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The submission title has been changed from "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" to "Mozilla’s project to replace Gecko with Servo" (at the time of this writing). Some of the other comments are pertaining to the "Jet Engine" title. For anybody that might be confused, like I was :)
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.
Others have pointed out that Netscape's rewrite gave us Firefox, so the rewrite was incredibly successful.
Earlier 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?
Eventually a skunkwork project was started to drop all non-browser components and focus on user UI, and that became Firefox.
They are still using many unsafe blocks and there was an use-after-free before :P
I've been looking at the HTML parser they are writing (servo/html5ever) which is incredibly impressive and parses the hideous Daily Mail homepage in my tests in < 30ms. It uses the tendril library which contains lots and lots of unsafe code, but this library is set out to do a very specific thing which is make parsing strings much much more efficient. This is a design tradeoff that is desirable; as long as tendril can be shown to be robust it's a good decision over a slower parser.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, "run" is Past Simple here. It took me a few moments to get that though.
Is that an Americanism? Ran is most common in the UK.
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.
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…
Even though the title might disappoint, it's super interesting to see where Firefox is going. I can't wait for 2017!
Looking forward to it too; this is a big deal because it will put a Rust implementation on many millions of desktops. I'm totally fed up with CPU and memory hogging browser bloat on my laptop. My dev env runs so much better when I kill all Chrome processes. I know that the article is only talking about the render engine, and not JavaScript, which I suspect is the main browser bloat culprit , but I'm still hopeful. Br…