3 ms·

> I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other products. > I can't imagine that from a standpoint of time investment and tec

> I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other products. > I can't imagine that from a standpoint of time investment and technical improvement Rust ever made sense for Firefox to be honest. To put it bluntly: without Rust, Firefox would have very likely not existed anymore. It was severely behind in terms of performance, and no good tooling was available to fix that without incurring a huge ongoing maintenance cost, due to lacking parallelism safety in other languages. So they built the tooling themselves. The whole Firefox Quantum thing very likely just couldn't have happened if it weren't for Rust. Rust wasn't some pointless experimental plaything; it was a large frontloaded engineering cost, with significant long-term benefits. (Note: I'm not a Mozilla employee, so it's always possible that I'm wrong here. But I have followed the whole Rust-and-Firefox thing pretty closely from the outside.)

blub 6y ago
The fact that all the other browsers don't have performance problems and are written in C++ completely refutes your statements.
- joepie91_ 6y ago
  "All the other browsers" are basically Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. All of which are developed by three of the wealthiest tech corporations on earth, and even one of those gave up on it because they couldn't keep up. While Mozilla is financially healthy, it is very much not one of the wealthiest tech companies on earth. They cannot afford to spend the kind of money on maintaining a big pile of unsafe parallelization code that Google and Apple can, and so the remaining option was to make the maintenance cheaper - which is what Rust is for.
  - blub 6y ago
    Opera gave up because they literally couldn't keep up. Microsoft didn't give up because they couldn't keep up, it's just that they came to a realization which Mozilla's also about to come to: nobody cares what's underneath the browser UI as long as the branding and features are there. And in the end ~500 million dollars per year should be more than enough to maintain one software project. Come on, they're not trying to send people to Mars.
    - joepie91_ 6y ago
      > Microsoft didn't give up because they couldn't keep up They had been lagging behind in feature support for a long time. > it's just that they came to a realization which Mozilla's also about to come to: nobody cares what's underneath the browser UI as long as the branding and features are there. This is an extremely short-sighted view, also from a business perspective, and one that I'm quite sure Microsoft didn't share. There are very real risks to being dependent on a single huge competitor for such a crucial part of your product, which is why IE (and, subsequently, Edge) came to exist to begin with. The users might not care, but the company itself certainly does, because outsourcing all the internals to Google means that they largely lose control over their user's experience and, by extension, over the UX of their own product. > And in the end ~500 million dollars per year should be more than enough to maintain one software project. Mozilla isn't just "one software project".

blub 6y ago

The fact that all the other browsers don't have performance problems and are written in C++ completely refutes your statements.

joepie91_ 6y ago
"All the other browsers" are basically Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. All of which are developed by three of the wealthiest tech corporations on earth, and even one of those gave up on it because they couldn't keep up. While Mozilla is financially healthy, it is very much not one of the wealthiest tech companies on earth. They cannot afford to spend the kind of money on maintaining a big pile of unsafe parallelization code that Google and Apple can, and so the remaining option was to make the maintenance cheaper - which is what Rust is for.
- blub 6y ago
  Opera gave up because they literally couldn't keep up. Microsoft didn't give up because they couldn't keep up, it's just that they came to a realization which Mozilla's also about to come to: nobody cares what's underneath the browser UI as long as the branding and features are there. And in the end ~500 million dollars per year should be more than enough to maintain one software project. Come on, they're not trying to send people to Mars.
  - joepie91_ 6y ago
    > Microsoft didn't give up because they couldn't keep up They had been lagging behind in feature support for a long time. > it's just that they came to a realization which Mozilla's also about to come to: nobody cares what's underneath the browser UI as long as the branding and features are there. This is an extremely short-sighted view, also from a business perspective, and one that I'm quite sure Microsoft didn't share. There are very real risks to being dependent on a single huge competitor for such a crucial part of your product, which is why IE (and, subsequently, Edge) came to exist to begin with. The users might not care, but the company itself certainly does, because outsourcing all the internals to Google means that they largely lose control over their user's experience and, by extension, over the UX of their own product. > And in the end ~500 million dollars per year should be more than enough to maintain one software project. Mozilla isn't just "one software project".