Mozilla Developer Talks Up WGPU As Their WebGPU Implementation In Rust

[V1tol]

I've hardly ever seen a Mac Firefox user in the wild.

You can count me. I use it since version 1.0 (not counting Netscape Navigator), I love it for many reasons, but the main one - I just use lot's of different computers and devices - and everywhere Firefox rocks.

Safari is for Apples only, Chrome is crap and other browsers don't exist (since usually they are Chromium-based). Don't care about bench performance since I use sites and not doing computing.

[shmerl]

As developers explained, WebGPU is not limited to the browser. In fact, it's viewed as the high level API that complements Vulkan, that Khronos said was missing in their initial effort. And it's already cross platform through gfx-rs.

I.e. OpenGL needed a modern well designed replacement that's still high level. That's WebGPU. When low level is necessary, Vulkan is available.

The name in this sense is really not the best (something like OpenGPU would have been much better), but it got stuck now.

[RahulSundaram]

Smaller than macOS? Pretty much every desktop-focused Linux distribution defaults to Firefox (some rebrand it, many disable telemetry)

Yes, Linux on desktop usage is less than Mac OS usage. The soft forks and disabling of telemetry makes that situation worse from upstream tracking perspective. Also Mac OS is a single platform. Linux on desktop really isn't

[programmerjake]

The name [WebGPU] in this sense is really not the best (something like OpenGPU would have been much better), but it got stuck now.

Just like WebAssembly is useful for way more than just the web.

[lu_tze]

Yes, Linux on desktop usage is less than Mac OS usage. The soft forks and disabling of telemetry makes that situation worse from upstream tracking perspective. Also Mac OS is a single platform. Linux on desktop really isn't

That's something entirely different. Awesomeness was talking about share of Firefox users on macOS vs share of Firefox users on Linux, not the market shares of the respective systems. Mac users use mostly Chrome or Safari, but not Firefox, so macOS share of desktop systems is irrelevant for Firefox. Yet they are pandered to.

The thing is, that Mozilla supports Windows because they have to (most users are there), macOS because it is cool for Mozilla developers to get company issued Macbooks and then go to conferences with them. Linux is the red-headed stepchild and the support is left for Redhat and SuSE.

[RahulSundaram]

That's something entirely different. Awesomeness was talking about share of Firefox users on macOS vs share of Firefox users on Linux, not the market shares of the respective systems. Mac users use mostly Chrome or Safari, but not Firefox, so macOS share of desktop systems is irrelevant for Firefox. Yet they are pandered to.

The thing is, that Mozilla supports Windows because they have to (most users are there), macOS because it is cool for Mozilla developers to get company issued Macbooks and then go to conferences with them. Linux is the red-headed stepchild and the support is left for Redhat and SuSE.

My response was primarily about Firefox usage on Mac OS vs Linux. Firefox on Mac has more users according to their telemetry data. The market share in Linux is splintered by soft forks and users/distributions that disable telemetry. No telemetry = no visibility

[onicsis]

Linux and Linux users are considered second class citizens

[onicsis]

My response was primarily about Firefox usage on Mac OS vs Linux. Firefox on Mac has more users according to their telemetry data. The market share in Linux is splintered by soft forks and users/distributions that disable telemetry. No telemetry = no visibility

But default user agent for Firefox on Linux, Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0, useful for analyses of browsers usage market share of web.

[Awesomeness]

My response was primarily about Firefox usage on Mac OS vs Linux. Firefox on Mac has more users according to their telemetry data. The market share in Linux is splintered by soft forks and users/distributions that disable telemetry. No telemetry = no visibility

Funny how Mozilla claims to respect privacy but as soon as user tracking is disabled, these users no longer count.

So yeah, I repeat my stance: Linux distributions should not default to Firefox. Then the distributors will also contribute less to Firefox and concentrate on their defaults. If Mozilla doesn't care about Linux, Mozilla shouldn't get any contributions from Linux distributors/users. Maybe they'll learn then who their loyal users were.

[RahulSundaram]

But default user agent for Firefox on Linux, Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0, useful for analyses of browsers usage market share of web.

That user agent is not reported to Mozilla unless you enable telemetry