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"Mozilla doesn't seem to have had a problem dumping all kinds of Javascript and CSS features into Firefox over the years not all of it making it into draft spec

"Mozilla doesn't seem to have had a problem dumping all kinds of Javascript and CSS features into Firefox over the years not all of it making it into draft spec proposals." Certainly, every vendor has been guilty here. I at least think that every extension Mozilla is currently encouraging use of is hoped to be a potential future standard. (And no, I'm not claiming this is unique -- some other vendors like Google are also good citizens in this regard.) I also agree that proprietary platforms are hurting the web, and that the web needs new abilities in order to fight the threat. However, to preserve the openness of the web, new features need to be things that more than one vendor has the resources and motivation to implement; even if Mozilla and Opera thought Dart or Pepper were great ideas, adopting them would put is on a treadmill where Google (with its much greater resources) controls the speed. And no, I am not claiming that Apple/Mozilla/Opera would have adopted Dart or NaCL if they were brought before the right committee at the right time. Part of getting early feedback means finding out if the community even thinks that your solution is something that's desired in the first place. "When Mozilla developed Rust, the first time most of the web heard of it was Graydon dumping a gigantic codebomb into GitHub and it being covered on Lambda-the-Ultimate." This is actually an interesting contrast between Mozilla and Google. The initial Rust code-dump was a barely-running proof-of-concept; it was shared with the world on the same day it was first shared within the Mozilla community. Zero lines of the current self-hosted compiler were written at the time. Most of the planned features (like the task system) were unimplemented. The first actual release (Rust 0.1 alpha) came a year and a half later, and that first release already reflected significant community feedback and contributions. For example, the packaging system in Rust 0.1 was written by a volunteer contributor who happens to be a Google employee. The stage of maturity at which Rust became open source was far earlier than Go. Some things really are different at a non-profit like Mozilla, and the goal of opening everything up as early as possible is one thing that's unique among tech companies I've worked for or with. We don't always do it perfectly, and we do struggle with the need for people to do some types of design and experimentation without the world looking over their shoulders, but it's very much a unique core principle that affects all of our work.

cromwellian 15y ago
SPDY is an example of a great idea, good enough that Mozilla is adopting it. Apparently, you're saying that, like SPDY, even if everyone agreed that Dart and NaCl were great ideas and great for the web, Mozilla still vote against them for political or aesthetic reasons. So part of "getting early feedback" as you alluded to above, is getting early politically motivated feedback. How is this a good thing? You should vote on technical proposals based on the intrinsic merit. Almost all of the additions to the browser API that Google has made are desired to make it into spec proposals. There is no desire for Chrome to be the only implementor of Dart or NaCL. I'm a little concerned what you're saying here. That if an idea is good, it won't be adopted anyway, just because someone else has greater resources to implement it. It sounds like Not-invented-here syndrome to me. No matter what technical specs are proposed, Google is always going to have greater resources to develop them. Everything you say about Mozilla, I can say about my experience at Google. The first release of Dart was very incomplete, it didn't implement a lot of the type system, no missing method, some stuff like default method parameters didn't exist. It generally really slow and bloated code. It was in a barely working state. The DartC compiler which was implemented in Java was not a production compiler design to be used by people, it was a prototype for research. This idea that Google sprang a fully-formed already finished product on everyone is a gross exaggeration. The Dart VM isn't even in Chromium yet. The self-hosted compiler (Frog, written in Dart) has been developed completely in the open. Google is a large company with hundreds and hundreds of projects, so not all of them operate the same way, but many of them are open sourced very early in the process, and Googlers push to release source early for client side web technologies. Google has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on acquisitions which it immediately turned around and open sourced, like WebM, and the first Google Web Toolkit, and Instantiation's products (donated to Eclipse Foundation) Really, I think the comments on NaCl and Dart are patently unfair. They were released practically as early as they could have been, NaCL took, what, 2-3 years in the open of development before it was finally pushed to production. Ultimately, if standards committees get gridlocked over political and emotional stuff, instead over the merits of technology, you will see people start to ignore them. A similar thing happened in with OpenGL ARB where vendors who had less resources voted down and blocked companies like NVidia and ATI who were progressing chips at a faster pace. Ultimately, it took DirectX surpassing OpenGL to push it to finally start evolving faster again.

cromwellian 15y ago

SPDY is an example of a great idea, good enough that Mozilla is adopting it. Apparently, you're saying that, like SPDY, even if everyone agreed that Dart and NaCl were great ideas and great for the web, Mozilla still vote against them for political or aesthetic reasons. So part of "getting early feedback" as you alluded to above, is getting early politically motivated feedback. How is this a good thing? You should vote on technical proposals based on the intrinsic merit. Almost all of the additions to the browser API that Google has made are desired to make it into spec proposals. There is no desire for Chrome to be the only implementor of Dart or NaCL. I'm a little concerned what you're saying here. That if an idea is good, it won't be adopted anyway, just because someone else has greater resources to implement it. It sounds like Not-invented-here syndrome to me. No matter what technical specs are proposed, Google is always going to have greater resources to develop them. Everything you say about Mozilla, I can say about my experience at Google. The first release of Dart was very incomplete, it didn't implement a lot of the type system, no missing method, some stuff like default method parameters didn't exist. It generally really slow and bloated code. It was in a barely working state. The DartC compiler which was implemented in Java was not a production compiler design to be used by people, it was a prototype for research. This idea that Google sprang a fully-formed already finished product on everyone is a gross exaggeration. The Dart VM isn't even in Chromium yet. The self-hosted compiler (Frog, written in Dart) has been developed completely in the open. Google is a large company with hundreds and hundreds of projects, so not all of them operate the same way, but many of them are open sourced very early in the process, and Googlers push to release source early for client side web technologies. Google has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on acquisitions which it immediately turned around and open sourced, like WebM, and the first Google Web Toolkit, and Instantiation's products (donated to Eclipse Foundation) Really, I think the comments on NaCl and Dart are patently unfair. They were released practically as early as they could have been, NaCL took, what, 2-3 years in the open of development before it was finally pushed to production. Ultimately, if standards committees get gridlocked over political and emotional stuff, instead over the merits of technology, you will see people start to ignore them. A similar thing happened in with OpenGL ARB where vendors who had less resources voted down and blocked companies like NVidia and ATI who were progressing chips at a faster pace. Ultimately, it took DirectX surpassing OpenGL to push it to finally start evolving faster again.