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From a tech geek perspective, Firefox is the "emacs of browsers". They wrote a (lisp/js) interpreter and then wrote the (editor/browser) in that language. Unf
by octoberfranklin 6y ago
From a tech geek perspective, Firefox is the "emacs of browsers".
They wrote a (lisp/js) interpreter and then wrote the (editor/browser) in that language. Unfortunately using a much more weakly-typed language [to write what is almost an OS of its own] yielded a mass of unmaintainable, constantly-mutating bloatware. They claim to be rewriting the interpreter layer in Rust, which is awesome, but 99% of the browser will still be written in javascript.
Plus, when I abandoned Firefox for good (about a year ago) pinch-to-zoom STILL DID NOT WORK. This was in 2019. Seriously.
And they pay people to fiddle with VRML/WebVR instead of fixing all this.
- kelnos 6y agoNot sure where you're getting your information, but the majority of Firefox is written in C++, not Javascript.
- octoberfranklin 6y agohttps://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_summary https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_... The vast, vast majority of that C++ is legacy crud that gets #ifdef'ed out -- Mozilla development style seems to be to never remove code, ever; just #ifdef it out. Also there's a ton of boilerplate in there due to their homegrown IDL.