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Comment by andrewvijay | Hacker News Reader

I'm on this rust hype train for a long time. This move by mozilla is probably going to be the biggest success story that might give rust a lot of attention. I hope the new engine is fast as heck and uses less battery in all my devices. Please!

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If performance is not competitive, it will not be much of a success story, but it will be more interesting to see how much better it will be in terms of security issues.

It was better 2 years ago (with caveats) - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA

But there's definitely place for speed gains due to multithreading.

After years of the multicore hype, we finally can reap its benefits.

>"If performance is not competitive"

I don't think this will be a problem. One example...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI

Not if in the process they'll make all the existing add-ons incompatible and therefore lose all their remaining market share.

I disagree. If they are able to deliver a browser that's much faster and consumes less battery, I believe that would be enough to make a lot of users change their browser.

Maybe I'm wrong and I'm not a good example, but I the only add-ons that I have installed that I really care about is 1password (which is easy to live without, as I can use the stand-alone application) and HTTPS everywhere (which just means that I have to be extra careful when browsing).

I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of internet users that do not even have add-ons in their browsers, but I doubt that there's any user who would not care about browser speed/battery life.

AFAIK, about 40% of Firefox users don't have any add-ons.

Furthermore, the recent e10s transition was already tree shake of the long tail of ancient add-ons in terms of how many still had old bindings and used ancient versions of the NPAPI.

Then there is the fact that every other browser has, or is in the process, dropped any notion of direct native add-on APIs and an increasing majority of actively developed add-ons for all browsers is now modern "Chrome-style" JS+HTML components.

You seem to be confusing NPAPI plugins with browser extensions.

Firefox doesn't allow addons that contain binary XPCOM components anymore. Everything has to be JS, whether the addon is XPCOM based, addon SDK (JetPack) based, or WebExtensions-based.

NPAPI is deprecated and is to the point where it is only used for Flash.

Sorry, yes I was using NPAPI as a handwaving shorthand for both NPAPI and binary XPCOM to save time. I appreciate the extra technical detail, though. (Because technically correct is the best kind of correct.)

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