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.
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.
> "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.
You have no idea what does it cost to have 60fps scrolling of the non-trival view.
Update: after watching this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu8q-oISbas I do not understand how anyone can call UI responsive and maintain a straight face. Or I do not know what are you comparing it to. Just take a look how the contacts app works :(
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.
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.
Yeah, I'd be curious to see that too. However, end users don't usually care about hardware specs directly, they care about the end experience. And if you're pushing for a new platform right now, you have to really try and build an ecosystem around it as soon as possible by earning enough fans and developers to keep the platform sustainable. And as developers, I know we like to think we're rather objective about a technology's 'true' merits, but UX impacts our decisions too. So if Ubuntu ships their OS on hardware that will provide a better experience than any FFOS phone out there, Imma place my bets on the OS that shipped with the better overall UX out the gate (even if it's not as cheap initially). I mean, it's not like we didn't already see this partially play out with WebOS. Even Windows phones are struggling and they seem to have a really nice UX...
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).
Personally I think Linux on the desktop is in a far worse shape than it was 12 years ago. Sure, Linux works much better on laptops then it used to, but what good is that since the software provided by distributions is less stable and of a lower quality then it was 12 years ago. It's all anecdotal evidence, but I've had far more success 10 years ago introducing Linux to non-so-technical users, previously exposed only to Windows 95/98, by using a default Gnome/KDE environment then I'm having now introducing them to recent versions of Unity/KDE/Gnome.
Linux became worse when the commercial alternatives only got better.
Is Ubuntu going in a direction that aligns with the tastes/needs of anybody?
After the dumbing down of the past few releases, it isn't really any easier for non-technical people to install and use.
The dumbing down has also driven away a lot of the more technically-inclined users. Unity makes it damn near impossible to get any sort of real work done.
The majority of kids and teens, along with the elderly, could not care any less about it.
It's a lot like Firefox. Yeah, it's still around, but without any real focus. At some point, the stragglers who are still using it will move on to something else, and there's nobody new coming to replace them.
No. Ubuntu 12.10 breaks a great many things. And I don't mean "this doesn't work like it used to!"-broke. I mean, "this doesn't work! It used to!"
see: wifi; hdmi out; webcam.
I hate Unity 3D but whatever, that's the direction they're going. I don't care about the search "lenses". But just breaking shit from 12.04 to 12.10 is ridiculous. Whoever/whatever is in charge of Canonical needs to be fired. They're ruining the reputation of the brand, not to mention making many consumers absolutely dread the idea of new releases.
> 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.
Perhaps the Gnome developers (and you?) don't realise that most of their (Gnome 2) users prefer to have this modicum of customisation available, as it has been in most desktop environments for many years now, over some nebulous concept of a 'solid user experience'.
I know, I know, I'm somehow objectively wrong for wanting this, which is fine if that's what you want to think. Like many others I left for XFCE a long time ago.
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.
It's not a bad thing that Gnome is trying to do new stuff, it's not a bad thing (in itself) that they're taking the direction they're taking.
The bad thing about it is the attitude, that users are being told they're wrong (constantly) and that the comparatively well-loved GNOME 2 was effectively declared dead and deprecated from day 1, instead of being respectfully handed off to the community or a maintenance team. Hell, G3 almost ought to have been called something else, and run separately. It's not the same thing.
And for the javascript customisation - some of the comments in the linked article seem to hint that the GNOME guys would like to ditch that too. It undermines the consistency of look and feel they're trying to achieve.
You should always provide a great default solution and let the user customize it if he wants to. Once there is ANY user customization, the entire user experience changes. If you want the UX to be ALWAYS the same, you can't let people change stuff.
The problem is, this is contrary to everything done before. I for instance, use Growl on OSX and customized it to my needs. The UX is the best one for me! It's not because Growl devs predicted that. They just let me CHOOSE after providing a great UX already by default.
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.
> 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.
If Gnome doesn't have the resources to do proper UX design, the answer is NOT to force incomplete/broken UX on users. It's to leave options open for others to fix the UX as needed.
Design is about making choices, but if you don't have the resources to find/make the best choice at least allow the end user to make the choice they prefer instead.
What I find amusing though, is that even OSX allows more customization than Unity/Gnome. In OSX I can turn off backlight dimming on battery, I can move the dock to different sides of the screen (essential for multi-monitor setups), and I can also tweak other things via plists. There is also more than one screensaver.
Your goal should never be to innovate, it should be to improve. Yes, you improve by innovating but you should remember the goal is to improve, not make something new for new's sake.
Also it is no wonder they are understaffed, they are alienating their user base which is from where they get their developers...
