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On the other hand, Firefox today is much better than Netscape ever was. And with the never re-write philosophy we wouldn’t have Rust.
by mr_toad 9y ago
On the other hand, Firefox today is much better than Netscape ever was. And with the never re-write philosophy we wouldn’t have Rust.
- candiodari 9y agoI think that actually speaks to Joel's point. None of those were rewrites. Firefox started as a fresh UI reskin for the old browser interface, and indeed continued as "mostly a skin" for years (incidentally, so did Chrome). (You can still get the non-firefox skin incidentally, it's "Mozilla Seamonkey") Then the Rust rewrite. Rust was a hobby project, and they rewrote layout engine interface, and nothing more than that. Then CSS. Now it's an HTML parser, a layout engine, a parallel CSS engine, and a GPU webpage renderer (still "missing"/non-rust are 2d compositing and javascript). Each of those components replaced another in a working version and there were at least beta versions of firefox of all the parts.
- jhasse 9y agoYou don't know what we would have instead.
- washadjeffmad 9y agoPotential is worthless. We have Rust, we don't have what might have been produced had Rust not happened, and as far as I know, no one is working on that hypothetical product.