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The submission title has been changed from "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" to "Mozilla’s project to replace Gecko with Servo" (at the time of this

by maggit 10y ago

The submission title has been changed from "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" to "Mozilla’s project to replace Gecko with Servo" (at the time of this writing). Some of the other comments are pertaining to the "Jet Engine" title. For anybody that might be confused, like I was :)

belorn 10y ago
Does that mean that the original title was bad, as the HN guidelines states, "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."?
- phaed 10y ago
  The title wasn't misleading at all, I totally understood it was about web browser rendering engines.
- ealexhudson 10y ago
  I genuinely don't get all the hoo-haa about titles. In pretty much every comments section I read here, there will be at least one person who complains that the title is "linkbait" or (more often) "clickbait" - even the most boring, anodyne description of the article. They're not allowed to seem interesting in any possible way. The original title wasn't particularly descriptive. That doesn't mean it was misleading, and actually, I thought it was very apt: they're talking about a technology to swap pieces of Servo in over time, and the jet engine analogy was appropriate (particularly with respect to the complexity). I quite liked it.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    There is a real concern among a number of users here, including me, that HN might turn into reddit if we aren't careful. That said in this case I agree with you. I also think we are mostly fine for now but I still hesitate to upvote funny comments.
    - andai 10y ago
      Would you care to elaborate? As someone who spends about half my free time on both websites, I am experiencing a mixture of hurt and intrigue.
      - steveklabnik 10y ago
        It is a long-standing fear amongst HNers, because HN was created as an alternative space due to reddit declining. [1] It's such a prominent thing that it's in the site guidelines: [2] > If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-news/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mnarayan01 10y ago
    I think the concern here is more that the blog of a "Designer Advocate at Mozilla" adds context which is totally lost when "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" appears on HN. It's a great title for the blog post, but it's both misleading and uninformative when pulled verbatim from its natural habitat.
  - posterboy 10y ago
    On the HN frontpage per se, titles are pretty much the only content, so the bias is obvious.
- libria 10y ago
  Perhaps there was concern the audience would assume Mozilla had pivoted into the aerospace industry.
jgraham 10y ago
Unfortunately the new title seems to be misleading in a different way. There is no "project to replace gecko with servo". There is a project to advance gecko so it is state of the art in browser engines. Much of the current state of the art has been developed in Servo, and the natural way to bring that technology to gecko is to integrate the components from servo directly. This has other nice properties like increasing the Rust-to-C++ ratio, which we believe will be a win for safety and maintainability. But it is nevertheless components, rather than the whole shebang. Servo, for example, only just got document.write support and still (as far as I know) doesn't have a correct representation of document history. So it is some way from being a production grade engine for use on the general web.
- iopq 10y ago
  Well, you can write individual components in Rust and put them into Servo and then refactor the existing C++ to make it modular enough for those components to be replaced by the Rust version. Then eventually you'll be able to replace enough components that it's all Servo, and no Gecko. At that point Servo will be functionally complete, as its individual components will be on par with the Gecko components.
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    I think it's unclear whether everything will get replaced by Rust components from Servo: certainly, smaller components are likely to get replaced, but larger interwoven parts are obviously going to be far harder to replace. I suspect not all of the Rust code that replaces the old C++ code will be from Servo: some will be written specifically for Gecko.
    - iopq 10y ago
      Firefox has already committed to eliminating XUL components. Once it has the correct APIs to emulate existing add-ons, mobile Firefox could probably switch over to Servo. Desktop has a lot more cruft and features, so it will probably be harder to switch. But I wouldn't be surprised if Servo is usable on mobile in 2017.
thousande 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XW-mewUm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XW-mewUm8
h1d 10y ago
Why is the title back again? No one can understand what the link is about with just engine and jet as nouns in the title.

by maggit 10y ago

belorn 10y ago

Does that mean that the original title was bad, as the HN guidelines states, "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."?

phaed 10y ago
The title wasn't misleading at all, I totally understood it was about web browser rendering engines.
ealexhudson 10y ago
I genuinely don't get all the hoo-haa about titles. In pretty much every comments section I read here, there will be at least one person who complains that the title is "linkbait" or (more often) "clickbait" - even the most boring, anodyne description of the article. They're not allowed to seem interesting in any possible way. The original title wasn't particularly descriptive. That doesn't mean it was misleading, and actually, I thought it was very apt: they're talking about a technology to swap pieces of Servo in over time, and the jet engine analogy was appropriate (particularly with respect to the complexity). I quite liked it.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  There is a real concern among a number of users here, including me, that HN might turn into reddit if we aren't careful. That said in this case I agree with you. I also think we are mostly fine for now but I still hesitate to upvote funny comments.
  - andai 10y ago
    Would you care to elaborate? As someone who spends about half my free time on both websites, I am experiencing a mixture of hurt and intrigue.
    - steveklabnik 10y ago
      It is a long-standing fear amongst HNers, because HN was created as an alternative space due to reddit declining. [1] It's such a prominent thing that it's in the site guidelines: [2] > If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-news/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mnarayan01 10y ago
  I think the concern here is more that the blog of a "Designer Advocate at Mozilla" adds context which is totally lost when "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" appears on HN. It's a great title for the blog post, but it's both misleading and uninformative when pulled verbatim from its natural habitat.
- posterboy 10y ago
  On the HN frontpage per se, titles are pretty much the only content, so the bias is obvious.
libria 10y ago
Perhaps there was concern the audience would assume Mozilla had pivoted into the aerospace industry.

jgraham 10y ago

Unfortunately the new title seems to be misleading in a different way. There is no "project to replace gecko with servo". There is a project to advance gecko so it is state of the art in browser engines. Much of the current state of the art has been developed in Servo, and the natural way to bring that technology to gecko is to integrate the components from servo directly. This has other nice properties like increasing the Rust-to-C++ ratio, which we believe will be a win for safety and maintainability. But it is nevertheless components, rather than the whole shebang. Servo, for example, only just got document.write support and still (as far as I know) doesn't have a correct representation of document history. So it is some way from being a production grade engine for use on the general web.

iopq 10y ago
Well, you can write individual components in Rust and put them into Servo and then refactor the existing C++ to make it modular enough for those components to be replaced by the Rust version. Then eventually you'll be able to replace enough components that it's all Servo, and no Gecko. At that point Servo will be functionally complete, as its individual components will be on par with the Gecko components.
- gsnedders 10y ago
  I think it's unclear whether everything will get replaced by Rust components from Servo: certainly, smaller components are likely to get replaced, but larger interwoven parts are obviously going to be far harder to replace. I suspect not all of the Rust code that replaces the old C++ code will be from Servo: some will be written specifically for Gecko.
  - iopq 10y ago
    Firefox has already committed to eliminating XUL components. Once it has the correct APIs to emulate existing add-ons, mobile Firefox could probably switch over to Servo. Desktop has a lot more cruft and features, so it will probably be harder to switch. But I wouldn't be surprised if Servo is usable on mobile in 2017.

thousande 10y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XW-mewUm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XW-mewUm8

h1d 10y ago

Why is the title back again? No one can understand what the link is about with just engine and jet as nouns in the title.