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Everyone: Mozilla sucks and hasn’t done anything useful in the last ten years. Also everyone: oh, this rust thing is nice. Hm. Not every toy you make is a win

Everyone: Mozilla sucks and hasn’t done anything useful in the last ten years. Also everyone: oh, this rust thing is nice. Hm. Not every toy you make is a winner, but I think it’s fair to say that while maybe it wasn’t a commercial success, we all ought to say thank you for supporting rust and servo while it was growing up.

paxys 3y ago
Also everyone: Chrome is too dominant we need an alternative. Ask them if they have tried this fantastic alternative called Firefox and you'll get silence.
- TheCleric 3y ago
  Not necessarily. I firmly think we need a non-Chrome based alternative, and through actual use, think that current Firefox ain’t it.
  - derac 3y ago
    I only use Firefox and it's great. I actually use Librewolf and it very rarely has issues with sites. What do you think is wrong with it?
    - TylerE 3y ago
      If you only use Firefox how do you know that it's great? My general impression is that Firefox is lagging far behind in many areas. It hasn't gotten worse, probably gotten better, but the other players have gotten MUCH better.
      - derac 3y ago
        Oh I use Edge at work actually and Chrome when occassional things break (mostly Google services). I find them very much the same. What differences stand out to you?
      - CharlieDigital 3y ago
        I use Firefox for personal browsing on mobile and desktop. Chrome for work. I do not sense, in any way, any difference between the two in day-to-day and even during development. However, FF on Android has extensions and my mobile browsing experience is more or less ad-free with not much extra effort from me.
  - macNchz 3y ago
    I've had Chrome, Safari, and Firefox open pretty much all day every day for the past decade+ and find them to be overwhelmingly alike. What is Firefox missing?
    - TheCleric 3y ago
      This is a great question. A lot of it I can't quite put my finger on. It just felt off. Which makes it impossible for them to improve since it's not concrete. I know for a fact one of the things I hated was that I was hoping to get vertical tabs working, but the vertical tab extension I tried at the time felt clunky and only duplicated the tabs in both horizontal and vertical. To disable the horizontal I'd have to edit a custom css file. This all felt very amateur hour. And I think I even went through the effort of doing so and it broke something else in the process (possibly my fault). Admittedly I don't have a good solution for this even now in my daily driver (Ungoogled Chromium), so it's not a firm "They need to fix this." I think I was just turned off that a solution boiled down to "create a custom config file".
      - TylerE 3y ago
        At least on Mac, the font rendering is different. Hard to exactly quanify, but I'd say Firefox seems less crisp and also less bold/lighter weight. It's not night and day, but with your comment visible side by side in both they're clearly different _somehow_.
        macNchz 3y ago
        Perhaps something particular to your machine...out of curiosity I overlaid screenshots of HN on both on Mac and Linux and the text was nearly pixel identical, though Firefox seemingly has a taller default paragraph line height than Chrome. There were a handful tiny differences in individual character rendering and spacing, but so minor as to be basically impossible to identify without quickly flipping back and forth between the overlaid layers while zoomed in.
        TylerE 3y ago
- hobofan 3y ago
  Even if every single person that is aware of how problematic Chrome's dominance is would switch to Firefox right now, that wouldn't move the needle in any measurable way. When it comes to quasi-monopolies like this, the "problem" are the passive consumers that will just use whatever comes pre-installed and pre-configure (and when it comes to browsers isn't associated to Microsoft). Coincidentally, that behavior is also what keeps Firefox/Mozilla alive by being able to charge for the default search engine configuration.
- mathfailure 3y ago
  [flagged]
- eviks 3y ago
  Or you'll hear that they've tried, and it's not fantastic
TylerE 3y ago
They lost all that good will when they fired all the rust team.
influx 3y ago
Most tech CEOs would have been able to take advantage of and ride the wave that Rust brought...
- azinman2 3y ago
  I’m curious… by doing what? Google seems to be a much more competent company for example. They have Go. How have they been able to find financial success with it?
  - TremendousJudge 3y ago
    Is there "financial success" to be made in programming languages? Usually companies use them to promote their own product environments, which is how they make money, but not through the language (or the compiler, or the interpreter) itself
    - azinman2 3y ago
      That’s kind of my point. What would be the play for Rust? Mozilla is all about open source-it’s hard to imagine some enterprise scheme here, or what that would even be.
      - toyg 3y ago
        They should have dogfooded harder - rebuilding Gecko fully in Rust, then shopping it around as the safer and faster alternative to Chromium for embedding. Community would get it for free, OEMs gotta pay, but it would be so much better, more modern, and more robust, that nobody would have minded. That would have made money.
        ecnahc515 3y ago
        No company would do that. What OEM is going to pay for a new, less compatible browser engine written in an unproven language that no one knows? Even if it is safer, that's pretty much the lowest priority for many companies, and safer != unable to exploit. Companies who want to embed a browser engine into their product use WebKit, which is free, and maintained by multiple other companies, and has been around long enough that it should be compatible with pretty much any website that exists.
lolinder 3y ago
Mitchell Baker wasn't CEO while Rust was growing up, and within six months of taking up the position again she'd laid off Mozilla's Rust team. It's totally fair that she gets exactly zero credit for Rust's success.

paxys 3y ago

Also everyone: Chrome is too dominant we need an alternative. Ask them if they have tried this fantastic alternative called Firefox and you'll get silence.

TheCleric 3y ago
Not necessarily. I firmly think we need a non-Chrome based alternative, and through actual use, think that current Firefox ain’t it.
- derac 3y ago
  I only use Firefox and it's great. I actually use Librewolf and it very rarely has issues with sites. What do you think is wrong with it?
  - TylerE 3y ago
    If you only use Firefox how do you know that it's great? My general impression is that Firefox is lagging far behind in many areas. It hasn't gotten worse, probably gotten better, but the other players have gotten MUCH better.
    - derac 3y ago
      Oh I use Edge at work actually and Chrome when occassional things break (mostly Google services). I find them very much the same. What differences stand out to you?
    - CharlieDigital 3y ago
      I use Firefox for personal browsing on mobile and desktop. Chrome for work. I do not sense, in any way, any difference between the two in day-to-day and even during development. However, FF on Android has extensions and my mobile browsing experience is more or less ad-free with not much extra effort from me.
- macNchz 3y ago
  I've had Chrome, Safari, and Firefox open pretty much all day every day for the past decade+ and find them to be overwhelmingly alike. What is Firefox missing?
  - TheCleric 3y ago
    This is a great question. A lot of it I can't quite put my finger on. It just felt off. Which makes it impossible for them to improve since it's not concrete. I know for a fact one of the things I hated was that I was hoping to get vertical tabs working, but the vertical tab extension I tried at the time felt clunky and only duplicated the tabs in both horizontal and vertical. To disable the horizontal I'd have to edit a custom css file. This all felt very amateur hour. And I think I even went through the effort of doing so and it broke something else in the process (possibly my fault). Admittedly I don't have a good solution for this even now in my daily driver (Ungoogled Chromium), so it's not a firm "They need to fix this." I think I was just turned off that a solution boiled down to "create a custom config file".
    - TylerE 3y ago
      At least on Mac, the font rendering is different. Hard to exactly quanify, but I'd say Firefox seems less crisp and also less bold/lighter weight. It's not night and day, but with your comment visible side by side in both they're clearly different _somehow_.
      - macNchz 3y ago
        Perhaps something particular to your machine...out of curiosity I overlaid screenshots of HN on both on Mac and Linux and the text was nearly pixel identical, though Firefox seemingly has a taller default paragraph line height than Chrome. There were a handful tiny differences in individual character rendering and spacing, but so minor as to be basically impossible to identify without quickly flipping back and forth between the overlaid layers while zoomed in.
        TylerE 3y ago
hobofan 3y ago
Even if every single person that is aware of how problematic Chrome's dominance is would switch to Firefox right now, that wouldn't move the needle in any measurable way. When it comes to quasi-monopolies like this, the "problem" are the passive consumers that will just use whatever comes pre-installed and pre-configure (and when it comes to browsers isn't associated to Microsoft). Coincidentally, that behavior is also what keeps Firefox/Mozilla alive by being able to charge for the default search engine configuration.
mathfailure 3y ago
[flagged]
eviks 3y ago
Or you'll hear that they've tried, and it's not fantastic

TylerE 3y ago

They lost all that good will when they fired all the rust team.

influx 3y ago

Most tech CEOs would have been able to take advantage of and ride the wave that Rust brought...

azinman2 3y ago
I’m curious… by doing what? Google seems to be a much more competent company for example. They have Go. How have they been able to find financial success with it?
- TremendousJudge 3y ago
  Is there "financial success" to be made in programming languages? Usually companies use them to promote their own product environments, which is how they make money, but not through the language (or the compiler, or the interpreter) itself
  - azinman2 3y ago
    That’s kind of my point. What would be the play for Rust? Mozilla is all about open source-it’s hard to imagine some enterprise scheme here, or what that would even be.
    - toyg 3y ago
      They should have dogfooded harder - rebuilding Gecko fully in Rust, then shopping it around as the safer and faster alternative to Chromium for embedding. Community would get it for free, OEMs gotta pay, but it would be so much better, more modern, and more robust, that nobody would have minded. That would have made money.
      - ecnahc515 3y ago
        No company would do that. What OEM is going to pay for a new, less compatible browser engine written in an unproven language that no one knows? Even if it is safer, that's pretty much the lowest priority for many companies, and safer != unable to exploit. Companies who want to embed a browser engine into their product use WebKit, which is free, and maintained by multiple other companies, and has been around long enough that it should be compatible with pretty much any website that exists.

lolinder 3y ago

Mitchell Baker wasn't CEO while Rust was growing up, and within six months of taking up the position again she'd laid off Mozilla's Rust team. It's totally fair that she gets exactly zero credit for Rust's success.