341–350 of 352 posts
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When will I be able to zoom and flick back and forward with the TouchPad? Firefox is desperately behind, at least in usability.
Total side point, but using FF on a Mac flicking back and forward with the touchpad works for me. I've been using it so long I can barely remember a time when it didn't work.
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> " The actual reality of this is that they are still kept alive by a direct competitor for decades and haven't made anything to generate significant sources of revenue. Maybe they should turn into a Rust consultancy of some sort. I don't know. " The odds of them being able to build a business that that replaces the several hundred million they get from Google (which is essentially pure profit, not even revenue) are…
> The instant Google decides they're no longer useful, Mozilla is going to go poof. People keep repeating this but couldn't Bing replace Google as the default? The "default search engine" position is actually worth money.
Consider this: Firefox's remaining userbase is mostly quite technically sophisticated users. Are they going to blindly end up searching on Bing all day because they don't know how to change the search box default? No. They're going to set the default back to Google, and carry on as before, except then Mozilla don't get paid for it.
Google have a few reasons to cut them off. One is, obviously, it won't make much impact on their revenue given Firefox demographics. The second is Mozilla and Apple are dragging down the Chrome team. Chrome tries to introduce new tech, Mozilla vetos it or doesn't implement it. Apple they can't do anything about, Microsoft gave up on Edge and is now in the Chrome camp. If Mozilla dies, only Apple remains on a non-Blink engine. And eventually Tim Cook will wonder why they're funding a poor clone of Blink for legacy reasons, when they could just use it directly and re-allocate the resources to more profitable projects.
Cutting of Mozilla's lifeline is one way to push the web along to standardisation on Blink as a codebase. And when that's done, well the W3C is irrelevant for a long time already, so HTML becomes the API to Blink basically and they add features at whatever speed they want.
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I use Pascal With Lazarus is has a cross platform Desktop GUI
Lazarus actually is impressive considering lack of the non-swift alternatives out there and that React Native still doesn't have desktop support. I'm glad you shared, because Pascal is a language I never looked into before, but it seems like it was ahead of its time, but I wonder if there are any modern dialects?
FreePascal just added RAII for automated memory management with records.
Delphi now has anonymous functions and some kind of type inference for variables
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"All the other browsers" are basically Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. All of which are developed by three of the wealthiest tech corporations on earth, and even one of those gave up on it because they couldn't keep up. While Mozilla is financially healthy, it is very much not one of the wealthiest tech companies on earth. They cannot afford to spend the kind of money on maintaining a big pile of unsafe parallelization…
Opera gave up because they literally couldn't keep up. Microsoft didn't give up because they couldn't keep up, it's just that they came to a realization which Mozilla's also about to come to: nobody cares what's underneath the browser UI as long as the branding and features are there. And in the end ~500 million dollars per year should be more than enough to maintain one software project. Come on, they're not trying…
They had been lagging behind in feature support for a long time.
> it's just that they came to a realization which Mozilla's also about to come to: nobody cares what's underneath the browser UI as long as the branding and features are there.
This is an extremely short-sighted view, also from a business perspective, and one that I'm quite sure Microsoft didn't share. There are very real risks to being dependent on a single huge competitor for such a crucial part of your product, which is why IE (and, subsequently, Edge) came to exist to begin with.
The users might not care, but the company itself certainly does, because outsourcing all the internals to Google means that they largely lose control over their user's experience and, by extension, over the UX of their own product.
> And in the end ~500 million dollars per year should be more than enough to maintain one software project.
Mozilla isn't just "one software project".
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Any Rustaceans who have been working at Mozilla, have probably done so for the mission that Mozilla work on (publicly), not too earn a ton of money. Amazon/AWS, who's main goal is closed down infrastructure, is the opposite of that mission. Worth keeping in mind when trying to recruit people from the opposite spectrum of yourself.
Maybe AWS is going to do something useful with it instead of just rewriting all established tools.
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I am not sure; to be honest, I am a bit skeptical of individuals being able to get enough money together. It's just math. We will always do our best to make sure that no one single company controls Rust, but we do also want Rust to be useful to industry, and so we do want to listen to our users, no matter where they come from.
It might be an interesting experiment for the ex-Mozilla rust team to launch a kickstarter (or similar) project to get them funded for one year. So it would not be individuals but a team with some high-level goals they plan to work on for the next year. I have no idea how many people would fund a project like this but it would be a fast and low cost experiment to find that out. I would not position this as "the peopl…
So I guess crowdfunded project idea is not bad at all. I mean there probably some rewards tier to have some tokens or souvenier
Mozilla's decision makes a lot of economic sense. They got rid of projects requiring lots of engineering effort with negligible benefits for the company or for the internet or for our privacy. I'm not sure at this point if it makes sense for them to keep the Firefox code base or give up, switch to Chromium and focus on what they do best - spy less on us than Google. When Microsoft gave up anyone paying attention knew…
It’s still WebKit under the hood isn’t it? The JS engines are different though
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What grounds do you have for saying it's not a mature language? It's more than 10 years old. Subjectively I would feel as confident in safety and feature set as any other mainstream programming language. I also strongly disagree that Rust has any sort of an uncertain future. It appears to be a well run and stable project. Regularly putting out releases from a variety of contributors.
The norm is for well-run, stable language projects to fizzle. Even massively funded and legislated languages do: consider Pascal, Smalltalk, Ada, and Common Lisp. Ultimately, the numbers count. C++ in 1990, at 10 years, was very far from mature. Rust has come up fast, but maturity, by definition, takes time.
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The norm is for well-run, stable language projects to fizzle. Even massively funded and legislated languages do: consider Pascal, Smalltalk, Ada, and Common Lisp. Ultimately, the numbers count. C++ in 1990, at 10 years, was very far from mature. Rust has come up fast, but maturity, by definition, takes time.
I feel like we're working from different definitions of mature? I'm just looking at how suitable it is for use in production, not whether it's going to last forever.
Look around at mature languages. They have shelves of books written about them, in numerous languages. More of their users are employed to write in them than not. They have conferences where most attendees are employed coding them. There are college courses on them. They are specified clearly enough to make a new implementation, and typically have multiple implementations. Multiple important products are written in them. Users get calls from recruiters inviting them to do it elsewhere.
Rust will get all this if it lasts.
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I expect a bigger corp with a sustainable business model will scoop it up. Rust is too promising to die at this point.
Is it though? Most of it seems to be hype. It’s great that programming languages get researched and improved, but do they actually improve? How is improvement measured?