Comment by BrendanEich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BrendanEich | Hacker News Reader

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See my reply just above. You ignore high costs of multiple engines, both intrinsic and inter-engine -- including, notably, a memory cycle collector of some sort, with its attendant write barrier costs. See Fil Pizlo on webkit-dev the other year:

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/...

As for your lamenting the lack of Machiavellian market power abuse by Google, it really is not clear that even Google can force Dart down others' throats, or its own throat. Rewriting JS code in Dart is a net lose, as far as I can tell. No Google property yet uses Dart, even with dart2js (I welcome correction).

Ignoring the morality of such market-power shenanigans (hey, I was at Netscape, but I've paid my dues, and someone had to be "first" :-P), it is also not clear "Mozilla would then have no choice". Money AKA energy is not free; Mozilla can least afford follies; there is always an option to reject a neo-standard.

Microsoft could not make VBScript stick in the '90s. I say this is signal, yet again. Multiple and mandatory HTML scripting languages exact high direct and indirect costs. Lack of such an outcome is not a conspiracy or tragedy. It's economics and evolution in action.

Update: WSH, shebangs, wow. You forgot about security!

An example of a power-play and widely deployed de-facto standard that we resisted at Mozilla, wisely: ActiveX plugins. Independent companies emulated some of the ActiveX COM APIs, plus basic MS COM, on Unixen, in the '90s and into the noughties. Lack of spec and open source were not a barrier, and MS documented well.

Was MS abusing market power? The US v. Microsoft case said they were. They definitely caused plugin vendors to support ActiveX _en masse_. And they then dropped the old Netscape Plugin API, which led many such vendors to drop NPAPI too, leaving those plugins IE-only.

Yet we at Mozilla resisted ActiveX, successfully. We did not just hold the line, we restarted NPAPI incremental evolution via the plugin-futures@mozilla.org list I created, and meetings jst@mozilla.org and I convened with Apple, Opera, Real Networks, Dolby, and Macromedia.

Even a convicted monopolist couldn't ram ActiveX down other browser vendors' throats, when it could and did do so to plugin vendors and some web developers. Google with Chrome is not yet near MS IE's monopoly share. So again, I think you should be more skeptical of your own assertions and assumptions about "no choice".

"An example of a power-play and widely deployed de-facto standard that we resisted at Mozilla, wisely: ActiveX plugins. Independent companies emulated some of the ActiveX COM APIs, plus basic MS COM, on Unixen, in the '90s"

Thanks for doing this Brendan.

I was at a young startup at the time and an MS dev team gave us access to the IE Trident preview with ActiveX [0] and you could tell it was a pile of horse, without even implementing it.

   '*you what?* create a plug-in, only works on IE, 
    then everyone has to download it?'

Totally against the grain of how the web worked and still works.

[0] IE4 layout engine: https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipe...

> it really is not clear that even Google can force Dart down others' throats

It's peculiar that Google claims that it is utterly impotent to persuade developers to use Pointer Events, and so it is going to give up even trying, and yet it continues to develop Dart and make vague noises about integrating it into the browser.

Google's own developers use Dart for Google products, no? I think that pressure is grassroots even if it is internal. And even if Dart remains permanently a compile-to-js language, as tragic as that would be, it's still an incremental improvement over GWT.

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