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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla seems like a post-capitalist non-profit for the benefit of bored programmers everywhere, sponsoring such useful work as "lets rewrite the browser".

It's not yet another HTTP, HTML, CSS .. implementation that is needed, it's making these standards sane and fit for 2014.

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> Mozilla seems like a post-capitalist non-profit for the benefit of bored programmers everywhere, sponsoring such useful work as "lets rewrite the browser".

Judging by the number of people who complain that their browsers are slow, it absolutely seems like useful work to me.

> It's not yet another HTTP, HTML, CSS .. implementation that is needed, it's making these standards sane and fit for 2014.

A quick search turns up dozens of standards that Mozilla is working on: https://www.google.com/search?q=w3+module+mozilla+corporatio...

As far as I know (and people don't seem to talk about it all that much), the core of the browser is borrowed from a browser project called NetSurf (yes, there are others besides webkit / blink). So, technically, they're not really reimplementing HTML/CSS/HTTP/What-have-you.

Nope. I mean, the parser's from there, but we're replacing it. We wrote a CSS parser to replace the NetSurf one we used for a bit, and all the layout code is from scratch. There's a Rust library called rust-http providing us with networking.

I see. Thanks!

We jettisoned most of the netsurf code a while ago. It was purely a stopgap measure. Only the HTML parser is still netsurf's and we're planning to rewrite it.

My bad. Sorry.

Do you feel unhappy about Mozilla and what they're doing for some reason? If not, why the rant?

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