Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified • Hacker News Board

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#41

Post by fabrice_d » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #19

I wonder whether this scenario is now going to play out in the opposite way, with Google ditching Blink for Servo once Mozilla finishes morphing Gecko into Servo with the Firefox Quantum project. Who would win then? Google's money and marketing power, or Mozilla's independence, trustworthiness and being the renderer's creator?

Not sure why this is down voted. I would not be surprised if Google was working on a next-gen browser engine along the same lines as Servo, or even a Servo fork. After all, there is a Rust toolchain for Fuschia...

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#42

Post by fabrice_d » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #22

At the time this internal skepticism about the future of Gecko was very palpable from outside. Which is why it was infuriating to see Mozilla jumping on every bandwagon they could, eventually ending up with the OS silliness: it really felt like they were trying to run from their own browser and from their own tech, like they were ashamed of not being cool. Thank god they eventually “saw the light” and they’re now bac…

FxOS started in 2011, not 2008. But yeah, that's the usual scapegoat to explain any of Mozilla's issues from the last 5 (or 10?) years.

You also totally misunderstand the goal pursued with FxOS, which had nothing to do with "run from their own browser and tech". If anything, the current work to remove XUL and xpcom puts Firefox closer to how FxOS was built, not further away. At the time some employees even build a new desktop browser around the same tech (not the failed Tofino experiment), that was outperforming Firefox because it had a lot of the "new hotness" like e10s and web extensions. Guess what, the desktop team ignored it, only to do the same thing later.

Mozilla is not back on track at all, they are still playing catch up on the desktop market which is not growing much and totally irrelevant on mobile.

But they have enough money to last years, in a weird way of "to rich to fail".

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#43

Post by sverige » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

Noumenon72 wrote: post #38

jgraham wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I worked at Opera during the WebKit/Chromium transition and work at Mozilla now. But in both cases I'm just a normal individal-contributor type employee with no special insight into strategy or decision making). There are always options. Opera could have doubled-down on Presto; putting more people on the core team, and focussing efforts to keep up with, and surpass, WebKit/Gecko. After all, that's basically the opti…

> which has resulted in Firefox Quantum. How is Quantum doing? On my computer, it's a lot slower; there are slow spinners in the tab titles and another kind of spinner for loading pages that often keeps me from seeing pages even after I already loaded them.

It's not a popular opinion here, but FF57 is bad enough that I have given up on it for the first time in maybe 7 or 8 years. I am now using either Waterfox or Qutebrowser for everything.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#44

Post by loopbit » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #28

jwilk wrote: post #14

I expected an article about 1990s browser wars. 2007-2008 is not ancient in my book.

It doesn't feel that way, but a decade(!) is a long time in our field.

Still, as someone who lived the browser wars of the 90's, "ancient" is not an adjective I'd use for something that happened only a decade ago.

Or put in a different way, if the browser changes in 2007 are "ancient", how would you describe the ones that happened 10 years before that? Prehistoric? Jurassic?

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#45

Post by carussell » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #25

>* There is a huge overhang of security-critical bugs; we have to choose between addressing that and making forward progress. We are putting code-cleanup projects on the back burner for the same reason.* Have they considered rewriting it in R... oh, hang on.

When posting dumb comments like this, please consider doing it somewhere else. (Or better, maybe: not at all.)

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#46

Post by rainbowmverse » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

osteele wrote: post #40

rainbowmverse wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years is a long time. This was back when I still heard people seriously asking if the internet would last. It was even plausible! Google was only a few years out from its IPO. Few people thought the internet could help elect a president (and I don't mean the current guy). A lot changed in the last ten years. It may not seem like it because most of those changes were refinements on things we already had at the time…

Ten years ago my home page showed up on the first page (top ten) of search results for a Google search for just my first name, or just my last name. I've never been particular famous—there were just no individuals with a web presence, outside of tech. [But mostly I just came here to practice using an em dash correctly…]

I'm more impressed with the ellipsis.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#47

Post by acdha » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 7:59 PM UTC

Noumenon72 wrote: post #38

jgraham wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I worked at Opera during the WebKit/Chromium transition and work at Mozilla now. But in both cases I'm just a normal individal-contributor type employee with no special insight into strategy or decision making). There are always options. Opera could have doubled-down on Presto; putting more people on the core team, and focussing efforts to keep up with, and surpass, WebKit/Gecko. After all, that's basically the opti…

> which has resulted in Firefox Quantum. How is Quantum doing? On my computer, it's a lot slower; there are slow spinners in the tab titles and another kind of spinner for loading pages that often keeps me from seeing pages even after I already loaded them.

That's not the normal experience – try uninstalling any extensions and check about:healthreport.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#48

Post by SyneRyder » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 8:02 PM UTC

Noumenon72 wrote: post #38

jgraham wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I worked at Opera during the WebKit/Chromium transition and work at Mozilla now. But in both cases I'm just a normal individal-contributor type employee with no special insight into strategy or decision making). There are always options. Opera could have doubled-down on Presto; putting more people on the core team, and focussing efforts to keep up with, and surpass, WebKit/Gecko. After all, that's basically the opti…

> which has resulted in Firefox Quantum. How is Quantum doing? On my computer, it's a lot slower; there are slow spinners in the tab titles and another kind of spinner for loading pages that often keeps me from seeing pages even after I already loaded them.

Wow, really? I've gone from regarding Firefox as a complete also-ran that I would never use unless necessary, to making it my default browser. Quantum is significantly faster than Chrome on my machine - it does eat more battery, but I feel it's worth it for something this fast & smooth. It feels like I got a new computer. (I'm using a 2012 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM, still on El Capitan.)

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#49

Post by tambourine_man » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 8:14 PM UTC

JepZ wrote: post #37

Somehow, everybody pretends as if Webkit is some proprietary, closed source rendering engine, but after all, it is the great success of the KDE/Konqueror rendering engine, being adopted by some huge corporations (Apple, Google). [1] While I appreciate that we still have the independent Firefox and its brand new Quantum engine, sometimes I feel like the Konqueror/KHTML team does not receive the appropriate tribute for…

While I largely agree, a ton of work was done by Apple before Webkit was usable. Most sites would show subtle rendering glitches and it took a while before it matured.

Re: Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

#50

Post by ForHackernews » Sun, Jan 07, 2018, 8:16 PM UTC

Noumenon72 wrote: post #38

jgraham wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I worked at Opera during the WebKit/Chromium transition and work at Mozilla now. But in both cases I'm just a normal individal-contributor type employee with no special insight into strategy or decision making). There are always options. Opera could have doubled-down on Presto; putting more people on the core team, and focussing efforts to keep up with, and surpass, WebKit/Gecko. After all, that's basically the opti…

> which has resulted in Firefox Quantum. How is Quantum doing? On my computer, it's a lot slower; there are slow spinners in the tab titles and another kind of spinner for loading pages that often keeps me from seeing pages even after I already loaded them.

In my experience, it's spectacular. I've switched back from Chromium to Firefox. It feels snappier than Chrome, and the newer dev tools means I don't miss Firebug.