Hacker News Reader

Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

>Outside the Microsoft Edge browser, users of other browsers on Windows PCs sometimes face inconsistent feature-sets and performance/battery-life across device types. Some browsers have had slower-progress to embrace new Windows capabilities like touch and ARM processors. As you know, we’ve recently started making contributions that provide these types of hardware support to Chromium-based browsers, and we believe that this approach can be generalized: we think we can help to accelerate the web and users’ experience of it by contributing new capabilities to Chromium open source for the benefit of all these browsers and users.

Disappointing that all big players want to contribute to Chromium code base but not Gecko, which is left solely in the hands of Mozilla and presumably is going to find it tougher and tougher to simply keep up with Chromium/Skia/Blink etc.

View on HN

At the same time I see they are doing a lot of experimentation with Rust and Servo - the way I see it - it would be harder to do that kind of experimentation across companies. They have the chance to do radical stuff and show that Rust/Servo investments actually pay off in the real world.

I believe Mozilla is not going to attempt to play catch up, as if they need to catch up to others, but to become more resilient, unique and dependable. They won't concern themselves with what others are doing and, instead, concentrate on technical proficiency and usability (and privacy). Firefox will not be going away.

While market share may be lower, they will always have millions and millions of users who will continue to love it.

I tried using Mozilla year after year and always surprised how little attention they pay to graphic design and how unpolished it looks visually, a deal breaker for me.

Have you tried since Firefox 57?

> Disappointing that all big players want to contribute to Chromium code base but not Gecko

to be fair, and as much as I like FF, the Chromium codebase seems much cleaner and much more amenable to external contributions (thanks to its KHTML roots, no doubt :-) ). The FF codebase really feels like something that badly transitioned from C to C++ (and now to Rust !), while the chromium had a mostly coherent C++ design from the very beginning.

Actually, the main thing that (I believe) makes the FF codebase sometimes hard to read is that it had to work on a number of platforms where C++ compilers were just completely broken. By now, either these platforms are dead or the compilers have been fixed, and the code of Gecko is improving steadily, but you can't undo 20 years of history that easily.

On the plus side, Rust is a really, really nice language :)

I read a story elsewhere about this. That author was guessing that this is really all about Electron. Electron apps are becoming a big deal on Windows (even from Microsoft).

It's not just fear of Google and Chromium beating EdgeHTML that's driving this. It's also Apple and their iDevices.

This allows them to bring Edge to parity with Chrome, and by building their own features and proposals on top of that they regain the ability to drive standards.

But they can also errode Apple's moat by supporting web standards and deep device/native integration better than Safari, which lags chromium in standards support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com