By the time they will finally make the switch, Firefox' market share will probably have plunged to a very low single digit percentage.
Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
11–20 of 219 posts
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#12> And Firefox runs on Gecko. Which is old. Like really old. I think it's the oldest rendering engine still in wide use.
Gecko may be oldest, but not with wide margin: KHTML (the origin of webkit and blink) was started in 1998, only a year after Gecko. Of course, probably not much (if any?) of the original KHTML source is still present in webkit, and because of the nature of open source development, there is blurry line between projects.
I actually ran KDE 1.0 as my main DE and used KHTML as my primary browser (falling back to Netscape when particular site was incompatible). I did immediately appreciate the coherence & elegance of KDE. It lasted for several years before OS X came and finally won me. Oh, those were times.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#13Missed opportunity to name the CSS engine replacement project "Gangnam".
That's already an ancient meme - in a few years it'll be nothing more than a weird pop-culture reference
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#14I am very happy seeing C/C++ getting replaced by something more modern and safer as Rust
(though the debug version in Rust is probably slow - that will be something interesting to see)
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#15This seems apt:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Mozilla spending time on this suggests Mozilla doesn't know what to spend time on.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#16This seems apt: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Mozilla spending time on this suggests Mozilla doesn't know what to spend time on.
Mozilla was a rewrite of Netscape and Firefox was a restructuring of Mozilla.
The only reason they still exist today and have relevance is their willingness to rewrite.
I don't disagree with Joel - but his main point seems to be - be prepared to spend longer than you expect on a rewrite - that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#17I was disappointed after reading the title when I saw the article...
Yeah, talk about setting people up for a letdown. :) I was expecting some insane experiment from the golden era of aviation.
And the analogy is a bad one, too. I think it's trying to make the task sound more difficult than it is.
If we stick with the airplane analogy, maybe this is better: it's like incrementally converting an older model jet engine to a newer model jet engine in between flights. Every incremental version must work correctly, which isn't easy, but the upgrades are definitely performed on the ground.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#18This seems apt: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Mozilla spending time on this suggests Mozilla doesn't know what to spend time on.
Others have pointed out that Netscape's rewrite gave us Firefox, so the rewrite was incredibly successful.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#19This seems apt: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Mozilla spending time on this suggests Mozilla doesn't know what to spend time on.
Ironically Mozilla is the best counter-example to that Joel on Software article.
The article specifically mentions that Netscape shouldn't try and re-write their browser. But if they hadn't done that, we wouldn't have Firefox. We'd still have an incremental improvement over Netscape 4.7.
For those who can't remember Netscape 4.7, let me remind you, it wasn't very good at the end. If they hadn't rewritten it, causing Joel to write that article to tell them they were wrong, there would be no relevant browser called Firefox today.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#20This seems apt: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Mozilla spending time on this suggests Mozilla doesn't know what to spend time on.
It seems you either haven't read or understood either Joel's article or this article.
They are going for small incremental changes, instead of rewriting code from scratch, which is what Joel warned against. They aren't saying, fuck Firefox, replace it with Servo. Instead the idea is use Servo as a way to discover better layout, rendering components and transplant it into Firefox.
See Strangular Application pattern