Hacker News Reader

> Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these days?

Mozilla amazes me with their org-bloat-to-products-they-sell-for-money ratio. They have programming language teams, research bloggers, occasional splashy products, an in-house bug tracker, and oh yeah, they make a web browser.

I don't know how they do it, but it seems to be working out for them. If I was the CEO of a company that only had one customer, I would probably not be hiring software engineers to write a programming language that's not even used for the core product. But, I guess that's why nobody ever asks me to be the CEO of a company!

> I would probably not be hiring software engineers to write a programming language that's not even used for the core product.

Rust is used in Firefox

I'm really glad that Mozilla is developing Rust. Even though I'm not using it (and haven't even learned it), it looks like a net positive for the world of software development. This is exactly the kind of thing that a nonprofit should do.

Most of the rusty Mozilla team was laid off last year. Also: the MDN team.

I agree, I don't think there's enough research here. If it were just one browser, perhaps designer choice.

But it is two browsers that chose blue, so perhaps there is some underlying Unix-y reason. Maybe early ncurses had chosen that blue for something unrelated to the web, and the decision goes back further.

Or maybe it was just lack of choices. For example, of the 16 original hex colors, blue & purple IMHO look the least like crap when mixed in with black text. Maybe its just that simple? red is too alarming, green is too bright, yellow/magenta/cyan/grey are too hard to read... now I'm speculating, but I think the answer might be an unrelated pattern in some other color-related origin.

Mosaic and Netscape didn't do black text on a white background. The default background was gray.

“Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI style at the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and the software designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink was clickable.”

For a comment complaining about unsubstantiated speculation this struck me as exactly that…

The default background was gray for Netscape, even on Windows, presumably because that was the default background for common Unix toolkits like Motif/X. Even Internet Explorer defaulted to gray. See these Wikipedia articles containing screenshots:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator

In particular, notice the IE2 screenshot, which shows it displaying the more modern Wikipedia website using a gray background. IE2 doesn't understand CSS, so just displays the source. The CSS declares a white background, so we can infer that the HTML probably does not declare a gray background using the long forgotten BODY tag BGCOLOR attribute. (Rather, almost certainly the HTML doesn't use the BGCOLOR attribute at all.)

It's possible that Mosaic defaulted to white on Mac OS, but I doubt it. Netscape didn't back then, IIRC.

For a long time gray and gray-toned backgrounds were ubiquitous on the web. It was nice because white backgrounds are difficult on the eyes, especially for prolonged periods. Unfortunately, white eventually began to dominate, as it already did for most Windows and Mac applications. Now we're coming full circle with dark theming, though dark theming is typically much darker than the old web and old X applications.

I seem to remember (Sun workstations) that Mosaic was white while Netscape was gray.

Reads like a really young person who is overconfident in their abilities and lacks any actual experience with any of the things they mention. Every geezer on here knows Mosaic had blue links because they used it.

Last year Mozilla laid off a lot of people from the MDN team. This might be the result of cutting costs for them.

Why not green?

For the same reason they didn't use red. Red and green have meaning in many cultures, especially the one that invented the web. As stated by the parent commenter, blue is more neutral.

"While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined." -Ben Shneiderman

Ben likes to actually run controlled experiments and measure things like that, instead of just speculating! ;)

See the email quoted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104

Green/Red has a connotation; plus green has poorer contrast. Blue is meaning-neutral and reads well.

Blue has an established connotation for marking up text. E.g once upon a time a newspaper editor would scribble notes in original copy before sending to the printers. It stands out against black text but is unobtrusive.

That was a particular hue called “non-photo blue”. It photographed as white when using the common photo-offset printing process. So you could make comments, on the camera-ready copy, that people could read, but that wouldn’t reproduce. I’m old and had proofreading jobs in high school.

I'm confused, is it really camera-ready if the editor still has comments?

What are these comments? "Nice word choice" "No changes here" "This is perfect" "(smiley face)"

It’s camera-ready but might get some comments from a last-chance lookover: “Should this be capitalized?” written in the margin, for example. If the answer is no, it’s OK as is, then the copy can go to the camera without having to be set again. This is more a proofreading stage than an editing stage; that part is long over.

EDIT: Also used for printing instructions, to make sure that things come out in the right order, for instance.

My understanding was in those days copy and paste was a literal thing, so I guess what eventually went to the printer might end up being a frankendoc of sorts …

There is a neat technique called ”stripping in” that lets you cut a word out of the page and replace it with the corrected word from another page. You can use it to correct a misspelling if the length of the corrected word is the same as the wrong one; it avoids having to reset the whole page.

You put the page with the correct word underneath the copy, on a light table (a real one). With an exacto knife, carefully cut out the word, cutting through both sheets. Now the correct word fits exactly in the hole. Hold it together with a piece of white tape (standard supply in all these shops) on the back. The mend is invisible.

It was also the color in which TSR would print maps for old Dungeons and Dragons modules, so that players couldn't photocopy them and pass them around. Functioned as copy-protection.

Oh yes, I forgot that many ordinary photocopiers also see non-photo blue as white.

That's really speculation but there are certainly reasons against it. Mostly that red-green blindness is the most common color blindness and that blue is considered a more serious color. For instance banks often choose blue as predominant color. Maybe that's also something worth considering for an experimental technology.

Maybe people back then want something different because the most common monitor back in the day was a green on black monitor. Having blue is refreshing looks new.

>Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these days?

That would explain whatever happened to Firefox.

Shameless plug: If anyone is looking to get rid of Chrome but don't like Firefox for any reason, try Brave, it is a great browser, really.

Or Ungoogled Chromium, if you're more interested in protecting your privacy than you are collecting $0.30 of digital currency every month.