Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccnafr | Hacker News Reader

But, why?

I'm going to offer a different explanation, but first, the standard one: Mozilla doesn't want to miss a paradigm shift, especially one where the only players currently in it are very proprietary. They learned their lesson with mobile.

One thing that many of us, myself included, are very excited about regarding the Servo/WebRender/Quantum projects is the ability for a fast, parallel web rendering engine to open new possibilities, such as how V8's JIT significantly pushed the envelope of what was possible. Now that JavaScript is acceptably fast, and we have WebAssembly for cases where control over memory layout is necessary, network speeds are the bottleneck of most applications. WebRender's big concept of rendering the entire web at "maximum FPS" is pretty awesome, but it's not pushing the envelope by itself, since framework and application developers have been treating "minimize DOM manipulation" as an important optimization. There's clearly potential with WebRender, but if a majority of used webpages are already rendering at an adequate framerate due to framework-level optimizations (and prior browser optimizations like Electrolysis and Stylo), it may be viewed as superfluous, despite potentially huge advantages.

I think the research in this direction is beneficial, and as a result, I'd like the Servo project to be allowed to continue developing cool stuff. As Servo won't replace Gecko in Firefox, it needs to try more challenging tasks to continue to push its envelope. WebRender has a ton of potential in the WebVR space, since a Web Components-based VR system would rely heavily on a performant DOM. Such a project would push Servo to continue development in preparation for a more functional future web.

WR doesn't help much with DOM update related issues, WR comes into play after that, when it's pixel time. WR is pushing the envelope for creative (ab)use of DOM elements as graphics primitives, like in that spinning cubes demo :) but on a more serious note, leveraging the GPU makes a lot of sense because it's been sitting there mostly unused (only used for layer compositing) when browsing, and it's more efficient at graphics operations.

That said, Servo itself has a fresh DOM implementation and I think there was work on making it really fast.

In retrospect, you're correct. I should have said "WR reduces the cost of the paint/composite cycle".

Because both AR and VR still have the possibility of enormous growth.

Mozilla as an organization these days seems to be hunting for that one trick that will let them magically become big again.

I don't want a trick. I want a good web browser. From its beginning, Firefox got popular because it was just a good web browser, not because of any gimmick. If anything, it was the lack of gimmicks that made it good. Unlike previous Mozilla products, it was just the browser.

I'd be curious to see an interview with their executive team. Their solutions just don't seem to align with people's problems any more.

(Last year, I might have guessed they're just abandoning the desktop web browser market, but today they're the only remaining completely independent implementation, so they've lucked themselves into a position of great importance. A lot of people who never use Firefox still want it to succeed.)

To the best of my knowledge, Mozilla relies on Google for the vast majority of their operating budget. That is a precarious position to be in. So of course they're searching for other sources of revenue.

I'm glad you want Firefox to succeed. I do too. (I'm posting this from FF!) But unless you can find a few dozen million friends to pony up actual cash for it, every year, Mozilla's going to have to keep looking for other options.

Why do you consider a VR browser to be a gimmick? And why is this announcement not relevant to building a "good web browser"? They want to build a good web browser for VR, as well as mobile, desktop, and any other platforms which are relevant today and hopefully tomorrow. Perhaps you are only interested in the desktop version, but it's still probably in their best interests to develop browsers for other upcoming markets. Were you also upset that they spent valuable resources building an Android version?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com