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mh-

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Status (take note of the then-future dates)

http://www.2ality.com/2011/12/firefox-electrolysis-on-hold.h...

I wondered how they went so far off the rails and let this fall by the wayside, not even updating the project status.

http://www.2ality.com/2012/02/servo.html

Mozilla had to find a replacement for C++ and chose Rust.

. . .

[Rust] Release 0.2, 2012-03-29:

I'm trying to think of a nice way to say that it's maybe not a good idea to invest in inventing a new language instead of focusing on your flagship product.

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First, Rust is a handful of people working on a research project.

Electrolysis was "put on hold" because there were better ways to make Firefox a more responsive browser, now. That's projects snappy and supersnappy. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy and http://taras.glek.net/ and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=718121 -- the final bug being what I think will make Firefox a great browser again.

I thought people want electrolysis or 64 bit because they have so many tabs open that they run out of address space; no amount of snappiness will fix that problem.

The Memshrink project is the one geared towards the lowering of memory consumption for Mozilla projects (Firefox, Thunderbird, and Boot2Gecko mainly).

That's probably a valid concern, but it's at best a fringe requirement, I would suspect, compared to the huge number of people who would want a snappier browser. Electrolysis provided some benefits here, because less parts of the browser would run in the same processes and threads.

Unlike the quip about working on Rust above, this is a matter of prioritization of effort. I would not qualify myself as experienced enough to make the decisions to run a project as large and with as many users as Firefox, but I don't think that Mozilla is wrong here.

I and about half of the people I know regularly test the limits of how many tabs they can keep open. The other half can't imagine doing so. I suspect this is a sharp bifurcation of use case that the project leads have found themselves on one side of, not a "fringe requirement."

New programming languages have been the downfall of many a great tech company, but not nearly as many as "focusing on your flagship product" to the exclusion of a changing world.

Rust, Typescript, Go, Dart are all awesome. I'd love to see any one of them change the world of development.

Electrolysis also broke compatibility with many Firefox add-ons. The code is not dead, however. It's used in B2G.

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