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Some of the issues you raise are important. But I am questioning the social dynamics of what you are suggesting. You could have copied your comment from someti

by sn41 6y ago

Some of the issues you raise are important. But I am questioning the social dynamics of what you are suggesting. You could have copied your comment from sometime in the late 90s. Because the same argument could have been made by replacing FAANG with Internet Explorer. A bunch of decent folks did come together and fix things. It was called the Mozilla foundation. There is an opinion that the old decent folks don't matter anymore, but I don't share it. I think what is happening is nothing short of sabotage within Mozilla. I am sad that this is happening.

nwah1 6y ago
There were internal and external problems. Clearly the rapid pace and complexity of web standards development is nearly impossible to keep up with. The original things which gave Firefox and advantage for regular users have been universally adopted. Fast performance, tabbed browsing, cross-platform support, and open source code were the main advantages. These are all standard now. The proprietary shims around the rendering engines invade privacy and limit user freedom, but clearly users don't care enough for it to influence their choices. They chose Firefox because it was convenient and worked better, and now that isn't true... Mainly because no amount of money they could throw at development could ever hope to compete with Big Tech. On the internal problem side, the recent batch of layoffs seem like the most egregious, particularly since they say they are continuing with gecko. If they decided that gecko is not worth maintaining anymore, that might be a wise strategic move, given external circumstances, albeit sad. But maintaining it while eliminating any hopeful future is the worst of all worlds. The salary growth of their top executives alone over the past 10 years could pay for Servo development. If they want to save money, that is where they should start. But killing gecko would save more. They would need to rework their whole business model, though. I think pioneering open cloud services would be great. No lock-in. Zero-knowledge. End-to-end encryption. Open source. They already have Firefox Accounts which tie in with Sync, Lockwise, VPN, Monitor, etc. If they add in OwnCloud, an Email service, and so on they could offer an attractive alternative to Google services.
core-questions 6y ago
100% agree with your sentiment. Maybe it's just the case that disruption is needed every decade or two to keep things fresh and interesting. Anyone who has dipped a toe into modern frontend web development and hasn't stayed for long enough to drink the kool-aid knows that it's a shitshow. You need a toolchain a mile long just to get some basic stuff on the screen, a far cry from the easy learning curve (lol!) of Perl outputting HTML via cgi-bin in your home directory 20 years ago. Okay, sure, you have access to a lot of visually pretty things now, but ultimately a lot of that could have been implemented at the browser level by exposing primitives that were more useful right from the start, rather than downloading a few megs of Javascript to emulate a reasonable environment on top of an unreasonable one. Remember the 1.44MB QNX magical floppy disk demo? Entire OS and a Javascript-capable web browser in less space than it takes to visit the average corporate homepage now. Something is wrong here. I don't think there has to be a tradeoff where the programming languages become insanely difficult for average developers in order to use less space, either; it's not like modern JS is particularly easy. https://www.red-lang.org/ https://www.red-lang.org/ is something in the right direction. The language itself looks a little confusing still, but I love the idea of a small binary that can run it and produce decent GUIs out the other end. We need to revisit the basic assumptions and produce something that can still be extremely performant on hardware that is 15 years old, imo, so that our modern machines become extremely powerful again.
- 9214 6y ago
  Could you please elaborate on what you find confusing about Red? Am genuinely interested as an active member of that project.

by sn41 6y ago

nwah1 6y ago

There were internal and external problems. Clearly the rapid pace and complexity of web standards development is nearly impossible to keep up with. The original things which gave Firefox and advantage for regular users have been universally adopted. Fast performance, tabbed browsing, cross-platform support, and open source code were the main advantages. These are all standard now. The proprietary shims around the rendering engines invade privacy and limit user freedom, but clearly users don't care enough for it to influence their choices. They chose Firefox because it was convenient and worked better, and now that isn't true... Mainly because no amount of money they could throw at development could ever hope to compete with Big Tech. On the internal problem side, the recent batch of layoffs seem like the most egregious, particularly since they say they are continuing with gecko. If they decided that gecko is not worth maintaining anymore, that might be a wise strategic move, given external circumstances, albeit sad. But maintaining it while eliminating any hopeful future is the worst of all worlds. The salary growth of their top executives alone over the past 10 years could pay for Servo development. If they want to save money, that is where they should start. But killing gecko would save more. They would need to rework their whole business model, though. I think pioneering open cloud services would be great. No lock-in. Zero-knowledge. End-to-end encryption. Open source. They already have Firefox Accounts which tie in with Sync, Lockwise, VPN, Monitor, etc. If they add in OwnCloud, an Email service, and so on they could offer an attractive alternative to Google services.

core-questions 6y ago

100% agree with your sentiment. Maybe it's just the case that disruption is needed every decade or two to keep things fresh and interesting. Anyone who has dipped a toe into modern frontend web development and hasn't stayed for long enough to drink the kool-aid knows that it's a shitshow. You need a toolchain a mile long just to get some basic stuff on the screen, a far cry from the easy learning curve (lol!) of Perl outputting HTML via cgi-bin in your home directory 20 years ago. Okay, sure, you have access to a lot of visually pretty things now, but ultimately a lot of that could have been implemented at the browser level by exposing primitives that were more useful right from the start, rather than downloading a few megs of Javascript to emulate a reasonable environment on top of an unreasonable one. Remember the 1.44MB QNX magical floppy disk demo? Entire OS and a Javascript-capable web browser in less space than it takes to visit the average corporate homepage now. Something is wrong here. I don't think there has to be a tradeoff where the programming languages become insanely difficult for average developers in order to use less space, either; it's not like modern JS is particularly easy. https://www.red-lang.org/ https://www.red-lang.org/ is something in the right direction. The language itself looks a little confusing still, but I love the idea of a small binary that can run it and produce decent GUIs out the other end. We need to revisit the basic assumptions and produce something that can still be extremely performant on hardware that is 15 years old, imo, so that our modern machines become extremely powerful again.

9214 6y ago
Could you please elaborate on what you find confusing about Red? Am genuinely interested as an active member of that project.