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I know its off-topic, but this remind me about some things, now that Firefox is taking the heat and losing more and more market share.. First about that famous
by oscargrouch 8y ago
I know its off-topic, but this remind me about some things, now that Firefox is taking the heat and losing more and more market share..
First about that famous Joel Spolsky post warning about software rewrites using Netscape as an example. Then the fact that Firefox have waited too much to create a multi-process browser which was really a needed rewrite to really catch up to Chrome.
If my memory doesnt fail me, Chrome was launched in 2008 and Firefox came up with the multi-process only 4 years later, in the end of 2012.
And then theres this rewrite of core pieces in Rust, that i'm sure was great for Rust language and community growth, but i dont think it was a good move for Firefox, because it take a lot of effort to stabilize the core pieces, specially while at the same time refactoring a compiler in the middle.
Rust turned out great, with a great performance, but what if it didn't?
Or maybe i'm being a half empty glass kind of person, and Firefox were actually turning out to the same faith, and at least a good tech, Rust came out of all this mess?
- em-bee 8y agorust was purposely created for the firefox rewrite. so yes, rust is the good thing that came out of the goal to improve firefox. also i seem to remember mozilla exploring multiprocess firefox earlier, but finding that it took more work to get ready. with all the complaints i have seen over the years about the firefox c++ codebase i am not surprised that this wasn't a trivial task.