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It would make no sense to de-emphasize servo. It seems like it would make a lot of sense to de-emphasize Quantum/firefox/everything mozilla is wasting their ti

by cgag 10y ago

It would make no sense to de-emphasize servo. It seems like it would make a lot of sense to de-emphasize Quantum/firefox/everything mozilla is wasting their time and money on that isn't Servo. I hope that either mozilla is lying for political reasons about their lack of intent to use servo outright, or that the servo team forks from mozilla and takes funding from patreon (or snowdrift when it launches) and builds something great, without the burden of mozilla and firefox.

pcwalton 10y ago
> It seems like it would make a lot of sense to de-emphasize Quantum/firefox/everything mozilla is wasting their time and money on that isn't Servo. Here's how I think of it: What's the biggest risk to Servo? I think most people would answer that (besides it being a lot of work), as it's a big boil-the-ocean project, there's a lot of newly-written code that hasn't been battle-tested yet. How do we fix that? By getting early user adoption on pieces when they're ready, so we can shake out the issues. Quantum is the perfect way to do that. Of course, I happen to care about Firefox's success too, so getting great features to Firefox users as soon as possible is also a big win from Quantum. :)
- allendoerfer 10y ago
  The competition in the browser market is much harder than for example the market of programming languages and even there big version bumps have huge costs. If you can avoid it, you don't want all your resources tied to Perl 6, PHP 6, Python 3 and so on, while your users are complaining because the usable version of your software does not improve any longer.
Ygg2 10y ago
I think emphasizing Servo is the wrong goal. Ideally, when rewriting a large legacy app you want to take the StranglerApplication[1] approach. Netscape tried rewriting its software from scratch and we all know how that ended for Netscape[2] - Netscape is no more. Luckily, Firefox came from that whole mess. But I assume a lot of effort was lost, going from Netscape to Firefox. In idealized scenario, Servo slowly starts taking replacing parts of Firefox. First URL parser and media player, then slowly DOM, CSS, Renderer, and finally takes over and rewrites JS VM. The takeover is silent and gradual and user doesn't notices anything outside speed improvements. It's like some kind of silent Borg infection. [1] http://paulhammant.com/2013/07/14/legacy-application-strangulation-case-studies/ http://paulhammant.com/2013/07/14/legacy-application-strangu... [2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html
- cgag 10y ago
  I think the user needs to notice a lot of improvements, at all at once, because firefox really feels hopeless at this point. I don't know though, maybe a slow turnaround will work, or a sudden rendering integration will be the turn around it needs.

by cgag 10y ago

pcwalton 10y ago

> It seems like it would make a lot of sense to de-emphasize Quantum/firefox/everything mozilla is wasting their time and money on that isn't Servo. Here's how I think of it: What's the biggest risk to Servo? I think most people would answer that (besides it being a lot of work), as it's a big boil-the-ocean project, there's a lot of newly-written code that hasn't been battle-tested yet. How do we fix that? By getting early user adoption on pieces when they're ready, so we can shake out the issues. Quantum is the perfect way to do that. Of course, I happen to care about Firefox's success too, so getting great features to Firefox users as soon as possible is also a big win from Quantum. :)

allendoerfer 10y ago
The competition in the browser market is much harder than for example the market of programming languages and even there big version bumps have huge costs. If you can avoid it, you don't want all your resources tied to Perl 6, PHP 6, Python 3 and so on, while your users are complaining because the usable version of your software does not improve any longer.

Ygg2 10y ago

I think emphasizing Servo is the wrong goal. Ideally, when rewriting a large legacy app you want to take the StranglerApplication[1] approach. Netscape tried rewriting its software from scratch and we all know how that ended for Netscape[2] - Netscape is no more. Luckily, Firefox came from that whole mess. But I assume a lot of effort was lost, going from Netscape to Firefox. In idealized scenario, Servo slowly starts taking replacing parts of Firefox. First URL parser and media player, then slowly DOM, CSS, Renderer, and finally takes over and rewrites JS VM. The takeover is silent and gradual and user doesn't notices anything outside speed improvements. It's like some kind of silent Borg infection. [1] http://paulhammant.com/2013/07/14/legacy-application-strangulation-case-studies/ http://paulhammant.com/2013/07/14/legacy-application-strangu... [2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html

cgag 10y ago
I think the user needs to notice a lot of improvements, at all at once, because firefox really feels hopeless at this point. I don't know though, maybe a slow turnaround will work, or a sudden rendering integration will be the turn around it needs.