Re:Fuchsia is not Linux
by candiodari on Thursday April 12, 2018 @06:25AM
(#16819429)
I think that actually speaks to Joel's point. None of those were rewrites.
Firefox started as a fresh UI reskin for the old browser interface, and indeed continued as "mostly a skin" for years (incidentally, so did Chrome).
(You can still get the non-firefox skin incidentally, it's "Mozilla Seamonkey")
Then the Rust rewrite. Rust was a hobby project, and they rewrote layout engine interface, and nothing more than that. Then CSS.
Now it's an HTML parser, a layout engine, a parallel CSS engine, and a GPU webpage renderer (still "missing"/non-rust are 2d compositing and javascript). Each of those components replaced another in a working version and there were at least beta versions of firefox of all the parts.
Firefox started as a fresh UI reskin for the old browser interface, and indeed continued as "mostly a skin" for years (incidentally, so did Chrome).
(You can still get the non-firefox skin incidentally, it's "Mozilla Seamonkey")
Then the Rust rewrite. Rust was a hobby project, and they rewrote layout engine interface, and nothing more than that. Then CSS.
Now it's an HTML parser, a layout engine, a parallel CSS engine, and a GPU webpage renderer (still "missing"/non-rust are 2d compositing and javascript). Each of those components replaced another in a working version and there were at least beta versions of firefox of all the parts.