More New Mozilla Technologies | Hacker News Reader

More New Mozilla Technologies

davidwalsh.name

49 pointstwapi12 comments

I love pdf.js. A lot of people complained about it when it was being developed, but it is such a simple pdf drop-in for node.js app-developers, web developers and everybody else on a javascript enabled platform.

I just wish they included it on Firefox for Android!

The thing is Mozilla is all about Chrome technology, Chrome parity and Chrome design.

Everything they care about is Google and Chrome. I miss the times where Mozilla was able to think on their own and was no follower and admirer of a dangerous and utterly greedy and disgusting tracking company called Google!

As long as they are following that path which leads more and more away from users with knowledge to users who use Chrome, Mozilla's downfall will continue.

It should be more than clear now, that Mozilla's big hope that users of Google Chrome will fill the void which is ripped open by advanced, power, geek users leaving, is not becoming a reality.

Mozilla can invent whatever they want, but as long as they do not remove the core issue - their new found ideology that only being like the competition will lead forwards - things will go more downhill.

I wonder if Mozilla can be saved.

I have been using FF for many years, recently it locked up my ubuntu 12.04 and 16.04 a few times really badly(used all memory and swap space before OOM kicks in, rendered the machine totally unusable for 10~30 minutes, I always ended up cold-boot it). Two weeks ago I decided to switch to Chrome, so far so good.

While I love FF and hope it gets stronger, its market share is sadly dropping sharply, I recently read it's about 10% of the market share? That's a red flag considering Mozilla does not have the deep pocket to compete with Chrome and the awakening IE, and Safari.

The future does not look rosy for FF I am afraid.

So, I might have a use for Tofino in the future, so I figured I would google it to see how hard it would be for me to find in the future.

"mozilla javascript browser project" and variations don't seem to find anything. Most come up with https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects, which doesn't list it for some reason.

Even searching for "mozilla technologies" doesn't find it (except for articles about new technologies in general, including this article), and it's not on https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech.

If I search for "mozilla tofino" I'm not finding any links to mozilla.org. Even restricting the search to mozilla's site only comes up with themes, addons and mailing list entries.

Any clue on why this project is so hard to identify with Mozilla?

It's probably just because it's new. Here's their blog: https://medium.com/project-tofino

I'd also recommend looking at browser.html and Servo: https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml

A browser built with Node.js? And people think rewriting Firefox in Rust would be a waste of development resources.

I'm pretty sure the idea is that it's just for prototyping so that ideas can be vetted or demoed quickly without having to touch a ton of C++.

It's node.js + electron; they're not rewriting the HTML renderer (which is Chromium-based).

It's intended as a prototyping platform, where they can quickly build UI experiments using only HTML + JS (and React).

Électron ? So it's a Chrome based Mozilla project ?

More less, but it's only for prototyping.

As far as I understand they wanted to focus on UX and use whatever works for everything elese.

Thanks the ux part wasn't very clear in the article

Tofino is not a rewrite of the web runtime, it only deals with the front-end. It's likely not the part you want to rewrite in Rust, unlike Servo which focuses on improving core algorithms that are easier to implement with a fresh start. Once they are proven, we move them to gecko, like the style subsystem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=stylo

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