Performance Articles
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Faster Canvas Pixel Manipulation with Typed Arrays
Edit: See the section about Endiannes. Typed Arrays can significantly increase the pixel manipulation performance of your HTML5 2D canvas Web apps. This is of particular importance to developers looking to use HTML5 for making browser-based games. This is a guest post by Andrew J. Baker. Andrew is a professional software engineer currently working for […]
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What makes WebAssembly fast?
Programming with WebAssembly or JavaScript is not an either/or choice. So developers don’t need to choose between WebAssembly and JavaScript. However, we do expect that developers will swap out parts of their JavaScript code for WebAssembly. Fifth in a series about WebAssembly.
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Where is WebAssembly now and what’s next?
On February 28, the four major browsers announced their consensus that the MVP of WebAssembly is complete. Even in the initial release, WebAssembly will be fast. But it should get even faster in the future, through a combination of fixes and new features. Sixth in a series about WebAssembly.
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New Performance Tools in Firefox Developer Edition 40
Today Mozilla is pleased to announce the availability of Firefox Developer Edition 40 (DE 40) featuring all-new performance tools! In this post we will cover some of DE 40’s new developer tools, fixes, and improvements made to existing tools. In addition, a couple of videos showcase some of these features. Note: Many of the new […]
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Upgrade your graphics drivers for best results with Firefox 4
Benoit Jacob from the platform engineering team has a blog post on how to best take advantage of hardware acceleration and WebGL in Firefox 4, namely: Upgrade your graphics drivers! Firefox 4 automatically disables the hardware acceleration and WebGL features if the graphics driver on your system has bugs that cause Firefox to crash. You […]
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Smoother scrolling in Firefox 46 with APZ
Have you ever been on Facebook or Twitter, merrily scrolling down the page, when all of a sudden, the browser appears to freeze? For several long seconds it just hangs there, and you’re not sure if it’s going to crash or not. Then, finally, something gives way, and the page jumps to catch up to […]
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The Baseline Interpreter: a faster JS interpreter in Firefox 70
Modern web applications load and execute a lot more JavaScript code than they did just a few years ago. While JIT (just-in-time) compilers have been very successful in making JavaScript performant, we needed a better solution. We’ve added a new, generated JavaScript bytecode interpreter to the JavaScript engine in Firefox 70. Instead of writing a new interpreter from scratch, we found a way to do this by sharing most code with our existing Baseline JIT. Meet the new Baseline Interpreter.
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A crash course in just-in-time (JIT) compilers
This is the second part in a series on WebAssembly and what makes it fast. If you haven’t read the others, we recommend starting from the beginning. JavaScript started out slow, but then got faster thanks to something called the JIT. This article is about how the JIT works.
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Generational Garbage Collection in Firefox
Generational garbage collection (GGC) has now been enabled in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine in Firefox 32. GGC is a performance optimization only, and should have no observable effects on script behavior. So what is it? What does it do? GGC is a way for the JavaScript engine to collect short-lived objects faster. Say you have […]
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Doom on the Web
Update: We had a doubt whether this port of the Open Source Doom respected its term of use. We decided to remove it from our Website before taking an informed and definitive decision. This is a guest post written by Alon Zakai. Alon is one of the Firefox Mobile developers, and in his spare time […]
