.

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This is a great explanation. I also recommend Metajack's talk on WebRender in Servo: this video Also go read everything else Lin Clark has done. They're pretty great.

in “The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank” · view on HN