Necko News #4 - 2023 H1 Recap
Necko News #4 - 2023 H1 Recap
Highlights from the team working on Necko, Firefox's networking layer
We have an opening on the team for a Senior Staff Software Engineer
Nice to see continued investment!
We fixed a very old bug in our HTTP/2 Upload codepath which restricted performance on faster networks.
This was pretty huge, a lot of people have run into this over the years.
Andrew Creskey exposed internal necko timings to PerfStats so that they can be measured within our performance test infrastructure. These are also visible from telemetry on this dashboard
Very cool. I can just imagine how this may work when you instrument it so that Firefox can never get slower at networking.
WebTransport released in Fx114 on 2023-06-06
I may have seen something about this, but as with a lot of the underlying code, it can be easy to miss what it means -- seems pretty cool and should enable some interesting new functions, especially on mobile.
There's more stuff in there, but this is some of what jumped out at me.
WebTransport is pretty exciting for folks who want to avoid the extra hassle of working with the lower-level WebSockets API, and it can also lead to better performance, so it could be a game-changer for some things; a surprising number of sites are using WebSockets, including multiplayer games.
Early Hints and the speculative connection improvements are also nice to have, as they should keep Firefox page loading performance competitive as more and more sites support them.
DNS over Oblivious HTTP is also a pretty important privacy improvement for DoH, so it's great to see that it has a negligible performance impact and we can move ahead with it.
There was also a captive portal fix, and some of the new contributors helped out with interop2023 fixes, which is very cool to see.
And the planning for off-main-thread networking is very likely to lead to performance wins down the line, if not also security wins, so it's worth keeping an eye on as well.
Whee, Early Hints. Hopefully more CDNs start adopting it now.