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I still don’t understand how they spend 500M a year with so little to show for it. What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? Nothing. I still can

by brador 6y ago

I still don’t understand how they spend 500M a year with so little to show for it. What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? Nothing. I still can’t copy urls From multiple selected tabs without an extension. What we need is a group to step up, create a new browser, capture the 500M/year payday and put the money to work.

esperent 6y ago
> What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? Rust, Wasm (although a joint project, inspired by asm.js which was purely Mozilla) come to mind. Also, I consider keeping the focus on privacy in an age when huge behemoths of companies are determined to steal every aspect of our lives for profit to be truly important work, much more important than any tech innovation.
- hu3 6y ago
  Mozilla employs (or employed) 2 "Rust devs". If that. steve could chime in to be more precise. But I'd say Rust is a merit of the people involved much more than Mozilla. If anything Mozilla just fired servo folks who contributed to Rust so it's not like they even pretend to support it. I hope Rust gets a foundation and I hope that Mozilla transfers the "Rust" trademark to them.
quotemstr 6y ago
Mozilla did give us Rust and rr [1], both of which were genuine advances. [1] https://rr-project.org/ https://rr-project.org/
ygjb 6y ago
Creating a "new browser" is monumental task, and it's not enough to make something that works. Browsers are extremely high risk pieces of software with an attack surface comparable to an operating system. Building something competitive means being able to make reasonable assertions of security, and that takes tons of resources.
freshsqueeze 6y ago
This is true. Mozilla knows well how to market to the tech crowd with the "we're the saviors of the internet, privacy, everyone else is evil" marketing. For the billions burned, you'd expect a lot more. The internet browsing experience feels the same as it did 10 years ago.
pornel 6y ago
Quantum has proven CSS can be parallelized, and Rust is an enabler for complex multi-core code. WebRender (and ongoing work on Servo/Pathfinder) shows that browser graphics can work on the GPU. Not just a couple limited CSS properties on carefully selected layers (like in WebKit/Blink), but all of it. These are major architectural innovations. I wonder what's the budget for Blink.
sp332 6y ago
They did show Chrome how to block autoplaying audio in a way that does't annoy the crap out of users. The screenshot feature is great and I use it constantly. The containers implementation is pretty slick, and it enabled the first-party Facebook Container add-on which makes it harder for FB to track users across the web. Edit: And readability mode, which was added a long time ago but I'm including it because Chrome still doesn't have one.
anonymousab 6y ago
>What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? They got a lot of great improvements and under-the-hood innovations out of Servo, and had more in the pipeline, and MDN served as a bedrock, reliable, gold standard documentation for modern web development. Coincidentally, the two things they just completely scuttled.

by brador 6y ago

esperent 6y ago

> What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? Rust, Wasm (although a joint project, inspired by asm.js which was purely Mozilla) come to mind. Also, I consider keeping the focus on privacy in an age when huge behemoths of companies are determined to steal every aspect of our lives for profit to be truly important work, much more important than any tech innovation.

hu3 6y ago
Mozilla employs (or employed) 2 "Rust devs". If that. steve could chime in to be more precise. But I'd say Rust is a merit of the people involved much more than Mozilla. If anything Mozilla just fired servo folks who contributed to Rust so it's not like they even pretend to support it. I hope Rust gets a foundation and I hope that Mozilla transfers the "Rust" trademark to them.

quotemstr 6y ago

Mozilla did give us Rust and rr [1], both of which were genuine advances. [1] https://rr-project.org/ https://rr-project.org/

ygjb 6y ago

Creating a "new browser" is monumental task, and it's not enough to make something that works. Browsers are extremely high risk pieces of software with an attack surface comparable to an operating system. Building something competitive means being able to make reasonable assertions of security, and that takes tons of resources.

freshsqueeze 6y ago

This is true. Mozilla knows well how to market to the tech crowd with the "we're the saviors of the internet, privacy, everyone else is evil" marketing. For the billions burned, you'd expect a lot more. The internet browsing experience feels the same as it did 10 years ago.

pornel 6y ago

Quantum has proven CSS can be parallelized, and Rust is an enabler for complex multi-core code. WebRender (and ongoing work on Servo/Pathfinder) shows that browser graphics can work on the GPU. Not just a couple limited CSS properties on carefully selected layers (like in WebKit/Blink), but all of it. These are major architectural innovations. I wonder what's the budget for Blink.

sp332 6y ago

They did show Chrome how to block autoplaying audio in a way that does't annoy the crap out of users. The screenshot feature is great and I use it constantly. The containers implementation is pretty slick, and it enabled the first-party Facebook Container add-on which makes it harder for FB to track users across the web. Edit: And readability mode, which was added a long time ago but I'm including it because Chrome still doesn't have one.

anonymousab 6y ago

>What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? They got a lot of great improvements and under-the-hood innovations out of Servo, and had more in the pipeline, and MDN served as a bedrock, reliable, gold standard documentation for modern web development. Coincidentally, the two things they just completely scuttled.