emscripten VS uBlock

Browsers limit the ability for these platforms to use raw sockets, there simply is no API for it. The best that can be done /today/ is to use WebSockets, which are not the same thing any can't be used for HTTP requests without the server expecting a WebSocket connection:

https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/5196#is...

Only half true. Emscripten implements the SDL 1.2 (and also SDL_mixer 1.2) API in Javascript here: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/src/.... On the other hand SDL 2 (and SDL_mixer 2) are proper ports (which you linked to).

So there's quite a size penalty to using SDL 2 rather than SDL 1.2.

Playing with low-level stuff is fun, but I won't use it anywhere in productionable code. Well, at least without considerable experience and understanding of the Emscripten code base.

Thank you for your comment!

WASM gave Figma a lot of speed by default for a lot of perf-sensitive code like rendering, layouts, applying styles and materializing component instances, our GUI code is mostly React and CSS.

WASM engine performance has not been a problem for us, instead we are constantly looking forward improvements in the devex department: debugging, profiling and modularization.

One of the largest challenges of the platform we face today is the heap size limit. While Chrome supports up to 4GB today, that's not yet the case for all browsers. And even with that, we are still discovering bugs in the toolchain (see this recent issue filed by one of our engineers) https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/20137

The challenge of the perf-testing at scale in our company is helping developers to detect perf regressions when they don't expect them - accidental algorithmic errors, misused caches, over-rendering React components, dangerously inefficient CSS directives, etc.

https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/tree/main/recipe...

Re: emscripten fs implementations: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/15041#i... https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/315

Moving onto the project, let’s first install Emscripten from their git repository. Emscripten will compile C into Wasm code. An important note is that I will be using Mac OS for this project. If you want to follow along using Windows, use this link. To Begin, open your terminal and clone down Emscripten with:

I got pointed to this one here: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/15487

If you want to do it, go to town. This is the only reference I could find to anybody targeting wasm with i2pd frankly I really hope the person inquiring in the issue is also you.

Right, and if that momentum is going to last 20 years, then that's going to dictate what's a good strategic decision and what isn't for the next 20 years. Thanks for letting me know what the good options might be when my infant daughter is halfway through college, that doesn't help me save for it in the meantime.

Prior familiarity is a very good reason to pick an option for a greenfield project if you're operating on any type of serious budget (time or money), especially if you need to hire others to help out. There's also the annoying reality that most libraries for new/up-and-coming languages are simply inadequate, despite whatever claims they make.

For instance, one of my personal side projects involves getting familiar with WebAssembly (note: not on a serious budget), and I'm using emscripten to transcode because that's what the internet seemed to think was the closest thing to a standard toolkit. I found a bug simply by combining two pieces of example code from Emscripten's own documentation (you'll note I'm transcoding from c++ due to prior familiarity): https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/17143

This is not a dig on emscripten per se, merely pointing out that it's probably not mature enough for the stress of corporate-scale development, where you encounter all sorts of crazy edge cases well beyond the sample code. Java over the years has obtained that level of maturity. The edge cases are largely solved or at least known, and there's an army of experts and consultants ready to help if there's a problem. When time is money, that matters. It determines the risk profile of any project, greenfield or otherwise.

Java's momentum hasn't stopped, at best it's simply slowing. And at this rate it'll take decades to come to a stop, and decades more to recede to any meaningful degree. I'll also point out that C is very much alive and well in the embedded world. Plenty of job postings looking for C experience explicitly.

Check out uBlock Origin's per site switches [1]

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

If ads, in particular on YouTube, are the problem, anything Chromium-based is probably only going to get worse and worse (see [1] and [2]). So that basically leaves you with Firefox and Safari.

I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Or if on mobile, it is well worth it to look up adblock options for the browser you use.

What are the compelling advantages of Chrome nowadays?

Chrome is working to limit the capabilities of ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...

Whereas a compelling advantage of Firefox is that uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Advertising networks have often been vectors for malware. Using an ad blocker is an important security measure. Even the FBI recommends ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221?=8324278624

> It allows for 30,000 dynamic rules

That is not what we mean by dynamic filters. From https://developer.chrome.com/blog/improvements-to-content-fi...

> However, to support more frequent updates and user-defined rules, extensions can add rules dynamically too, without their developers having to upload a new version of the extension to the Chrome Web Store.

What Chrome is talking about is the ability to specify rules at runtime. What critics of Manifest V3 are talking about is not the ability to dynamically add rules (although that can be an issue), it is the ability to add dynamic rules -- ie rules that analyze and rewrite requests in the style of the blockingWebRequest permission.

It's a little deceptive to claim that the concerns here are outdated and to point to vague terminology that sounds like it's correcting the problem, but on actual inspection turns out to be entirely separate functionality from what the GP was talking about.

> Giving this ability to extensions can slow down the browser for the user. These ads can still be blocked through other means.

This is the debate; most of the adblocking community disagrees with this assertion. uBO maintains a list of some common features that are already not possible to support in Chrome ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... ) and has written about features that are not able to be supported via Chrome's current V3 API ( https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... ). Of particular note are filtering for large media elements (I use this a lot on mobile Firefox, it's great for reducing page size), and top-level filtering of domains/fonts.

> "Its happened before"

> That's not an argument

It's a subheading to "2. Browser engine monopoly". The subsection's purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it's something to be avoided.

> in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt

That would be agreeing with the article, unless I understand what you mean.

> On top of that, the internet was very different back then.

In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.

> I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser?

The points made in the article are:

* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company

* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards

* It’s fast and has a nice user interface

Onto which I'd add:

* Content blockers work best on Firefox (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...), doubly so when Manifest V3 rolls out

* Allows more customization of interface and home page

* UX improvements, like the clutter-free reader mode, aren't vetoed to protect search revenue as with Chrome (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467)

Advertising networks are vectors for malware:

https://www.cisecurity.org/insights/blog/malvertising

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

So if you're concerned about security then you want the browser with the best ad blocker.

uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...