Firefox 79 Is Ready To Ship With Safeguard On "_blank" Links, More Wayland VA-API Work

[SilverBird775]

Now, there is two ways to enforce the Webrender on outdated hardware in windows:

"webgl.angle.force-warp" and the other one is "gfx.webrender.software"

Nice! It's not yet obvious to me how a new build-in software renderer is any better then a fully emulated device, so the accelerated layers (Advanced Layers/OpenGL, when they work by chance) engine remain a better alternative to the above software emulation methods. Not tested this new renderer on linux yet but expecting the same weak results.

[bug77]

Yeah, that is true. I loved reading the Rust manual, it was full of aha-moments and I found it interesting and insightful what approaches and design decisions they had taken. But using it has been tough for my puny little brain. It is a good, robust language but it requires an intelligent programmer to code for it. I like Python because its easy to use even for dumb people like me.

I don't think it's about how smart we are. Higher level languages simply hide a lot of the nitty-gritty details behind various facades and expose more readily usable constructs. They're inherently easier to pick up. C/C++ or Rust don't and thus they have a steeper learning curve. It also depends on what area of programming you like more. And what pays the bills

[ssokolow]

For me it makes sense to have each module in a separate file like all the other programming languages. Rust already have public/private visibility through the pub keyword on structs, fields inside structs and functions.

Except that the presence or absence of the pub keyword only applies to stuff outside the current module. To use C++ terminology, it's as if everything in the module is declared friend to everything else.

Part of Rust's design philosophy is to avoid gratuitously becoming dependant on an IDE for productive coding like Java is, and that discourages becoming too reliant on a project navigator to hop around in a forest of tiny files.

[uid313]

That's why I like learning new languages: for those aha! moments. Even if I don't become very productive, simply seeing things from a different point of view makes me a better programmer.

Yeah, that is true. I loved reading the Rust manual, it was full of aha-moments and I found it interesting and insightful what approaches and design decisions they had taken. But using it has been tough for my puny little brain. It is a good, robust language but it requires an intelligent programmer to code for it. I like Python because its easy to use even for dumb people like me.

[down1]

How well is VA-API working? Any tests on Wayland and X11?

I'm running on wayland mode with VA-API, in 78 it was working fine, now it is flashing green frames sometimes.

[bug77]

Yeah, it really does hit like a truck. I've read the manual and I think it is great, it has been pleasant to read it, and I've got many of the "aha!" moments reading it, where I feel like I understand why it does something a certain way, and it makes sense. I think I get it, but then when I try to code it hits me like a truck.

For me it is very hard to be productive in it, I cannot even manage to do the simplest of things, and it just makes me appreciate Python more; it is so simple and it just works. Not fair to compare a low-level compiled language to a high-level interpreted language, but still. C and Rust are so tough on my puny little brain.

That's why I like learning new languages: for those aha! moments. Even if I don't become very productive, simply seeing things from a different point of view makes me a better programmer.

[uid313]

Yeah, I'm not that good with Rust either, but that is the takeaway I've heard from others, too: first it hits you like a truck, then it hits you like a truck some more and eventually, if you haven't given up, you start to understand why stuff is being done the way it is done and it was your old ways of programming (unsafely) that stood in your way all along. Kind of like how when you grasp functional programming you start having wtf moments when looking at oop code

Yeah, it really does hit like a truck. I've read the manual and I think it is great, it has been pleasant to read it, and I've got many of the "aha!" moments reading it, where I feel like I understand why it does something a certain way, and it makes sense. I think I get it, but then when I try to code it hits me like a truck.

For me it is very hard to be productive in it, I cannot even manage to do the simplest of things, and it just makes me appreciate Python more; it is so simple and it just works. Not fair to compare a low-level compiled language to a high-level interpreted language, but still. C and Rust are so tough on my puny little brain.

Modules are the unit of isolation for Rust's public/private access/visibility declarations, so it's simpler and more consistent to allow inline modules than to have a whole separate construct which, to allow fine-grained control over visibility, basically does the same thing but isn't a module.

For me it makes sense to have each module in a separate file like all the other programming languages. Rust already have public/private visibility through the pub keyword on structs, fields inside structs and functions.

[curfew]

Having upgraded to Firefox 79, I did not notice any performance improvement WRT video playback. CPU usage is still very high -- I am tempted to say that it is in fact a little bit higher now.

Playback got more buggy: sometimes there are green frames in the video and sometimes it also seems to freeze for a couple seconds. Video thumbnails on some websites are still broken (do not work at all) so at least that one was not fixed either.

[ssokolow]

That said, I do think I would like the module system more if it each module was in a separate file and it was not possible to declare inline modules and inline nested modules. I kind of like it when each module is one file, and each directory is a level in the namespace, and I do like it when there is one way to do something and not many different ways to do the same things.

Modules are the unit of isolation for Rust's public/private access/visibility declarations, so it's simpler and more consistent to allow inline modules than to have a whole separate construct which, to allow fine-grained control over visibility, basically does the same thing but isn't a module.

[ssokolow]

Thank you for the marketing speak, now getting back to reality, you realize it is exactly this Rust code in Firefox, the project the initiated and Rust was written for, does not compile? One would expect that at least the latest version of these flagship project are written in a way to be compatible and work together.

For a long time, Firefox pinned a specific nightly version of Rust in their builds (which they'd update periodically) because they didn't want to wait for various language features to be stabilized. They're not the best example you an choose for code written to Just Work™ on future compiler versions.