Christopher Blizzard, a Mozilla engineer, writes about browser technology, HTML5 video codecs, WebSockets, web standards, and performance.
HN links his posts in debates over HTML5 demos, royalty-free codecs and the IETF, and browser JavaScript speed. One commenter says he has interesting articles.
How did you get this impression? One of the ffmpeg guys had been hinting about this for a while and finally posted in a LWN thread to point out 3 Nokia patents he thought Theora infringed.
http://lwn.net/Articles/372416/
Which were shot down pretty quickly:
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/02/some-additional-information-about-theora-and-patents/
You could argue that the ffmpeg guys should be the ones to know best about MPEG patents that Theora infringes since they implement those codecs and as this example shows they are happy to jump to conclusions even when two of the patents clearly couldn't apply for the very basic reason of being filed after VP3 was made public. So the fact that they've not named names could be seen as a positive sign, but as with all things patents, proves nothing.
PGO is pretty new, and it's turned on for the current builds of Firefox 3.1.
I'm guessing it wasn't enabled by Mozilla initially for the usual reasons of complex packaging problems and low manpower for the Linux version.
Distribution packagers generally aren't that knowledgeable about what they package, but that probably isn't what's wrong in the specific case of Firefox, which gets a lot of attention. For Firefox, it's probably the fact that Mozilla has very specific software requirements, and distributors have been burned (http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=368) in the past by ignoring them. So... distributions generally don't do much to change what they distribute as Firefox.
That Chris Blizzard fellow has some interesting articles here: http://hacks.mozilla.org/author/blizzard/
and blog here: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/category/performance/
I'm glad (some) browser developers are still focusing on javascript vs native speed.
I just upgraded from a 2ghz to a 4ghz PC and damn if this isn't going to ruin my attitude about trying to make web sites faster.
The problem is NOTHING is slow on this hardware and it was less than a $150 upgrade. (It also uses less power than the 2ghz hardware!)
I'm going to have to figure out how to cut the speed in half for testing. Wish we still had "turbo" buttons!
Christopher Blizzard's (Open Source Evangelist at Mozilla) thoughts[1] on standardizing Canvas 3D, taken in conjunction with what relevant people at Google are saying[2], makes it look like Google is just really eager to get people using "3D" on the web.
[1] http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=1223
[2] http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2009/04/google-releases-3d-graphics-plugin-for-browsers.ars
Finally found the link, here's Mozilla whining about Apple's CSS 3D showcase locking out other browsers (which wouldn't be able to display it anyhow):
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/06/intellectual-honesty-and-html5/
Two years later, Firefox 10 comes out, the first version that actually supports those effects.
The IETF has its own set of problems: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2009/07/royalty-free-codecs-at-the-ietf/comment-page-1/#comment-206483