OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Internet

Curious what the problem is making new firefox versions.

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Martin Iturbide:
FYI: There was some past discussion here - "Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser  (2017-11-17)".  Wow... it was three years ago.

Regards

Dave Yeo:

--- Quote from: JTC on December 19, 2020, 08:53:46 pm ---Are there any compile-time optimizations that could help further reduce the size of the binaries ?  Or compile options to target multi-core chips with instructions that
can further reduce the execution path ??

--- End quote ---

-Os for a smaller optimized binary. Experimenting with Firefox (I believe there is a copy at Bitbucket) it wasn't that much smaller and slightly slower.
The thing with building on a multicore machine is that make can do more jobs by forking. I usually use -j5 (-j3 seems the most that works for TB) so that at times there are 5 make.exe's compiling different subdirectories on my 4 core machine, the extra one is for when one is blocked waiting for the HD. Nice to have all 4 cores running at 100% much of the time. Of course there are bottlenecks where one or more make's has to wait for a dependency to finish.
Bitwise was running into the situation where some object files were using 2GB to compile so had to revert to -j2 or -j1 to avoid the system hanging, leading to long compile times.

The compiler doesn't really seem to have options for multi-core. I did try tuning my latest for Core2 but whether it made a difference is hard to tell. I believe there are libraries that help for multi-core but basically just using more threads is key. While Mozilla uses threads, most of it runs on thread 1.
There's also having each tab as its own process, an option with QT and Firefox. Firefox is broken for doing it in our port and there are memory problems again with having a process per tab besides harder to make work (they have to communicate). Advantage is having a single tab crash instead of the whole browser. I expect that the QT browser will have that disabled, especially at first.

Roderick Klein:

--- Quote from: Martin Iturbide on December 19, 2020, 09:04:19 pm ---FYI: There was some past discussion here - "Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser  (2017-11-17)".  Wow... it was three years ago.

Regards

--- End quote ---

It took also much longer as the code is more modern.
It required work on GCC 9.2 compiler and custom code in LIBCX and a lot of other DLL's added/updated .

Roderick

David Kiley:

--- Quote from: Dave Yeo on December 19, 2020, 04:56:47 pm ---It is currently barely capable of being built, carefully.

--- End quote ---

Yeah I know it's still under development just curious if it would solve the memory issue if/when it gets functional or that is just something fundamental.

Dave Yeo:

--- Quote from: David Kiley on December 20, 2020, 07:05:49 am ---
--- Quote from: Dave Yeo on December 19, 2020, 04:56:47 pm ---It is currently barely capable of being built, carefully.

--- End quote ---

Yeah I know it's still under development just curious if it would solve the memory issue if/when it gets functional or that is just something fundamental.

--- End quote ---

Well browsers are just using more and more memory. I'd assume that it'll keep working for quite a while, especially if the users are careful not to have a hundred tabs open but fundamentally memory usage keeps increasing and we have a limited amount.
It's weird, I started using OS/2 v3 on a 4MB machine and was so happy when I got 8 MB's. Now with 12 GB's of memory, I worry more about memory. Before it was excessive swapping, now it is crashing.

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