4 ms·

Two years later : "Mozilla will sunset it's games team to focus on Internet for dogs" Sarcasm aside, I saw XUL, I saw Thunderbird, I wrote code for both, it's h

by tangue 11y ago

Two years later : "Mozilla will sunset it's games team to focus on Internet for dogs" Sarcasm aside, I saw XUL, I saw Thunderbird, I wrote code for both, it's hard for me to believe in Mozilla.

_wmd 11y ago
"I saw OLE, I saw Outlook Express, I wrote code for both, it's hard for me to believe in Microsoft" Shitty apps and shitty tech :) XUL was conceptually nice but in reality a nightmare for efficiency and pretty much it was just hard to work with due to a lack of tooling and solid evolution over time. I don't know of many sad to see it go
- toyg 11y ago
  It is really hard to believe in Microsoft, even for card-carrying microsofties. Silverlight? VB6? The umpteen drm formats? DCOM? ActiveX?...
  - oblio 11y ago
    On the other hand, people working with .NET/SQL Server have been making a (great) living for 10 years. Every company has its duds.
    - VOYD 11y ago
      +100
  - discreteevent 11y ago
    One can debate the details but in my opinion COM is fundamentally a great technology. Statically defined interfaces with extremely late bound, relatively large, opaque implementations. No inheritance. It's one of the only things that realises what Alan Kay was talking about when he talked about OOP (which is very different to what most people complain about). It's microservices and more and it works: It's still at the core of Windows and has served it well.
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      Well, except that having everything be virtual and atomically reference counted isn't the friendliest environment for compiler authors. You can't do the Smalltalk/JS speculation tricks if you're a compiled AOT language (actually, even worse: a language-independent ABI). So COM performance will always be mediocre.
toyg 11y ago
Mozilla is like a bazaar that is sponsored by an oil-wealthy sheik. As long as the oil/search-money flows, a lot of people are paid to come up with bizarre contraptions that may or may not find buyers at some point in the future. There is a lot of discussion going on every day, but the sheik's rule is absolute and cannot be challenged. Every once in a while, the sheikh tells people to build a grand palace, then changes his mind before it's completed. A few madmen will stubbornly continue to work on it. Every once in a while, the sheikh agrees to build nuclear weapons "because it's better if we do it ourselves in the open, than leaving our enemies free to do it in the dark". The fact that enemies alone cannot do it, is dismissed as a detail. Every once in a while, the sheikh decides this or that market stall becomes an official Kingdom Stall, where everyone has to shop at least once when they enter the bazaar. And so on and so forth...
icebraining 11y ago
Who do you believe in?
oblio 11y ago
I feel that Mozilla is best seen as a sort of research group. Many of the technologies they pioneered or pushed are part of web standards and we're all better off for it. For example FirefoxOS could be considered a failure but I think many things they researched and developed are now part of web standards, especially those concerning offline webapps.
hohoho2016 11y ago
I always wondered why on Earth HN has a downvote feature. Now I see.
hackuser 11y ago
Every organization retires products, for which many people wrote a lot of code; I'm not sure what the objection is here, other than to that reality. Google does, Microsoft does, Twitter does, etc. Open source organizations do it too. Only enterprise vendors will support unsuccessful products for a long time, such as IBM's long support of OS/2. Mozilla also has products they've supported for a long time, including Firefox and Bugzilla. > I saw XUL I know they're phasing it out in some ways but hasn't it lasted around 15 years, since before Firefox? Some people think Mozilla stuck with it for too long. It's possible XUL is older than a few (precocious) Mozilla contributors.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- tangue 11y ago
  Though I understand this point, I have the naive assumption that Mozilla should be different, a kind of sweet spot between GNU and commercial products. And I have the feeling that it's now a market-oriented corporation turning its back on hackers.
vamur 11y ago
XUL is the biggest reason why Firefox feels so much slower on Windows and Linux compared to Chrome. So it's high time for Mozilla to remove it - along with support for Flash. And you can use self hosted webmail instead of Thunderbird.
- mwcampbell 11y ago
  > XUL is the biggest reason why Firefox feels so much slower on Windows and Linux compared to Chrome. Can you explain why, or point to existing information on this subject?
  - vamur 11y ago
    Compare K-Meleon on Windows to Chrome and Firefox to Chrome. Switching between tabs, opening menu, etc is slower on Firefox while the difference is less noticeable between K-Meleon and Chrome. And on Linux, Chrome's custom toolkit feels much faster than the Firefox XUL. Everything from opening new tab, switching tabs, menus, etc. And using Electrolysis doesn't help. So it's an issue with the XUL toolkit.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
_greim_ 11y ago
If I read the situation right, this is just a way to drive adoption and stress test WebAssembly, which itself is a multi-vendor initiative; much bigger than Mozilla.

by tangue 11y ago

Two years later : "Mozilla will sunset it's games team to focus on Internet for dogs" Sarcasm aside, I saw XUL, I saw Thunderbird, I wrote code for both, it's hard for me to believe in Mozilla.

_wmd 11y ago

"I saw OLE, I saw Outlook Express, I wrote code for both, it's hard for me to believe in Microsoft" Shitty apps and shitty tech :) XUL was conceptually nice but in reality a nightmare for efficiency and pretty much it was just hard to work with due to a lack of tooling and solid evolution over time. I don't know of many sad to see it go

toyg 11y ago
It is really hard to believe in Microsoft, even for card-carrying microsofties. Silverlight? VB6? The umpteen drm formats? DCOM? ActiveX?...
- oblio 11y ago
  On the other hand, people working with .NET/SQL Server have been making a (great) living for 10 years. Every company has its duds.
  - VOYD 11y ago
    +100
- discreteevent 11y ago
  One can debate the details but in my opinion COM is fundamentally a great technology. Statically defined interfaces with extremely late bound, relatively large, opaque implementations. No inheritance. It's one of the only things that realises what Alan Kay was talking about when he talked about OOP (which is very different to what most people complain about). It's microservices and more and it works: It's still at the core of Windows and has served it well.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    Well, except that having everything be virtual and atomically reference counted isn't the friendliest environment for compiler authors. You can't do the Smalltalk/JS speculation tricks if you're a compiled AOT language (actually, even worse: a language-independent ABI). So COM performance will always be mediocre.

toyg 11y ago

Mozilla is like a bazaar that is sponsored by an oil-wealthy sheik. As long as the oil/search-money flows, a lot of people are paid to come up with bizarre contraptions that may or may not find buyers at some point in the future. There is a lot of discussion going on every day, but the sheik's rule is absolute and cannot be challenged. Every once in a while, the sheikh tells people to build a grand palace, then changes his mind before it's completed. A few madmen will stubbornly continue to work on it. Every once in a while, the sheikh agrees to build nuclear weapons "because it's better if we do it ourselves in the open, than leaving our enemies free to do it in the dark". The fact that enemies alone cannot do it, is dismissed as a detail. Every once in a while, the sheikh decides this or that market stall becomes an official Kingdom Stall, where everyone has to shop at least once when they enter the bazaar. And so on and so forth...

icebraining 11y ago

Who do you believe in?

oblio 11y ago

I feel that Mozilla is best seen as a sort of research group. Many of the technologies they pioneered or pushed are part of web standards and we're all better off for it. For example FirefoxOS could be considered a failure but I think many things they researched and developed are now part of web standards, especially those concerning offline webapps.

hohoho2016 11y ago

I always wondered why on Earth HN has a downvote feature. Now I see.

hackuser 11y ago

Every organization retires products, for which many people wrote a lot of code; I'm not sure what the objection is here, other than to that reality. Google does, Microsoft does, Twitter does, etc. Open source organizations do it too. Only enterprise vendors will support unsuccessful products for a long time, such as IBM's long support of OS/2. Mozilla also has products they've supported for a long time, including Firefox and Bugzilla. > I saw XUL I know they're phasing it out in some ways but hasn't it lasted around 15 years, since before Firefox? Some people think Mozilla stuck with it for too long. It's possible XUL is older than a few (precocious) Mozilla contributors.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tangue 11y ago
Though I understand this point, I have the naive assumption that Mozilla should be different, a kind of sweet spot between GNU and commercial products. And I have the feeling that it's now a market-oriented corporation turning its back on hackers.

vamur 11y ago

XUL is the biggest reason why Firefox feels so much slower on Windows and Linux compared to Chrome. So it's high time for Mozilla to remove it - along with support for Flash. And you can use self hosted webmail instead of Thunderbird.

mwcampbell 11y ago
> XUL is the biggest reason why Firefox feels so much slower on Windows and Linux compared to Chrome. Can you explain why, or point to existing information on this subject?
- vamur 11y ago
  Compare K-Meleon on Windows to Chrome and Firefox to Chrome. Switching between tabs, opening menu, etc is slower on Firefox while the difference is less noticeable between K-Meleon and Chrome. And on Linux, Chrome's custom toolkit feels much faster than the Firefox XUL. Everything from opening new tab, switching tabs, menus, etc. And using Electrolysis doesn't help. So it's an issue with the XUL toolkit.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

_greim_ 11y ago

If I read the situation right, this is just a way to drive adoption and stress test WebAssembly, which itself is a multi-vendor initiative; much bigger than Mozilla.