Rust, not Firefox, is Mozilla's greatest industry contribution
techrepublic.com
techrepublic.com
> "Linus Torvalds is perhaps best known as the creator of Linux, but he has arguably had a bigger impact as the inventor of Git"
I had to check that this wasn't an April fool's day post. Linux powers a large proportion of servers on the internet, and has done so for a long time now. The popularity of Git is a relatively recent phenomenon.
> "Mozilla has seen better days. There was a time when it was indispensable to web freedom."
It's more indispensable to web freedom now than it has ever been.
> "there was real concern about the web's future with its primary gateway owned by one big, proprietary company"
I guess they've never heard of Google Chrome? A browser run by a company that's far scarier than Microsoft ever was in that period. The implications of a Google Chrome monopoly in the browser market on user freedom and privacy far outweigh the moral implications of Internet Explorer's monopoly. Not to mention the implications for web standards. Microsoft uses Blink in their Edge browser. If Mozilla were to concede in this area, Google would become the de-facto owner of web standards.
Now, I confess I have grown to not like divs and spans. That said, I am very amenable to "border-box", which is kind of hilarious in historical context.
I also remember IE actually supported fieldset and legend in sane ways well before netscape. Which was very annoying.
Actually, my memory is essentially that the IE team was doing decent work. The Netscape team was faltering. Only reason folks didn't like the IE team is the rest of MS was acting in very bad faith with clear embrace and extinguish as a goal for the browser market. Which ultimately left Opera as the biggest loser who otherwise had an amazing product.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7192490
(edit:) I just remembered that many years later I gave a talk that contained a follow-up to some of the thoughts about Microsoft (it is a big part of the talk, but not the beginning or the end).
(edit again:) OMG people seem to be enjoying this comment, but I stupidly linked to the wrong old comment up there (and even that link is weird: the best part of that thread is a few parents up from that link)... and it is so sad as the actual comment was one I was so proud of... here it is:
Yes for a while there they were doing a great job of implementing Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy by intentionally avoiding web standards conformance and instead focusing on proprietary features (ActiveX plugins etc) in attempt to make IE "better" than the competition
Microsoft licensed the source code to NCSA Mosaic in order to prodcuce Internet Explorer. What were the "standards" at the time Mosaic was released.
What never seems to get mentioned in these threads about Chrome and Mozilla is that Google hired a couple of Mozilla Firefox developers to kickstart Chrome.
Perhaps I am wrong but I sometimes think there would be no Chrome without that help from former Mozilla employees.
> Microsoft licensed the source code to NCSA Mosaic
Not quite. They used Spyglass Mosaic, which shared only the name. Spyglass Mosaic was a from-scratch implementation.
https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html
> What never seems to get mentioned in these threads about Chrome and Mozilla is that Google hired a couple of Mozilla Firefox developers to kickstart Chrome.
Not quite. Early Firefox development resembled Linux: multiple industry actors collaborating on a single codebase—pretty unlike the way it works today, where a single (bumbling) corporation is almost totally responsible for marketing, product direction, and development. Google was one of the biggest contributors to Firefox development. The Firefox lead was a Google employee being paid to do just that.
When Google decided to do Chrome, they pulled their engineers off Firefox, with parallels to what later happened with the WebKit -> Blink fork: an initial cooperative effort, followed by their chafing at the overheads of collaboration and the lack of total control, followed by breaking away to do their own thing.
If there was any amount of poaching/brain drain that should be mentioned but no one really talks about, it's how many ex-Mozilla Corp folks left for Facebook and is partially responsible for the engineering culture there.
Sounds like Mozillians are not so concerned about user privacy if they went to work at Facebook.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. A reading of your previous comment would lead people to believe that there is some part of NCSA Mosaic lurking under the hood in IE. But IE is based on Spyglass Mosaic, not NCSA Mosaic, which are not the same thing.
Mozilla is complicit in this behavior, and they cave time and time and time again.
Lots of platform features are useful for fingerprinting, unfortunately, because software, but they're not deliberate attempts to tear down privacy.
I also beg to differ, AudioContext has a horrible security model (it's non-existent). Browsers don't even care if the website even needs it.
"Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms. Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. "
( https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d... )
No, I think today's Mozilla is harmful to web freedom.
Linux might be used for the majority of web servers, sure, however Git is used for version controlling the significant majority of software produced today. I would argue something that is used by nearly every software development team/company across the entire planet has a much greater impact than something that is used by nearly every server across the planet.
Linux also sees more heavy competition from the likes of Windows and *BSD, where git has essentially dominated it's market with things like CVS, SVN and Mercurial becoming increasingly abandoned, and only niche proprietary systems like Perforce still competing for usage
BSD?
The absolute disrespect towards microkernels. Shameful.
No it doesn’t. Neither of them are even a consideration in most server scenarios at tech companies. Anecdotally, every company I’ve worked at used Linux in multiple forms (severs, embedded, etc) but not all of them used git (Google is the most well-known example).
How many open source projects or tech companies can you cite using an SCM suite other than Git, except for Google which you already mentioned?
The huge disparity in usage makes it pretty clear Git is the only widely relevant SCM suite today. GitHub and GitLab are arguably the most active and central hubs of open source communities, and they're based on Git. Bitbucket discontinued Mercurial support a while ago. How many popular / impactful public code hosting repositories are primarily using SCMs other than Git? I'd be surprised if you can name a single one other than Google's now discontinued Google Code service.
Isn’t Linux become popular in recent years too? At first they use Unix to run servers, you can even encounter some sites running Unix nowadays.
I kind of agree with the saying “Linus has a bigger impact as the inventor of Git”, because we can use git for Windows/Mac OS/BSD software, while Linux can only run Linux Apps.
git is one VCS among many, even if it is the most popular and the best in many respects. It's one of the many tools used by pretty much a single profession. To me it's a bit like saying that a circular saw has had more impact on the world than Linux.
This is Mozilla's biggest problem. Instead of trying to find a new purpose they need to focus on making Firefox a truly great browser.
It's almost funny because Mozilla critics are about evenly divided between "Mozilla needs to move beyond the browser" and "Mozilla needs to focus on the browser". And both groups are adamant that their view is obviously correct.
And sure, Rust is great. It's lowered the barrier-of-entry to systems-level programming significantly compared to the alternatives. But, comparing it to Netscape/Firefox, and coming to the conclusion that Rust is Mozilla's greatest contribution is ridiculous.
In a time where Microsoft was much more hostile to the tech industry and open-source in general, the landscape of web-browsers was an absolute mess thanks to Microsofts insistence on developing their own way of doing things contrary to accepted standards.
Without Firefox and the work Mozilla did pushing back against Microsoft, there would be no Chrome. And while this may be a bold claim, there may have never been a NodeJS and the Javascript renaissance that the industry has seen over the last ten or so years.
From my perspective, when Chrome burst onto the scene and gave us Firefox vs Chrome, it did feel a little bit like Microsoft vs Mozilla, except this time the monolithic corporation won, and we're all still sitting here wondering if we are better or worse off for it.
Maybe I'm old or maybe I just don't get it, but this seems like we're rushing to throw away historical contributions because they aren't as cool and popular as the hot new stuff.
The thing that scares me most about mozilla is the question of which long term revenue generation mechanism best guarantees their ability to continue to develop and mature software the allows for a user focused internet software ecosystem (which WASM is forming of the web).
Sorry for the lack of punctuation there, but I couldn't figure where the fuck the commas should go.
(as a Rust lover and FF user).
Anyhow ¯\_(°ペ)_/¯ Rust is a great example of good engineering. There is a lot of old ideas put together in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.