3 ms·

"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 o

"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

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".