It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.
Every day I login into Hacker News. Every day, I see Mozilla FUD.
I tried Servo
201–210 of 256 posts
Re: I tried Servo
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The browser engine should become as the Linux Kernel: one engine and different distros. Try spending a month with a BSD - personally, I recommend OpenBSD, or (yes) macOS. Alternatively, try ZFS where you've previously used mdadm+lvm+luks+etc. The difference is like sitting in a chair that has all of its screws tightened. You only notice how bad was your previous chair once you feel there's no wobbling.
That's more of a distro thing than "Linux being a few screws loose". I vastly prefer the OpenBSD kernel too, but if you use a distro that does things properly such as NixOS, the BSDs are the ones that feel wonky.
> That's more of a distro thing than "Linux being a few screws loose".
That's what I mean. Every distro has plenty of loose screws, because they all package a kitchen sink, but miss the forest for the trees. Meanwhile Linus himself is upset, because he can publish a precompiled build of Subsurface for every platform, except Linux.
A BSD is a vertically integrated base system. Design is how it works.
Re: I tried Servo
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine It's certainly a newer and lesser-known engine. It's mostly been me working on it for the past year or so (with a couple of other occasional contributors). But I do have funding to work on it full time through DioxusLabs (who are building Dioxus Native - a Flutter / React Native competit…
Just skimmed through the Blitz source. Really interesting. I don’t have experience with UI rendering or Rust, but I couldn’t help wondering: if you leave out things like local storage and websockets, why include networking at all? Feels like a separate concern. Genuinely curious. Great project. Wishing you all the best!
Gotta fetch images and stylesheets from the network!
Re: I tried Servo
#204> This is a danger to the open web in more ways than one. If there is only one functioning implementation of a standard, the implementation becomes the standard. I still don't understand why this is a problem. As long as the engine implementing the spec - governed by committee formed by entities other than Google itself - is open source. The problem and the waste of resource is how we are behaving now. The browser en…
Even with the best intentions, the implementation is going to have bugs and quirks that weren't meant to be the standard.
When there's no second implementation to compare against, then everything "works". The implementation becomes the spec.
This may seem wonderful at first, but in the long run it makes pages accidentally depend on the bugs, and the bugs become a part of the spec.
This is why Microsoft has a dozen different button styles, and sediment layers of control panels all the way back to 1990. Eventually every bug became a feature, and they can't touch old code, only pile up new stuff around it.
When you have multiple independent implementations, it's very unlikely that all of them will have the same exact bug. The spec is the subset that most implementations agree on, and that's much easier to maintain long term, plus you have a proof that the spec can be reimplemented.
Bug-compatibility very often exposes unintended implementation details, and makes it hard even for the same browser to optimize its own code in the future (e.g. if pages rely on order of items you had in some hashmap, now you can't change the hashmap, can't change the hash function, can't store items in a different data structure without at least maintaining the old hashmap at the same time).
Re: I tried Servo
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla is nothing like Xerox, if anything Google is the new Xerox: they have way too much money so they throw it at R&D side projects without a business plan. The big one for Google is transformer models, they basically invented LLMs only to play catchup with OpenAI later. Mozilla successes have always been focused on the web browser, from the very beginning. Even the name reflects that: "Mozilla" stands for "Mosaic…
> […] and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect. I’m sure Rust started out as something intended to help with their browser work. But it became a general purpose programming language pretty e…
> But it became a general purpose programming language pretty early, right?
IMO what we've seen learnt from ChromeOS and later their stab at firefox OS is the merit in treating the browser as the system. For that there was a lot of wisdom in making rust that capable. Seeing oxide make their stack is incredibly validating.
Re: I tried Servo
#206I feel guis have taken a wrong turn. We need a simple composable language. I want entire theorems built from the least amount of axioms possible. HTML and css is not it. The sheer complexity is what causes all the bs.
Show us the way!
Form a design team to reduce the amount of primitives in html such that I can do everything that html + css does but with the minimum amount of primitives.
Re: I tried Servo
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Found it! It was on a podcast: https://changelog.com/podcast/604 Here are some key quotes: "something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code." "So what I’ve done is I’ve asked a bunch of people to “Please implement these things in a couple of different languages. And then we can talk about how th…
I appreciate the details. Ultimately I'm not dissuaded from my original impression. I worked at a company doing web scraping, and our code sucked and we knew it, and the lead programmer kind of liked Elixir, and we were always going to rewrite in Elixir one day, and he would mention it in interviews and stuff, and put it on job requirements, but really there was almost no Elixir in the company. We came up with all so…
Or rather, the FAQ shows one influential person over language decisions:
"The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain."
Source: ladybird.org FAQ
Re: I tried Servo
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine It's certainly a newer and lesser-known engine. It's mostly been me working on it for the past year or so (with a couple of other occasional contributors). But I do have funding to work on it full time through DioxusLabs (who are building Dioxus Native - a Flutter / React Native competit…
Just skimmed through the Blitz source. Really interesting. I don’t have experience with UI rendering or Rust, but I couldn’t help wondering: if you leave out things like local storage and websockets, why include networking at all? Feels like a separate concern. Genuinely curious. Great project. Wishing you all the best!
We do have the networking abstracted behind a trait (so people can bring their own implementation if they want), but we need something for testing (and it's convenient for users if we provide a default option for them too). I would also note that our networking support is a pretty thin layer (~200 LoC) around the https://docs.rs/reqwest/ crate. As well as HTTP, reqwest is handling things like cookies and form encoding for us.
Re: I tried Servo
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ladybird has better results in web rendering tests than Servo, and slowly is gaining on Firefox. They are already quite competitive.
Ladybird is extremely slow, it's far from being competitive at all.
Remember you're experiencing a debug build of pre-alpha software.
Re: I tried Servo
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people. They bought Pocket to assuage complaints from people that they were "selling out" by including an optional button in Firefox (which never even loaded any code until it was clicked) that allowed you to set up an integration with your Pocket account and send articles there. They were clear th…
> Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party That's a horribly dishonest explanation. The way that Pocket was integrated into the browser was obviously shady. Most clearly, there was no reason for it to be anything other than an extension. Mozilla earned most of the complaints that they were shoving Pocket down user's throats. The complaints weren't even pri…
The irony being that lots of the complainers then went to Google Chrome to "show it to those corporate Mozilla people".
I am constantly amazed at the amount of virol directed at Mozilla, especially from people who openly admit to use chrome as their primary browser. I can respect people like Stallman who stick to their principles to a fault (and I would argue indiscriminately), but I really don't get how people can criticise Mozilla for integrating Pocket and use that as a justification to start using Chrome. That seems like a huge cognitive dissonance.