Thousands of developers from HN make websites. If they switch to Firefox, at the very least, the websites they make will support Firefox. This won't necessarily make Mozilla commercially viable, but if people are really that concerned about it, they can donate to the Mozilla Foundation.
But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it will get tilted toward that company and away from the rest of us.
That may not be bad for any given business next week; these things take time. But for anybody building a serious business, you're going to have to worry about the long-term, large-scale stuff. Google's been going 20+ years; Microsoft and Apple, 40+; IBM, 100+. They didn't get there by only thinking about the next quarter, and you won't either.
but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.
I'll note that it's a different bad argument, one about consumer choice, than the one I was addressing, which was about business choices. But consumer choices too always have implications. That's why, e.g., boycotts are a thing: small decisions add up.
Everything is a "moral choice" when the person demanding the choice feels strongly about it, but that typically means you just lack perspective.
At the end of the day we're talking about browsers and websites, and while people may not LIKE it, when a business writes software it's a business decision as to whether or not they'll target all browsers or a subset.
In that way there was a quiet revolution toward cross browser support.
The actual argument against (which others are making and which I'm sympathetic to) is that one shouldn't optimize only for direct bottom-line business interests, that businesses and people have a social responsibility, etc etc. But that's entirely different from what you're talking about.
It's a business decision.
That's it. I didn't say we should optimize for direct bottom-line business interests. I said IT IS A BUSINESS DECISION.
It is not the decision of the developers unless the BUSINESS GIVES THEM THE ABILITY TO CHOOSE.
And even in THAT, it's a business decision.
That's all I said. The business that pays for the labor and chooses the direction they go in.
This idea that a business targetting a specific browser is some horrible social problem is silly. If I'm making a product that's meant to sit in a kiosk running Chrome OS, I'm sure as shit not going to pay for FF and Edge support. If I get it on accident, fine, but if something breaks in FF I'm not putting any effort in fixing it.
The price for me doing tech support for free on your laptop is the default browser gets switched to Firefox and Chrome gets uninstalled :-)
I use both Firefox and Chrome pretty regularly, but I'm under no illusions that the quality of Firefox isn't quite a bit lower in multiple very concrete ways for my day-to-day usage (presumably because Mozilla has less resources than Google).
In the past, I have switched family members to a _better_ browser, but I'm talking about IE6 to Firefox, the usability gap between which was 1) in favor of the switched-to browser and 2) waaaayyy bigger than Firefox v Chrome in 2017. Even then, if I had to make that same decision again today, I would probably first convince the person whose computer I was modifying. Especially for non-technical users, having things suddenly change out from under you can be really jarring in an environment that's already pretty confusing.
Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag (not everything is wired at this point), and it also improves perf.
So, yes Servo is of paramount importance for Mozilla's future, because it does make a difference to end users.
Another advantage of Rust is that it allows devs to avoid a whole range of bugs making it easier for them to iterate and ship updates without introducing new tricky bugs (race conditions can be hard to debug).
While dynamic languages may be nice when you want to explore a problem space, the stronger/most static type system is a benefit for upgrading large, mature code bases...
Stylo is still a compile-time option, but will soon be built by default and controlled by an about:config flag. You can watch the progress to build by default in this Firefox bug:
Have you gotten amazing results on your machine? I ask because I think Servo, Rust, WebRender are awesome and I'm rooting for them, but the performance has not been great when I try Servo or WebRender in Firefox on multiple machines. Maybe it's just the machines I've tried on though.
Browser benchmarks should include how long does it take to watch a 30 sec youtube video from application start to finish or how much 3rd party feature/bloat/mal/adware it downloads connecting to $major_site.
As the lead dev of VLC in a recent interview said, they’ve been offered huge amounts of money to include Google Chrome in their installer, and saying no was the hardest decision he’s ever made.
As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites, as long as Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox (see the youtube redesign), as long as Google pays developers to ship Chrome as malware with every single installer, as long as Google forces OEMs to install Chrome with Android, Chrome will rule the market.
The only solution now is the EU.
MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help.
(Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right thing)
With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with via its control of the client - Windows.
Google is influencing what the web is viewed with by simply being such a key part of the web itself, and using its weight from that direction instead.
(One could argue that they have Android for the client, but as a percentage of web users it's still far from what Windows had in the IE6 days.)
Firefox won back the web by having a great product, grassroots evangelism, and a Microsoft who badly neglected their competing product for many years. They left an opening.
Chrome might be losing its lustre but it's certainly not being treated the same way. I think Firefox's new battle for market share might be harder than it was vs IE, simply because Google is still so active on this front. In response, the only real new thing in our arsenal is hindsight, which I guess is what the VLC example above is a result of.
Microsoft was trying (and succeeding) for the web not to be a preferable API to Win32, so as to keep that way a high barrier to entry into the OS business. Which is why IE was squarely against standards.
The Web won because a) its introduction was a one-time technological change whose social impact was on the order of the printing press, and b) Microsoft had gotten fat and lazy on their monopoly revenues from Windows and Office.
We can't get cocky here. It is perfectly plausible that HTML will still render 500 years from now. And I'm dead certain that it will still dominate 20 years from now.
Growing up in a major technical revolution, it's easy for us to assume that the future will have a lot of technical revolutions that will keep knocking monopolists, rentiers, and authoritarians off their perches. And if that happens, great. But we should really be planning for the opposite case.
Internet Exploder was constantly evolving and multi-platform.
Did you forget IE ran on PPC Macs, X86 Macs, Windows, and CP/M?
IE updated... just slower than Netscape.
For a long time being a 90s Mac user sucked as different websites required you to use IE on a Windows PC.
On the Mac it went as far as version 5 only. And never made it to x86 (unless you count Rosetta)
So, through the dark ages, IE was very much frozen and Windows only, for all intends and purposes.
I'd love to use Brave on my desktop too, but their lack of plugin/extension/add on support cripples it a little. There's a couple I just can't live without. Using Iridium[2] on the desktop instead.
I believe Chrome has to be installed, but it clearly doesn't have to be the default. Just see all the Samsung phones with the default Samsung Internet Browser as evidence.
As long as Chrome is preinstalled, it will win.
Where do you see this? I have Firefox open and don't see this on Search, Drive, Google Music, etc.
Transcribing the subtitles:
> "To be honest we’ve been offered some insane amounts of money to do bad stuff around VLC, like shipping tool bars at the same time of the installer of VLC or or installing other software like Google Chrome and so on. And when you see the numbers they propose to you, you’re just like: How the fuck am I going to say no to that?"
> "The thing is, it’s not only my project so I’m not allowed to do that. [It’s the] legacy of other people. That wouldn’t be moral."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/technology/google-europea...
I'm asking genuinely here. Is Servo expected to be have a much better performance?
Demonstrated a successful code execution attack against Safari to gain root privileges using an use-after-free vulnerability in Safari and an out-of-bounds vulnerability in Mac OS X.
Demonstrated a successful code execution attack against Microsoft Edge in the SYSTEM context using an uninitialized stack variable vulnerability in Microsoft Edge
Demonstrated a successful code execution vulnerability against Microsoft Edge in the SYSTEM context using an out-of-bounds vulnerability in Microsoft Edge and a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Kernel.
etc. Highlights mine. All of these are prevented in safe Rust.
My general belief is that general-audience users don't care at all about bugs like those. Which is why we have so very many of them, and have for decades.
It's the same benefit you get from strong, static types in a large project vs one with dynamic/weak types, but for another category of bugs. In large projects, it makes a difference.
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0. Hopefully you'll forget the meme ;-)
Software stabilizes over time, you find problems and then you fix them. How often are these class of bugs causing catastrophic issues?
That's really the important question.
Project Quantum will use only pieces of Servo coupled along with Gecko. Maybe Mozilla will fully replace all of the old single threaded code at some point in the future but I imagine that's a ways off.
Given the gradual progress of these changes it's likely that any successes in performance it brings will be copied in the other engines before they are too far ahead.
Servo, which I think is the most important software project in the world, is where it will start to change. That's when those of us who may not be directly contributing code into Servo need to come out and do our thing. I still fondly remember the NYT ad and the crop circle. We should do it all over again.