nical

Yeah that's a wordpress blog quickly put together outside of mozilla's official blogging infrastructure. There was no really good reason to do that, it was just laziness on our end.

Firefox + WebRender works great in Renderdoc, either capturing the D3D11 commands generated by ANGLE or forcing opengl. The D3D11 commands and shaders correlate pretty well with the GL commands emmitted by WebRender anyway. This tool is absolutely fantastic.

Bugs are usually quickly fixed once someone on the graphics team manages to reproduce them (in a renderdoc capture). Unfortunately nobody has managed to reproduce it yet even though the issue has been in the team's radar for a while.

If you know that the result will not change over frames, blitting a cached image will always be faster than re-rendering. It's not necessarily a need, just an improvement. That said pathfinder is fast enough already that it can deal with rendering interesting workloads every frames at 60fps, and will keep getting better at it, I think that there is room for improvement in the tiling phase.

I find some of your comments very aggressive. Yet you are lecturing people about being condescending. I honestly much prefer pcwalton's tone which I find much less condescending, interestingly.

Pointing at code can be indeed useful, but it looks to me like you are comparing apple to oranges: Rust is not at 1.0 yet, so comparing code that isn't yet production-ready with Go or whatever technology that is already mature is not all that useful.

Saying that, in it's current state, Rust is not a good choice for production code is acceptable and fairly obvious. Extrapolating to the point of saying that it is doomed seems like quite an exaggeration to me, and not respectful of the work people are putting into this project.

I do have ideas. I also have a decent knowledge about how Gecko's graphics engine works internally. And again, the expensive operations (actual image rendering, layout computation, compositing, etc.) all happen in the platform, that is in "native" C++ code. What it costs to to have a good scrolling experience is to write your app in a way that doesn't cause the engine to over-invalidate and compute reflows all the time. Or it costs beefier hardware, but then this is not part of the debate of web vs native.

At some point we will really need be careful when talking about "native performances". FirefoxOS is written in JS on top of Gecko which is as "native" as it can be. if an app's UI is well written, all of the computationally expensive stuff happens in gecko. A good way to see that it is not about being native it is to compare Android and FirefoxOS on the exact same phone. "native performances" still makes sense if you are talking about building physics engines or whatever kind of heavy simulations, but not for 90% percent of the smartphone apps today.

Indeed, when comparing ubuntu's mobile os running on a galaxy nexus with firefox os running on very cheap hardware, you should expect a difference. I would be interested in seing how ubuntu mobile runs on a 69 euro phone.

I would rather say that it is sad to see Ubuntu going in a direction that doesn't align with your tastes/needs. I personally think Ubuntu is better today than ever before (for the most part).

I see your point and it is perfectly valid. I am happy that GNOME tries come up with something new since there are still some good DEs like XFCE which propose a solid and classic user experience. Choice is there for everyone to be happy. I think GNOME shell's extension mechanism actually provides developers with more customization possibilities than GNOME 2 did, only it is javascript, therefore not accessible to everyone, and not as easy and straightforward as the options we used to have 2 years ago.

> I like to put my toolbars and menus in the place I want to have them.

Perhaps you don't realize the amount of work it represents to build a consistent and solid user experience while officially supporting letting the user choose where to place its notifications, toolbars, etc, and never break this customizability afterwards.

I also believe that limiting customization is important. Any Firefox dev can tell how terribly hard it is to improve Firefox without breaking addons. GNOME does not have the man power of Mozilla, let alone Apple. They want to create great things by implementing them one at a time. that's the open-source way, and most free softwares are built like that. I feel the comparison with Apple is somewhat unfair, because GNOME does not have enough developers to release a complete product at every release (or should they just work in the dark and not release anything for the next 2 years?). Ubuntu is in a similar same situation, and they do improve over time. So they do it one thing at a time and try to involve as much the community as they can. If I had to direct such a project with the resources they have, I don't know that I would have made better choices. Also, my feeling about the GNOME UX, is that decisions come from UX people, and that it is the very reason it enrages us developers: we have different ways to approach interacting with a computer, we are very picky about workflows, and we tend to reject innovation if it makes us change our habits. And that's where I agree with you about leaving their current audience frustrated: GNOME wants to reach out to "normal users", but its user base is mostly hackers. It is hard to innovate in the UX space when your users have their workflows and interaction patterns burnt into their brains and fingers. I believe that someone who never touched a computer before would much prefer the GNOME UX over a more traditional desktop environments.