dblohm7

16 ms·

211.
by dblohm7 4y ago
Canada points and laughs.
212.
by dblohm7 4y ago
The two companies I miss most are Phar Lap and NuMega.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
(I used to work on the Android port of Gecko for Firefox) That was never a thing.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Former Mozilla engineer here. > I observed the change in tone in Mozilla blog posts, from experts talking about their craft to marketspeak. I think I can explain what you're seeing here. The original blog.mozilla.org was run very mu
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by dblohm7 4y ago
On Windows ULONG_PTR is not an unsigned long*, it is a pointer-width unsigned integer. LONGs and ULONGs are 32-bits on 64-bit Windows, so when porting the API to 64 bits, types that were typedef'd as such on 32-bit, but actually need t
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by dblohm7 4y ago
When I worked on Firefox for Android, we were constantly fighting for the broader Firefox org to take mobile more seriously —- if Gecko excelled on mobile with respect to power consumption, then a lot of that would spill over to desktop pla
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Removing XPCOM is orthogonal to adding rust. In fact, if you search Bugzilla you fill find many references to deCOMtamination, which is about removing unnecessary XPCOM.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Former Firefox developer: It was both.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Former Firefox developer here. The reason for omitting tests is because they are essentially the exploits themselves; omission raises the barrier to entry, as somebody has to be skilled enough to craft an exploit based on the source code ch
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by dblohm7 4y ago
You're precisely correct, IMHO. I use Windows on my desktop primarily because I don't have the patience to deal with (2).
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by dblohm7 4y ago
> It's sad that Firefox engine is so difficult to embed and we could have seen more projects using it. Not on Android, it isn't. https://geckoview.dev
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Former Mozilla engineer here: The Firefox team isn't as small as you are implying, and they are always constrained by inadequate resources.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Former Mozilla employee here: A subset, yes, but also a majority. And it isn't enough.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Former browser engineer here: Thank you for that second sentence. So many people forget that part!
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Given the projects where Rust is already in use (and has been for several years at this point), I don't think that is a concern.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
(Personal opinion here) Keep in mind that we're still a relatively small (but growing) team, and I think that a big part of not open sourcing everything is a simple matter of having the capacity to properly engage with the community. F
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Tailscale employee here: In general the OSS operating systems get OSS clients, whereas the closed-source ones don’t necessarily get the full OSS treatment.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Ah, so it is! I got overexcited because I was one of the people who advocated for a racy cache during the redesign of that code back in the day.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
When the cache wins the network transfer is canceled, so it’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Firefox's HTTP cache races with the network for precisely this reason.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
> A primary reason why I left is that I felt like my wings were clipped as PM, and that I was unable to effectively build symbiosis with engineering. I feel this hard. On the occasions that I tried to reach out to product management abou
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Yes. It was an intractable problem.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Yeah, but what's the tablet market for Android these days?
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by dblohm7 4y ago
Or you know, we just wanted to offer the closest thing we could get to continuous delivery of desktop software?
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by dblohm7 4y ago
No. > that's why they've killed XUL We couldn't deliver a multiprocess browser without doing it. > about:config for the android version I completely supported this and continue to do so. GeckoView on Android works compl
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by dblohm7 4y ago
This is correct. Full-time devs are going to spend their work time on what the people who pay them tell them they should be working on.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
That's fair, I think in GV at the time we were more thinking about Fennec parity, so that's where my thoughts originate.
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by dblohm7 4y ago
IMHO: Product managers are super important: it's their job to understand the market (where it was, where it is, and where it is going), the competitive landscape, and work with leadership on strategic planning. However, all three group
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by dblohm7 4y ago
My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit
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by dblohm7 4y ago
(Former Mozilla developer here, who worked on GeckoView[1], the modern way to embed Gecko into Android apps, including all currently shipped Mozilla browsers on Android) From an engineering perspective, the sad thing about this is that the

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