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Just about all of the major browsers earned their reputation for being blazing fast, tiny, and using little memory.Not like Opera though who made performance and small size (and power optimizations) as their core philosophy.
(This was the browser whose popularity even frightened Microsoft, whose infamous Internet Explorer had I think nearly 80% market share at the time. So much that they deliberately ensured that their website broke on Opera. And it forced them to reluctantly focus on the Trident engine that powered IE again - till then, they had been ignoring IE because Microsoft was rightly genuinely frightened of competing on and with the web).
Starting with the mindset of making a fast, small and efficient engine that could run on constrained systems was the reason Presto outshined other engines. Later this extended to optimising their code for lower power consumption too.
That's the main difference with Gecko, Chromium / Blink and Webkit (to a lesser extent) who did focus on optimising for speed but were a bit more lax on the memory and power aspect and only started addressing it after users started complaining (and ofcourse, only after they made mobile platform a priority). I still remember how we users grumbled when Opera installers crossed the 10 MB size :) ... but Opera still managed to keep us hooked by introducing a plethora of features while still trying their best to maintain an efficient code base and deliver it in a smaller package. Compared to it, equivalent versions of Firefox and other browsers at that time (and even today) seem very bloated in comparison because it's not a priority to them.
> Then real-world pressures kick in -- it turns out that although people love small and fast, that doesn't do them much good without support for X (or being able to handle condition Y), and there are many, many values of X (and Y).
Sure, but this doesn't apply to Opera. Opera kept their high standard and core philosophy intact till the last version before management failed them. It maintained feature parity with competing browsers till the end, before it was sold off and dumped for Blink to cut costs.
Opera didn't fail because it couldn't keep up with web standards or in introducing new features, but because of poor business management.
If Opera's founder is to be believed, they just couldn't allocate enough resources for keeping track of, and patching broken popular sites that don't follow web standards. (This is the reason he gave for abandoning Presto, and selling his company, and then choosing Blink for his new Vivaldi browser).
Opera the business failed, but their product was top notch and better than their competitors till the end. If I remember right, I stuck with it till 2017-18 before I moved on to Firefox and later to Ice Cat, Pale Moon and Safari.
> We [I work for Mozilla] end up mainly competing on different metrics, assuming we all keep up with "good enough" speed and size.
Yeah, that's spot on - that's what I've always felt about Firefox, that Mozilla's philosophy is to be "good enough", and that's why to us consumers the product (Firefox) feels "average". There is nothing much to feel excited about in terms of performance or features. That's the area (performance and features) that Opera excelled in.
> And yes, it was a deliberate decision, but not for the profit motivations you're suggesting.
I am sorry but I don't believe this - it was very much for profit too. I do believe it was to ensure the project isn't forked easily to build a competing product. Just look at Goanna / Pale Moon struggling to maintain quality and feature parity now. (Ofcourse they are also struggling because of the design decisions they made).
Chromeless Firefox was a very interesting project. Killed before it could become popular. Vivaldi browser is based on a similar idea and its enjoying some success.
My point is that it is a smart decision from a purely business perspective - look at all the relatively successful fork of the Chromium browser. And browsers based on webkit. There are many people who don't like the current direction of Mozilla and / or Firefox and they would gladly jump on to decent a fork if it were easy to do so.
> It was based on maintainability and developer velocity, when we realized we were not going to out-compete Google with engineer headcount. We had to simplify and reduce our nonessential complexity overhead.
That's MBA manager speak - lots of buzzwords that don't really convey anything meaningful. ;)
My perspective is that as an open source project, Mozilla shouldn't sacrifice product quality for short-term gains. They should fix bugs rather than focusing on new features or products even if they lose ground to other browsers. Their focus should be on quality rather than trying to compete with a corporate product and keep pushing release after release just for the sake of competing and "staying relevant".
> Why throw so much shade? ... we have very little to gain from keeping any technical or architectural stuff private, and quite a bit to lose.
That is exactly why I found it interesting that an open source project was asking volunteers to sign NDAs! (https://medium.com/@smsnobin77/firefox-build-macos-f1f53d643...)
As for the snark against Mozilla - your perception is right. I do have a certain level of antagonism against the foundation. It stems from the following reasons:
(1) They are a million+ dollar foundation and still produce an "average" product. Comparing them to other open source projects with much, much smaller budgets that produce high quality softwares really irks me.
(2) Some of their recent management decision range between foolish to greedy. E.g. Forcing Pocket on unsuspecting users (I strongly suspect some members where bribed to push this integration). E.g. Including closed source DRM in the browser (if users want to download a plug-in to watch DRM protected media, then they should have a choice to do so. Google and Cisco, if I remember right, now have a monopoly on this because of Mozilla).