I've made a couple small contributions to Firefox. Though I'd been a Firefox user for years, this never occurred to me until I looked at the source in 2015 and saw TODO comments to upgrade a C++ operation to something available in C++11 (that's C++ released in 2011) when Firefox dropped Windows XP support.
I was surprised at the time that so much of the code was ES6. My mentor pointed out that web app companies might need to wait a few years for users to mass-adopt ES6 browsers. On the other hand, Firefox can use ES6 everywhere in its own code where JS makes sense, since it's only going to be running on latest Firefox JS engine.
I think Firefox hit full ES6 compatibility first among the browsers because there was this extra incentive to modernize the codebase.
Chrome didn't have to build off of the Netscape source, so it didn't have the same legacy problems in 2008 that Firefox did. I think Mozilla has done a remarkable job keeping pace with Google, taking this into account.
Nit: The standard was finalized in 2011 - August 2011 to be more specific, so quite late in the year. Full compliance in various compilers was not achieved for quite some time after that - MSVC being quite problematic in that regard.
Major projects - esp. those compiled on multiple systems across several compilers, like Firefox - absolutely could not just go ahead and start using C++11 in 2011.
I was really into native development around that time, and C++11 was the first time I was exposed to the complexities and gotchas around standardization vs. implementation. I've stopped paying as much attention since, but I believe C++14 fared much better.
A number of ES6 additions were initially Firefox extensions (though some standard-track features like comprehensions also got removed).
FWIW internal firefox code has had ES6-like concepts before ES6 itself; and many of these made it into the final spec in some form.
Wasn't it Webkit that hit that first? Whereas Firefox at the time was just 93%.
https://twitter.com/webkit/status/728643624464883712?lang=en
https://www.contentful.com/blog/2017/04/04/es6-modules-suppo...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Foundation_Projects
The foundation has a crazy long history of funding open source and various pursuits. Comparing their style of execution to google is just rediculously unfair on so many levels.
The foundation had engaged in tax evasion over the money raised through the corporation and ended up settling with the IRS by paying a $1.5 millions fine[1], they had provisioned $15 millions for this fine, suddenly they got a few unexpected millions to spend on whatever.
I agree that comparing mozilla to google makes little sense as mozilla was working for google in exchange for 85-95% of their revenue. Without google paying mozilla for their users privacy, mozilla would have had to find an actual business model and would not have had the option to wander away from their core product.
On the other hand, without mozilla google would have been mostly the same though would have probably missed some data about millions of users .
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-gets-lucky-settles-irs-aud...
The seperation is purely legal and financial, no?
They've also been criticized for years for their business model being too dependent on a single income source contrary to their values. They did nothing about it until it became clear that they were losing the game. IMHO this is bad management for years.
First, OS manufacturers who have unlimited power to steer users toward their own browsers. This was true in the Windows days, and it's an order of magnitude more true in the mobile world where one of the leading platforms, iOS, won't even allow "real" versions of competitors' browsers onto their devices.
Second, they're at the mercy of purveyors of web content. How screwed would Firefox be if a couple of major sites like Facebook and Youtube started treating FF like a second-class citizen? FF already kind of feels like a second-class citizen sometimes; as far as I know Google Hangouts still doesn't work on FF: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/google-hangouts-tempora...
So, in the long run, Mozilla is going to have to do something about their tenuous position.
Realistically, they can't blow the doors off of incumbent browsers (Edge, Safari, Chrome) like they did back in the IE6 days. That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Microsoft, having achieved dominance, had literally disbanded their browser team despite the fact that IE6 was atrocious. But that will never happen again. MS, Apple, and Google each have gobs of engineering talent allocated to their browser efforts and the only way Mozilla can excel its way to the front of the pack is if the other three major browser vendors simultaneously slack off at once and give FF an IE6-like opening.
Also, the importance of the browser is decreasing. Watch kids on phones. It's all apps. They don't do jack shit in a web browser. A web browser is something they use, at most, to look up homework answers.
The world is a better place for Mozilla's presence and I hope that, while keeping FF strong, they manage to figure out an Apple-like second act at some point.
They said that for Netscape too (compared to Mozilla/Firefox). At what point do they start writing nice extensible code?
Webkit based browsers don't seem to have the same issues.
But at least they tried. Everyone else just gave up and either accepted Apple's overpriced walled garden or handed over their deepest secrets to Google.
First off their goals, effectively OLPC the phone. A cheap "smartphone" built on web tech that allowed the owner to modify the software as he saw fit.
This then clashed with the partners they found, carriers that had zero interest in owner-modifiable phones.
It was doomed from the start, but it allowed some execs to pat themselves on the back and tell their fellow gallery dwellers that they had done something for the third world...
It was never going to work, and didn’t. Should never had a cent spent on it.
And without grave mistakes ?
Seriously get a reality check.
- Theodore Roosevelt
Maybe it was unrealistic to expect it to work out - one relatively small company fighting with Google and Apple - but I guess some people are optimists and want to believe that the world can be made into something else than corporate dystopia or whatever.
Wanting to believe in something is a thing, neglecting your core product and users to bet on a personal belief is something else.
2. I thought they were bloody stupid ideas.
I'm not convinced that investing in ideas I think are stupid because things I have previously thought were stupid did well is a sound strategy. All it shows is I'm bad at predicting what will do well, so it makes more sense for me to invest broadly across as many markets as possible.
There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.
Think low end android phone (of the time!) running software that was 10x slower than android's.
It's really hard to describe how slow it was if you didn't personally use a firefox os phone. There were times when it felt significantly slower than a 386 running windows 3.11.
Considering this is HN, and not Slashdot, probably several readers...
They developed (well... became the first and most significant major backer of) an entirely new programming language, purely for the purposes of building a better browser. And then devoted tons of resources for years into developing Servo, a massive and complex project that is only being realized now. I'd rather they think big and be ambitious like this, than be yet another stagnating tech company kept alive by former glory.
Also, it's unfair to argue that they have neglected the browser. Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS, and at every step in the process they faced people begging them not to break their things, despite the alternative being the continued rot of Firefox's internals. But they did try, for years, to move forward without breaking everything - it just came at the cost of glacially slow and cautious progress.