Firefox 25 is released

Rust is about long-term strategy. They need it to build Servo, and they need Servo so they have a state-of-the-art browser engine in 5 years.

An unbelievable amount of effort has gone into optimizing Gecko, with impressive results, but ultimately it's an aging, legacy codebase. More importantly, neither Gecko nor WebKit/Blink are ready for a manycore world. As Brendan Eich puts it[1]:

The multicore/GPU future is not going to favor either WebKit or Gecko especially. The various companies investing in these engines, including us but of course Apple, Google, and others, will need to multi-thread as well as process-isolate their engines to scale better on “sea of processors” future hardware.

There’s more to it than threads: due to Amdahl’s Law both threads and so-called “Data Parallelism”, aka SIMD, are needed at fine grain in all the stages of the engine, not just in image and audio/video decoding. But threads in C++ mean more hard bugs and security exploits than otherwise.

I learned at SGI, which dived into the deep end of the memory-unsafe SMP kernel pool in the late ’80s, to never say never. Apple and Google can and probably will multi-thread and even SIMD-parallelize more of their code, but it will take them a while, and there will be productivity and safety hits. Servo looks like a good bet to me technically because it is safer by design, as the main implementation language, Rust, focuses on safety as well as concurrency.

1. https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/

Mozilla had postponed turning on the "block third party tracking cookies by default" feature since May, originally slated for FF22 I believe and it keeps getting pushed back. Anyone know the status of this?

Well it's certainly better. But, as some one who has to run Selenium at work a fair bit (it makes me so sad), I can tell you that Aurora is quite savvy and the memory use never really got out of hand but FF24 still crashes after running a fairly long suite.

I think it's fair for you to call me out, a bit. My preface was probably not sufficient or adequately fair in itself. The specific complaint did trigger my memories of a more general circumstance, upon which I then rattled off a comment.

As to the Firefox installer specifically, now that my brain and memory have had a chance to catch up with the rest of me, I dealt with its "stubification" some time ago. When that first occurred, I was somewhat annoyed. However, I fairly quickly found that full installer downloads were provided under the... "other languages and systems" link/page, or whatever it is specifically labelled.

I did also, over time, observed that the new pattern, including automatic downloads and updates -- or prompts to update -- probably would help significantly in keeping the majority "non-technical" user population up to date, particularly on Windows, that I was using more at that time.

More recently, I've been using Ubuntu primarily, and I've gotten used to the release hitting package management within a couple of hours. I reboot daily, and usually check for and install updates when I do, so Firefox updating has just become part of the daily routine.

I do, nonetheless, think there is something of a "dark pattern" going around, in general, of making erstwhile stand-alone processes more dependent upon network-connected and dependent back-end services.

When I occasionally help family and friends out with a new computer, no longer can I download their ISP-provided security software and get it up and running before plugging into the network. Nope -- that's all network-dependent installs, now. (Used to be, you could sign in to the ISP, generate a license key, and then use that to validate against a stand-alone installation package.)

At least Windows now has a default firewall that actually kind of works, and most people are behind a wi-fi router that has its own firewall. These mitigate the "machine will be probed within minutes if not seconds" scenario that's been described ad nauseum in the last decade plus.

There was also a point in time when moving forward in version could and did sometimes break things. Some of use became sensitized to automated updates and no convenient, or at all officially provided, way to roll back. And some of those update processes could and did get a bit annoying of themselves with their resource use.

Adobe has switched to a online-dependent, "rental"-heavy licensing pattern. To subsequently have X million user accounts compromised. (Thank goodness I purchased my full, stand-alone installation of 5.5 from Amazon.)

Dark patterns...

> "Auoera(sic) " [sic]

You mean Aurora, and I'm not sure why you use "(sic)" here. It means "that's how it was written upstream, I didn't invent this!"