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> But let's not forget that Opera browser earned its reputation for being blazing fast, its tiny size and its low memory consumption on the desktop platforms long before it became a popular browser on the mobile platform.

Just about all of the major browsers earned their reputation for being blazing fast, tiny, and using little memory. And those attributes are well-deserved at their launches. Then real-world pressures kick in -- it turns out that although people love small and fast, that doesn't do them much good without support for X (or being able to handle condition Y), and there are many, many values of X (and Y). Small and fast plus X would still be nearly as small and fast, but small and fast plus all X is decidedly not. Meanwhile, the other engines are evolving too, and everyone more or less converges on roughly the same performance characteristics. We [I work for Mozilla] end up mainly competing on different metrics, assuming we all keep up with "good enough" speed and size.

> It says a lot about Firefox that despite being older than both Chromium / Blink and Webkit, the latter are more popular in many open source and commercial applications because of the ease of use in coding and integrating it in their applications.

Indeed it does. Firefox abandoned embeddability long ago, and only recently decided to try again with GeckoView. And yes, it was a deliberate decision, but not for the profit motivations you're suggesting. It was based on maintainability and developer velocity, when we realized we were not going to out-compete Google with engineer headcount. We had to simplify and reduce our nonessential complexity overhead.

> Mozilla also made some developers sign non-disclosure agreements

Why throw so much shade? I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but Mozilla does indeed sign NDAs for stuff that people will only make available under NDA, and there is some insider knowledge that can only be released under NDA or not at all. That was far more common with FirefoxOS, because let's just say that the mobile industry isn't quite as open as desktop. (Massive understatement!) But generally speaking, we have very little to gain from keeping any technical or architectural stuff private, and quite a bit to lose. We're still a community-based project, and get very substantial contributions from non-employees, admittedly much less than in that past as a percentage (for a long time, we hired up many of the better contributors, which cut both ways.) The vast majority of our discussions happen in open forums (Matrix instead of IRC now, but still mailing lists + newsgroups + various other things). The only private technical stuff I ever deal with is security-related, and even there we're very good about opening up bugs after they've shipped.

> Just about all of the major browsers earned their reputation for being blazing fast, tiny, and using little memory.

Not like Opera though who made performance and small size (and power optimizations) as their core philosophy.

(This was the browser whose popularity even frightened Microsoft, whose infamous Internet Explorer had I think nearly 80% market share at the time. So much that they deliberately ensured that their website broke on Opera. And it forced them to reluctantly focus on the Trident engine that powered IE again - till then, they had been ignoring IE because Microsoft was rightly genuinely frightened of competing on and with the web).

Starting with the mindset of making a fast, small and efficient engine that could run on constrained systems was the reason Presto outshined other engines. Later this extended to optimising their code for lower power consumption too.

That's the main difference with Gecko, Chromium / Blink and Webkit (to a lesser extent) who did focus on optimising for speed but were a bit more lax on the memory and power aspect and only started addressing it after users started complaining (and ofcourse, only after they made mobile platform a priority). I still remember how we users grumbled when Opera installers crossed the 10 MB size :) ... but Opera still managed to keep us hooked by introducing a plethora of features while still trying their best to maintain an efficient code base and deliver it in a smaller package. Compared to it, equivalent versions of Firefox and other browsers at that time (and even today) seem very bloated in comparison because it's not a priority to them.

> Then real-world pressures kick in -- it turns out that although people love small and fast, that doesn't do them much good without support for X (or being able to handle condition Y), and there are many, many values of X (and Y).

Sure, but this doesn't apply to Opera. Opera kept their high standard and core philosophy intact till the last version before management failed them. It maintained feature parity with competing browsers till the end, before it was sold off and dumped for Blink to cut costs.

Opera didn't fail because it couldn't keep up with web standards or in introducing new features, but because of poor business management.

If Opera's founder is to be believed, they just couldn't allocate enough resources for keeping track of, and patching broken popular sites that don't follow web standards. (This is the reason he gave for abandoning Presto, and selling his company, and then choosing Blink for his new Vivaldi browser).

Opera the business failed, but their product was top notch and better than their competitors till the end. If I remember right, I stuck with it till 2017-18 before I moved on to Firefox and later to Ice Cat, Pale Moon and Safari.

> We [I work for Mozilla] end up mainly competing on different metrics, assuming we all keep up with "good enough" speed and size.

Yeah, that's spot on - that's what I've always felt about Firefox, that Mozilla's philosophy is to be "good enough", and that's why to us consumers the product (Firefox) feels "average". There is nothing much to feel excited about in terms of performance or features. That's the area (performance and features) that Opera excelled in.

> And yes, it was a deliberate decision, but not for the profit motivations you're suggesting.

I am sorry but I don't believe this - it was very much for profit too. I do believe it was to ensure the project isn't forked easily to build a competing product. Just look at Goanna / Pale Moon struggling to maintain quality and feature parity now. (Ofcourse they are also struggling because of the design decisions they made).

Chromeless Firefox was a very interesting project. Killed before it could become popular. Vivaldi browser is based on a similar idea and its enjoying some success.

My point is that it is a smart decision from a purely business perspective - look at all the relatively successful fork of the Chromium browser. And browsers based on webkit. There are many people who don't like the current direction of Mozilla and / or Firefox and they would gladly jump on to decent a fork if it were easy to do so.

> It was based on maintainability and developer velocity, when we realized we were not going to out-compete Google with engineer headcount. We had to simplify and reduce our nonessential complexity overhead.

That's MBA manager speak - lots of buzzwords that don't really convey anything meaningful. ;)

My perspective is that as an open source project, Mozilla shouldn't sacrifice product quality for short-term gains. They should fix bugs rather than focusing on new features or products even if they lose ground to other browsers. Their focus should be on quality rather than trying to compete with a corporate product and keep pushing release after release just for the sake of competing and "staying relevant".

> Why throw so much shade? ... we have very little to gain from keeping any technical or architectural stuff private, and quite a bit to lose.

That is exactly why I found it interesting that an open source project was asking volunteers to sign NDAs! (https://medium.com/@smsnobin77/firefox-build-macos-f1f53d643...)

As for the snark against Mozilla - your perception is right. I do have a certain level of antagonism against the foundation. It stems from the following reasons:

(1) They are a million+ dollar foundation and still produce an "average" product. Comparing them to other open source projects with much, much smaller budgets that produce high quality softwares really irks me.

(2) Some of their recent management decision range between foolish to greedy. E.g. Forcing Pocket on unsuspecting users (I strongly suspect some members where bribed to push this integration). E.g. Including closed source DRM in the browser (if users want to download a plug-in to watch DRM protected media, then they should have a choice to do so. Google and Cisco, if I remember right, now have a monopoly on this because of Mozilla).

About the NDA part: some community members have the possibility to sign an NDA and get access to some Mozilla Corp information before it is public. This is absolutely not required to contribute to the code base.

About DRM: Mozilla fought against it, and caved when it became clear they could not win. But Firefox users still have to opt-in to install the binary blob (eg. Widewine), it's not bundled in the browser.

> About DRM: Mozilla fought against it, and caved when it became clear they could not win.

While I do believe there was genuine opposition to this move within the community, I think the real decision makers had already made up their minds and just made a show of "discussing" it. I feel they did it under pressure, and perhaps were even induced with promises of more revenue, from Google.

And where was the question of really caving? All they had to do was ask Google (or any other company) to develop a browser plugin for Firefox and let the user decide if they wanted it (when a user encountered it on a site, produce a pop-up alerting the user to the plug-in required). And maybe then we would have some real competition in this space too as a new plug-in war would have developed ...

> But Firefox users still have to opt-in to install the binary blob (eg. Widewine), it's not bundled in the browser.

That's not true - it's been opt-in by default for a long time. See here - https://imgur.com/a/iCTmnzN ...

I think since EME free versions were released, at some point a policy decision was taken to make it "opt out" in the usual general releases, as a technical person would rather opt for the EME Free version or go through the options and disable it if they so desired, where as a non-technical user might get confused about EME or DRM or plug-ins ...

I fear that the Google DRM binary blob has actually made it much easier for them to uniquely fingerprint every Firefox user with EME / Widevine despite all the ad-blockers and anti-fingerprint extensions or techniques being used. In other words, I fear that Firefox (knowingly or unwittingly) has aided Google in killing privacy on the web.

> While I do believe there was genuine opposition to this move within the community, I think the real decision makers had already made up their minds and just made a show of "discussing" it. I feel they did it under pressure, and perhaps were even induced with promises of more revenue, from Google.

The problem with beliefs is that there is no option to disprove them. Mozilla said they fought against it, the people who were there say they did fight against it, you don't believe it and think it's some kind of "show" put up.

> All they had to do was ask Google (or any other company) to develop a browser plugin for Firefox and let the user decide if they wanted it (when a user encountered it on a site, produce a pop-up alerting the user to the plug-in required).

And what incentive would companies have had to do that? Firefox simply doesn't have the market share to force anyone to develop for them. Even worse, Google has every incentive to not do it and instead pop up a banner "hey, looks like your browser doesn't support YT, use Chrome". People who argue that Mozilla was wrong to accept the DRM blob never have a good answer for this and usually then end in "people would have seen that Mozilla is right and boycotted YT" or "who cares if Mozilla has only 1% market share, it's far more important to never make any compromise".

> Firefox simply doesn't have the market share to force anyone to develop for them. Even worse, Google has every incentive to not do it and instead pop up a banner "hey, looks like your browser doesn't support YT, use Chrome". People who argue that Mozilla was wrong to accept the DRM blob never have a good answer for this and usually then end in "people would have seen that Mozilla is right and boycotted YT" or "who cares if Mozilla has only 1% market share, it's far more important to never make any compromise".

It wasn’t just Google: Microsoft and Apple also sold both DRM systems and content, and all three loved the idea of getting rid of Adobe. I never could get anyone to offer a credible theory for how Mozilla could fight those odds.

> And what incentive would companies have had to do that? Firefox simply doesn't have the market share to force anyone to develop for them.

- Firefox has enough of a marketshare that nobody ignores them. - If Google wouldn't, someone else would have. - The content providers (Netflix, Prime, Hulu etc.) would have forced them to do so.

I don't buy these arguments. And the fact that Mozilla makes it opt-in by default shows that the Mozilla board is now more concerned about revenue from Google and squeezing it as much money from their product than actually improving it. I wish the Firefox developers had more voice.

> Just look at Goanna / Pale Moon struggling to maintain quality and feature parity now. (Ofcourse they are also struggling because of the design decisions they made

What design choices? If they would ride on Firefox release cycle, Pale Moon would lose its advantages.

True. I meant that some of the struggles that they are facing in keeping parity with current Gecko development is because of the goals they have. I use Pale Moon sometime but it's performance on mac leaves a lot to be desired. I also worry about security issues on it ...

P.S: I hope you didn't feel attacked because of my harsh opinions in my prevoius reply to you. My ire is directed at the Mozilla foundation, and not at contributor employees like you who help to build a useful software.

> And yes, it was a deliberate decision, but not for the profit motivations you're suggesting. It was based on maintainability and developer velocity, when we realized we were not going to out-compete Google with engineer headcount. We had to simplify and reduce our nonessential complexity overhead.

How naive to think that copying your competitor makes you gain many users!

Edit (references):

1. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-addons-future.ht...

2. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-29-sucks.html

3. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-suckfest.html

4. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-disable-australi...

> I disagree. (I continued to use the last version of Opera Presto for a few year even after it was abandoned, and it continued to outperform other browsers on both platforms - Windows and macOS, though the macOS version was a bit more buggy).

Loading my profile on Twitter leads Presto to use more memory than Firefox. (Though really that's a terrible benchmark, probably want to disable in-memory caching.)

> Let's not forget that Presto already supported a lot of HTML5 features(1) before it was abandoned. (Even today, it works surprisingly well on most websites, though it does show its age a bit). And while the last few versions did seem to be a bit more resource heavy, I attribute that to development suffering because of the upheaval in the company - morale was low as many developers were laid-off while the management was also negotiating a sell out with investors. This naturally stunted the development of the core browsers parts in the end.

In all due respect, you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about, neither with when there were lay-offs or with how morale was internally. Morale only really collapsed after the move to WebKit, nor had there been lay offs for several years prior.

The increases in memory consumption were primarily down to changing trade-offs with performance v. memory consumption, and certainly a fair number of these were configurable at compile-time (heck, Futhark stayed around for a while after Carakan was shipping on desktop precisely because it's memory consumption was lower).

> I can't comment much about this - The source code of Opera Presto is out there on the net, and it is definitely much easier to understand than the Firefox codebase. I also remember that the popular Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver used the presto engine at one point.

The graph of module dependencies was… quite something. There was a _lot_ of mutual dependencies between modules, so in many ways it really wasn't modular.

As for embeddability, I'll point out that typically there were multiple implementations of platform layer stuff across the company (heck, Core maintained an almost entirely separate implementation to Desktop for all the platform layer stuff, despite the test browser running _on the same platforms as Desktop_). You had to write a lot of code to get the browser running on a new platform.

As for all your comments about Gecko's embeddability, I'm not even going to give them a response; they've largely been covered already.

> Loading my profile on Twitter leads Presto to use more memory than Firefox. (Though really that's a terrible benchmark, probably want to disable in-memory caching.)

That's not surprising as current Firefox has indeed made improvements. Your argument is disingenuous if you aren't comparing Opera presto with the equivalent version of Firefox of the same period. Firefox than couldn't even manage 10-20 tabs, without high RAM consumption, whereas Opera Presto could easily handle around 100+.

> Morale only really collapsed after the move to WebKit, nor had there been lay offs for several years prior.

I didn't claim the layoffs started years before they were sold. Opera was a solid company for some time. But many employees were laid off prior to Opera being sold to their current owners, mostly the marketing and support staffs and some developers. Morale was indeed low in the company. And rumours were already swirling around in Opera forums and popular Opera fan blogs that Presto would be dumped. (And it was dumped ultimately for Blink, a fork of webkit, created in partnership with Google).

Your point about some memory issues with engines, compared to the previous versions, are correct. Despite those issues, Opera Presto was still better than Gecko during the same period.

My point is to compare Apple to Apple - highlighting the weak point of a browser engine, whose development has since been abandoned, by comparing it to Gecko's current modern avatar doesn't make sense, when my argument is that Presto was a better engineered product than other browser engines of its times. Ofcourse I agree that Firefox has come a long way and is far better now. (That's why I shifted to it after Opera died).

> The graph of module dependencies was ... so in many ways it really wasn't modular.

Perhaps so. It is still easier to understand than Firefox's mish-mash of a codebase, because it is smaller and better coded.

> The source code of Opera Presto is out there on the net

I don't suppose it's been open-sourced, has it? It would be great to have an alternative browser engine out there, instead of just three (or two and a half, depending on how you count Blink and Webkit).

> I don't suppose it's been open-sourced, has it?

No, it was leaked illegally. Opera filed a lot of DMCA complaints with many online Git repository services to get the code removed from them. But you can still find it if you Google hard. I also recall reading that some Russian developers were working on the leaked code and had also released a "newer" version with some patches (Opera presto was really popular in Russia) but I couldn't find it.

There is another little known open source browser project independent of Gecko, webkit and Blink currently being developed but I just can't remember its name, even though I tried compiling it on my system ... damn ... I'll post an update when its name comes to mind.

Servo maybe?

No, it was NetSurf - https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ ...

No, but there is an effort to recreate it with the Otter Browser: https://otter-browser.org/

Otter browser uses WebKit, so it's not a new engine.

I remembered - the relatively unknown browser called NetSurf - https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ ...