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Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

coolelectronics

Comments (72)

  • yjftsjthsd-h
    >This port cost over 25k in opus/fable tokens for debugging and JIT research> This was just a fun experiment to push the boundaries of WebAssemblyI'm a huge fan of the project, but I have to ask. If spending $25k is a "fun experiment", where exactly is your threshold for serious work?
  • degamad
    I'm so glad this exists, I've been considering doing something like this for a few months.I recently got a TV based on VIDAA os, a locked-down linux-based OS where everything is rendered from Web pages. It has a built-in browser that doesn't support ad-blocking (I suspect VIDAA is profiting from showing ads on the TV), and you can't install new apps unless they're Web pages.This would hopefully allow one to run Firefox within the existing browser, then install uBlock Origin within Firefox... I know what this weekend's project is going to be...
  • coolelectronics
    Oh and for anyone asking, you can run firefox-wasm inside firefox-wasm inside firefox! I only got this to load once though since it gets pretty unstable at that level.
  • MajesticHobo2
    Browser sandboxing is now fully solved.
  • ksmithbaylor
    I can’t help but think of Gary Bernhardt’s 2014 talk, “The Birth and Death of JavaScript”: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
  • brewmarche
    Can’t get it running on Firefox 152.0.6 (aarch64), no extensions. [chrome-demo] chrome assets ready [gecko] warning: unsupported syscall: __syscall_madvise [gecko] embed-xul: main() on the app pthread (PROXY_TO_PTHREAD) [gecko] embed-xul: GECKO_GL_PASSTHROUGH=1 [gecko] embed-xul: GECKO_COARSE_CLOCK=1 [gecko] embed-xul: GECKO_GPU=1 (GPU/WebRender->canvas rendering) [gecko] xul_init: GRE dir = /gre [gecko] Pthread 0x11051000 sent an error! blob:https://developer.puter.com/edc1bd0a-b844-4a18-a69a-63dd49dc304a:8906: SecurityError: Security error when calling GetDirectory
  • lxe
    It's kind of ironic how this doesn't work in Firefox.
  • EvanAnderson
    I've been waiting for this to happen.The websites that don't want you to block ads will serve you an obfuscated "inner browser" that will render their site. All your ad blockers, etc, are rendered moot.Once accessibility is solved this is absolutely going to be a thing on major websites.
  • azakai
    Prior art: WebKit.js, the WebKit rendering engine ported to JShttps://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js/
  • anon
    undefined
  • zerof1l
    All the network traffic from that browser is routed through a server. My IP inside that browser was in India and on CloudFlare network. I don’t particularly trust Puter. Why not route traffic through my actual browser?
  • luciana1u
    25k tokens to port Firefox to WASM. by 2027 we'll be spending 25k tokens to port WASM back to native because someone will benchmark it and find the WASM version is 3% faster.
  • rmac
    on mobile chrome / Android I can't get the following to work :- IME / keyboard doesn't pop on any field- copy paste- scrolling with touch- ai side panelWhat works on mobile :- Extensions !This is so sick great work; did you try webgpu?https://imgur.com/a/nWFCraP
  • koolala
    What makes it require that WASM extension you need the flag for in Firefox? Was there really no way to work around it or polyfill it for it to work? It is performance critical?
  • elmer2
    I would be careful with this demo. When you go to whatismyip.com, it's showing: 104.28.233.73. Someone could use this to cloak their IP address and do some damage.
  • andai
    The description mentions a similar project browser.js which apparently has some real use cases, what are they?
  • sangeeth96
    edit: I misunderstood, that's $25k not 25k tokens :/ time to log off.this is so rad! 25k tokens is a lot less than i thought this'd take -- what were the difficult bits in the porting process? also, was firefox preferred because parts of it are already in rust?
  • eqrion
    > There is a novel WASM->JS JIT for experimental site speedupI would love to see the details for this. SpiderMonkey had an attempted wasm32 JIT backend, but it was never finished.edit: Apparently it also has some sort of WebAssembly interpreter backend too, which SpiderMonkey doesn't have.
  • throwaway2027
  • simonw
    This is amazing. I loaded up https://developer.puter.com/labs/firefox-wasm/ in Chrome and I've visited a bunch of sites, it works really well.Then I opened up https://developer.puter.com/labs/firefox-wasm/ in Firefox-in-WebAssembly-in-Chrome... and sadly it didn't load. I got this in the startup log: [log] [chrome-demo] chrome assets ready [warn] [gecko] warning: unsupported syscall: __syscall_madvise
  • mdlxxv
    "Yo dawg. I herd you like web browsers, so I put a browser in your browser, so you can browse the Web while you browse the Web".
  • SpyCoder77
    No mobile support
  • som
    ... doesn't support Firefox mobile apparently :D
  • jedisct1
    "This browser doesn't support WebAssembly JSPI, which Firefox WASM needs to run."
  • anon
    undefined
  • ohonbob
    [dead]