4 ms·

The Firefox rewrite was a success by all measures. Spolsky is wrong on this one, at least with the claims of generality.

digi_owl 10y ago
Then again Firefox was itself a strip down of a rewritten Netscape suite. Stripped down in that the suite included not just a browser but also a email client, IRC client and a HTML editor, and the UI was done using JS and XUL markup. What Firefox devs did was to take the browser part, make it stand alone, and replace much of the XUL UI with native widgets (GTK on _nix).
randall 10y ago
Except for one measure: Netscape died as a company. The huge rewrite contributed to killing it. If you don't ship a product (for like 4-6 years?) you're gonna die. Mozilla originally chose the name phoenix, (then firebird to avoid trademark problems, then finally firefox) was chosen because it was a phoenix rising from Netscape's ashes. Its major innovation: It was 'blazing fast' when compared to ie 5.5 / 6. Tabbed browsing was also pretty cool. You can learn a lot of lessons from Netscape, but this isn't one of them. Servo is a great example of how a rewrite should / can work. Mozilla hasn't devoted 100% of resources to Servo, but instead is letting servo build all on its own, and someday unclearly defined in the future, the two could merge. (but might not!) It's a separate product, and nobody is pinning all their hopes and dreams on it.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  I remember how long it took to release a stable version of Mozilla and Mozilla Phoenix. In the meantime, had to recompile newer releases all the time manually. There was no alternative browser on Linux or *NIX for that matter (OK, macOS still had MSIE). The successor of Netscape Communicator was Mozilla (IIRC it was just called that, later renamed Mozilla SeaMonkey), and the successor of Netscape Navigator was Mozilla Phoenix (later renamed Mozilla Firebird and eventually Mozilla Firefox). Firefox and Thunderbird were once again separate clients. Mozilla was still considered bloated, but Phoenix was far less bloated which is nice on lower RAM machines, and allowed the start of Web 2.0. It was also the return of doing one thing and doing it right: browsing the WWW. As Netscape Communicator (unlike its predecessor, Netscape Navigator) came with a Usenet client and e-mail client. Later in development, addons became a thing, and you could add features which were previously part of Netscape Communicator such as calendar, HTML editor, etc. You can also add such features with addons to Mozilla Thunderbird. Then Google Chrome happened, and people switched to that, but I'm not entirely sure why.
  - randall 10y ago
    I switched for the same reason i switched to phoenix: it was just faster. Now I use it for the dev tools. It's still faster imo.
  - mattmanser 10y ago
    Firefox went through a long period of being slow to start and memory hungry.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Also, Servo is just the engine. And modern web render engines are themselves highly modular. I think the Gecko engine powering Firefox have had its javascript interpreter replaced 2-3 times. So when it comes to it, the most likely outcome will be a kind of "my grandfather's axe" scenario where over time parts of Servo replace Gecko within Firefox until Servo has completely replaced Gecko.
- varjag 10y ago
  Sorry, but I emphatically disagree. Servo entailed creating a new programming language, building a community around that language and using the project as playground for feature validation. This might work for an non-commercial entity but it is not a good example of a rewrite.
  - randall 10y ago
    It's more about the integration side than the particulars of it. It's a huge project with different goals than ff, so it should be (and is being) treated as such. It's a huge, audacious, hairy project, which might happen if a startup said "OK let's rewrite everything from scratch!"

digi_owl 10y ago

Then again Firefox was itself a strip down of a rewritten Netscape suite. Stripped down in that the suite included not just a browser but also a email client, IRC client and a HTML editor, and the UI was done using JS and XUL markup. What Firefox devs did was to take the browser part, make it stand alone, and replace much of the XUL UI with native widgets (GTK on _nix).

randall 10y ago

Except for one measure: Netscape died as a company. The huge rewrite contributed to killing it. If you don't ship a product (for like 4-6 years?) you're gonna die. Mozilla originally chose the name phoenix, (then firebird to avoid trademark problems, then finally firefox) was chosen because it was a phoenix rising from Netscape's ashes. Its major innovation: It was 'blazing fast' when compared to ie 5.5 / 6. Tabbed browsing was also pretty cool. You can learn a lot of lessons from Netscape, but this isn't one of them. Servo is a great example of how a rewrite should / can work. Mozilla hasn't devoted 100% of resources to Servo, but instead is letting servo build all on its own, and someday unclearly defined in the future, the two could merge. (but might not!) It's a separate product, and nobody is pinning all their hopes and dreams on it.

Fnoord 10y ago
I remember how long it took to release a stable version of Mozilla and Mozilla Phoenix. In the meantime, had to recompile newer releases all the time manually. There was no alternative browser on Linux or *NIX for that matter (OK, macOS still had MSIE). The successor of Netscape Communicator was Mozilla (IIRC it was just called that, later renamed Mozilla SeaMonkey), and the successor of Netscape Navigator was Mozilla Phoenix (later renamed Mozilla Firebird and eventually Mozilla Firefox). Firefox and Thunderbird were once again separate clients. Mozilla was still considered bloated, but Phoenix was far less bloated which is nice on lower RAM machines, and allowed the start of Web 2.0. It was also the return of doing one thing and doing it right: browsing the WWW. As Netscape Communicator (unlike its predecessor, Netscape Navigator) came with a Usenet client and e-mail client. Later in development, addons became a thing, and you could add features which were previously part of Netscape Communicator such as calendar, HTML editor, etc. You can also add such features with addons to Mozilla Thunderbird. Then Google Chrome happened, and people switched to that, but I'm not entirely sure why.
- randall 10y ago
  I switched for the same reason i switched to phoenix: it was just faster. Now I use it for the dev tools. It's still faster imo.
- mattmanser 10y ago
  Firefox went through a long period of being slow to start and memory hungry.
digi_owl 10y ago
Also, Servo is just the engine. And modern web render engines are themselves highly modular. I think the Gecko engine powering Firefox have had its javascript interpreter replaced 2-3 times. So when it comes to it, the most likely outcome will be a kind of "my grandfather's axe" scenario where over time parts of Servo replace Gecko within Firefox until Servo has completely replaced Gecko.
varjag 10y ago
Sorry, but I emphatically disagree. Servo entailed creating a new programming language, building a community around that language and using the project as playground for feature validation. This might work for an non-commercial entity but it is not a good example of a rewrite.
- randall 10y ago
  It's more about the integration side than the particulars of it. It's a huge project with different goals than ff, so it should be (and is being) treated as such. It's a huge, audacious, hairy project, which might happen if a startup said "OK let's rewrite everything from scratch!"