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Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

brendaneich.com

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Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#6
I never liked Mozilla for a number of experiences:

Their transition from an open source project to an organization receiving millions from the Google search box.

The restrictions (based on security reasons) to install an extension from a site different than mozilla addons. For me this was a prequel of app stores.

Mozilla Thunderbird team had no respect for people who reported bugs: they closed important bug reports.

Lack of respect for extension developers breaking compatibility between versions and not clearly isolating extensions. I remember looking into the TabMix Plus extension and seeing ~40 IFs handling special cases with other extensions.

Lack of a good community (circa 2007) where complex questions were never answered.

I can think about more disgusting experiences...

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#7
Mozilla Research is awesome. They punch way way way above their weight.

Google is chock full of programming language people, but Mozilla's work on Rust and Javascript (ES6, asm.js, sweet.js) is producing far better languages than Google has done with Go and Dart in my humble opinion.

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#8
post #4

One of the slides shows a benchmark where Rust beats GCC; it would be really nice to see the code.

In what? Compilation speed? Atm Rust is no way the light nimble language they need it to be.

Runtime performance. This is mostly an LLVM versus GCC thing.

Runtime performance is far more important to us than compiler speed—a fast-to-compile Web browser is useless if it loses to existing engines in UX or benchmarks (every cycle counts!)—but we continue to spend time on compiler speed, because it's important for developers.

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#9

Mozilla Research is awesome. They punch way way way above their weight. Google is chock full of programming language people, but Mozilla's work on Rust and Javascript (ES6, asm.js, sweet.js) is producing far better languages than Google has done with Go and Dart in my humble opinion.

You can't compare Google Research against Mozilla Research. Google is really moving computer science forward, just look at their papers and real implementations (disclaimer: I am not a Google fan).

If you compare the Google Chrome source code vs Firefox you will quickly understand how miles ahead Google is.

Re: Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

#10
post #6

I never liked Mozilla for a number of experiences: Their transition from an open source project to an organization receiving millions from the Google search box. The restrictions (based on security reasons) to install an extension from a site different than mozilla addons. For me this was a prequel of app stores. Mozilla Thunderbird team had no respect for people who reported bugs: they closed important bug reports.…

It would be interesting to receive replies instead of downvotes.
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