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Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

robert.ocallahan.org

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

#61

Post by asadotzler »

guelo wrote: post #57
fabrice_d wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Google probably couldn't stomach mozilla's open source license which makes it difficult to distribute with proprietary code.

Mozilla's open source license was created 20 years ago precisely to make it easier to distribute proprietary bits with open bits. I'm not kidding, that was a primary goal.

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

#62

Post by blattimwind »

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.

I noticed this a few times when having a massive number of open tabs around (500+). In these cases one process of firefox consumed 100 % CPU and another 40-60 %; restarting Firefox removed the excessive CPU consumption and the spinners as well.

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

#63

Post by rasz »

jgraham wrote: post #36
jasode wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of the few who paid for a web browser (paid $29 for Opera 7 in 2003), it looked to me like Opera really had no choice. There was a post from an Opera insider that I can't find but it was basically this: the web's complexity was evolving faster than the Opera team could maintain their proprietary Presto rendering engine. Switching away from Presto and building on WebKit was a basic matter of survival. Yes, they…

(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…

Idiotic behavior like keeping bugzilla secret (sadly again adopted in Vivaldi due to same people in charge) didnt help either. They didnt even try all that hard before giving up. Opera had an option of open sourcing Presto.

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

#64

Post by XorNot »

SyneRyder wrote: post #48
Noumenon72 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Agreeing with this - I've switched to Firefox on all my devices and I'm incredibly happy with it!

A big understated benefit is being able to run unlock/Adblock on my phone - which has made a big difference in mobile usability.

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

#65

Post by jgraham »

srett wrote: post #60
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…

I read a post once from another (claimed?) ex-employee who said that around 2009 or so, Opera wasn't doing so great and they laid off a dev or two and then after they recovered half a year later, they never re-hired to fill the gap. The poster accounted the technical falling behind to that layoff. Do you share this impression? As for me, I still use Opera 12 almost on a daily basis and the main issue I have is not br…

It seems to me to be overly simplisitc to take a specific event and say "that's the decisive moment where it all went wrong".

Technically Presto had some unique features; for example the inturruptable script engine allowed the browser to feel performant and responsive without having to heavily invest in parallelism via multiple threads or processes. But it also had some architectural differences to other browsers, and never had the market clout to ensure that the Opera-unique features were reflected in platform features and so had to be implemented by the competition, or even to ensure that features that were hard/impossible to implement in Presto did not become required for web-compatibility. For example Presto was unable to implement beforeUnload without a significant rewite of the core document loading pipeline, but that omission from Presto wasn't enough to prevent sites depending on it when it worked in Gecko/WebKit/Trident. Similarly a lot of effort would have ben required to port Presto to multiple processess (similar to the multi-year "e10s" effort for Gecko).

Presto was also highly optimised for memory consumption and so was ideal for running in resource constraimed environments like early smartphones and games consoles. But I think the launch of the iPhone and Mobile Safari changed consumer expectations for the web experience on mobile and Opera didn't manage to respond in an effective way. I have no idea what the optimal response would have been, but if Presto could have achieved double-digit marketshare on high-end mobiles (as opposed to low-end devices running Mini), we might have avoided many of the compat issues that currently affect the mobile web.

Organisationally I think there were other issues; I already spoke about the focus on the particular use case of making a highly integrated, highly configurable, desktop browser product, which doesn't look much like the more successful mass-market browsers today. I think later there were other problems, but I was far away from the executive decision making, so maybe I'm not best placed to comment on what the actual company goal was.

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

#66

Post by lbenes »

tambourine_man wrote: post #49
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.

Not sure why you had issues. In my experience under KDE it was rock solid. It was my primary browser from around 2002 until ~2009. I often tried other browsers and Konqueror led the pack in terms of web conformance and performance.

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

#67

Post by bzbarsky »

loopbit wrote: post #44
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Antediluvian, in the almost literal sense of happening in a totally different world.

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

#68

Post by gcb0 »

it only have optimistic views of google promoting webkit.

completely ignores the fact that google effectively took over the project, killing old features it didn't like and preventing any new contribution from making it to main line unless they fit their plan.

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

#69

Post by ianbicking »

fabrice_d wrote: post #42
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 ne…

> You also totally misunderstand the goal pursued with FxOS, which had nothing to do with "run from their own browser and tech".

FxOS embraced web technologies, but didn't embrace the browser. I think Mozilla is still having a hard time embracing the browser, though at least now the will is there.

Who at Mozilla ever talks about hypermedia? About link text? About navigation? About bookmarks? FxOS was a demonstration of how hollowed-out the philosophy of the browser had become at Mozilla. It used web technologies to faithfully clone non-web UI and OS organization. It would be like reimplementing JavaScript in JavaScript: an interesting intellectual pursuit, but completely useless.

> If anything, the current work to remove XUL and xpcom puts Firefox closer to how FxOS was built, not further away.

Technically yes, but the motivation is different: this is work to make Firefox better, not to make a better-thing-that-is-not-Firefox.

> 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.

The Firefox Desktop team was too small to pursue much of anything. It was like a dozen people maintaining the Firefox frontend. Progress couldn't happen until the organization was aligned to actually support Firefox.

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

#70

Post by moz23 »

toyg wrote: post #51
fabrice_d wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

Please read my comment, before trying to read my mind. I'm telling you what it looked like from the outside. Nobody ever cared for the internal politics of Mozilla; what we saw was a wobbly org that looked anxious to build anything that wasn't their own browser. I didn't say the OS was responsible, nobody cares if FxOS ended up making choices that the browser should have made or whatnot. The problem was not FxOS; FxO…

Inroads on Android? Got data on that? As much as I love Focus, it's irrelevant in terms of marketshare (and it's also just webkit/chrome under the hood). And Firefox for Android marketshare was going down ever since Mozilla shelved developing it. And Firefox for iOS is neutered thanks to Apple's policies.
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