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Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research

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

#11

Post by simonw »

wslh wrote: post #10
wslh wrote: 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.

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

You can be both things. Generally it's nice to be paid for your work.

"The restrictions (based on security reasons) to install an extension from a site different than mozilla addons"

If someone convinces you to install a malicious browser extension (easily done in a world where people will click OK on basically anything) they can spy on and control everything you do online.

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

#12

Post by Offler »

wslh wrote: 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.…

The security restrictions regarding add-ons make sense, I believe Chrome has just recently adopted them due to the browser being owned by hacked websites.

Thunderbird was a silly waste of resources and should have been shelved well before they did.

In balance I'm quite happy Mozilla exist and have been generally positive.

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

#13

Post by Executor »

Offler wrote: post #12
wslh wrote: 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.…

The security restrictions regarding add-ons make sense, I believe Chrome has just recently adopted them due to the browser being owned by hacked websites. Thunderbird was a silly waste of resources and should have been shelved well before they did. In balance I'm quite happy Mozilla exist and have been generally positive.

Can you explain you disdain for thunerbird? I'm using it as my main email program and am quite happy with ti.

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

#14

Post by noelwelsh »

wslh wrote: post #9
noelwelsh wrote: post #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.

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.

My opinion is that what Mozilla produces in the domain of programming languages is superior to what Google produces in the same domain. I make no claims comparing the two outside this domain.

Google has far more resources than Mozilla, and produces loads of great stuff in many domains.

I use both browsers daily (Aurora specifically, for Firefox) and have no preference between them. I have no opinion on their source code.

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

#15

Post by wslh »

simonw wrote: post #11
wslh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to receive replies instead of downvotes.

"Their transition from an open source project to an organization receiving millions from the Google search box." You can be both things. Generally it's nice to be paid for your work. "The restrictions (based on security reasons) to install an extension from a site different than mozilla addons" If someone convinces you to install a malicious browser extension (easily done in a world where people will click OK on basi…

> If someone convinces you to install a malicious browser extension (easily done in a world where people will click OK on basically anything) they can spy on and control everything you do online.

Do you think then that for example desktop software must be installed from a central company like Microsoft because someone can convince you to install it from every website?

And also: do you think that Mozilla was really doing security inspections in the early days? No, it wasn't, the extensions had all kind of security bugs. I think it was more about control.

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

#16

Post by surrealize »

pcwalton wrote: post #8
Ygg2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This is mostly an LLVM versus GCC thing.

So how does clang do on nbody.c?

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

#18

Post by OrsenPike »

wslh wrote: post #9
noelwelsh wrote: post #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.

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.

To be fair though Chrome was started from scratch in 2007/2008 whereas Firefox has a lot of legacy stuff still hanging around from the early 2000s.

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

#19

Post by OrsenPike »

pohl wrote: post #17

As Peter Norvig argued, design patterns are bug reports against your programming language. Does anybody know what the actual quote is? I love this.

Check out the following

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern#Critici...

Also http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatu...

and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DesignPatternsInDynamicProgramming

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

#20

Post by wslh »

Executor wrote: post #13
Offler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The security restrictions regarding add-ons make sense, I believe Chrome has just recently adopted them due to the browser being owned by hacked websites. Thunderbird was a silly waste of resources and should have been shelved well before they did. In balance I'm quite happy Mozilla exist and have been generally positive.

Can you explain you disdain for thunerbird? I'm using it as my main email program and am quite happy with ti.

I explained it: it has important bugs and the team instead of saying "won't fix" said "it didn't occur".
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