This 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.
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Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
21–30 of 219 posts
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#22This 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.
Wasn't Mozilla the open source version of Netscape Communicator, rather than a rewrite?
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wasn't Mozilla the open source version of Netscape Communicator, rather than a rewrite?
You're probably right.
An earlier version of Netscape was a rewrite.
Mozilla was a refactored version of Netscape (to remove closed-source dependencies)
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wasn't Mozilla the open source version of Netscape Communicator, rather than a rewrite?
Netscape 4 was pre XUL.
Mozilla browser was Netscape 6 with XUL 'hotness' and massive UI lag.
Firefox was stripped down and fast (though XUL is apparently still around).
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#25They are still using many unsafe blocks and there was an use-after-free before :P
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#26> 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 li…
You are still on KDE 1?
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#27> 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 li…
One could argue that Trident (or EdgeHTML as partial fork) is still in wide use, and this started with IE4 in 1997.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#28> 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 li…
You are still on KDE 1?
Maybe because upgrading would require a reboot. :)
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#29> 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 li…
You are still on KDE 1?
No, "run" is Past Simple here. It took me a few moments to get that though.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#30This 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.
> I guess we could land the plane, let all the passengers disembark so they can wander over and take other planes, and not provide any service for a while while we change the engines out… but no — no, we can't do that. Not gonna happen.
> We could keep flying the current plane, while starting from scratch and building an entirely new plane on the ground — special ordering every nut, every bolt, designing a new cockpit, and waiting many years before we to get to fly that plane. But we don't want to do that either.
Mozilla is exactly following Joel's advice.