

Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research - kibwen
https://brendaneich.com/2013/04/mozilla-at-15-memories-and-thoughts-on-mozilla-research/

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noelwelsh
Mozilla Research is awesome. They punch way way way above their weight.

Google is chock full of programming language people, but Mozilla's work on
Rust and Javascript (ES6, asm.js, sweet.js) is producing far better languages
than Google has done with Go and Dart in my humble opinion.

~~~
wslh
You can't compare Google Research against Mozilla Research. Google is really
moving computer science forward, just look at their papers and real
implementations (disclaimer: I am not a Google fan).

If you compare the Google Chrome source code vs Firefox you will quickly
understand how miles ahead Google is.

~~~
OrsenPike
To be fair though Chrome was started from scratch in 2007/2008 whereas Firefox
has a lot of legacy stuff still hanging around from the early 2000s.

~~~
azakai
Chrome was started off of WebKit, which also has legacy from many years
earlier. Both WebKit and Gecko have code that dates to before the year 2000 in
fact.

This is pretty much expected for a huge multimillion line C++ codebases, like
all web browsers currently are. All have crufty parts (not sure why GP thinks
one browser has nicer code overall? That's not my opinion based on the code
I've read.)

~~~
Offler
V8 was new and WebKit was still a newer codebase than Gecko.

------
pnt
Rewriting the browser stack in an evolving language feels like trying to shoot
the moon. However, I hesitate to bet against Mozilla when it comes to
impossible rewrites.

~~~
haberman
I love the idea. It will give Rust lots of feedback about real-world,
practical problems that arise on large-scale software. I think it will make it
all that much more likely that Rust will be an industrial strength systems
language.

------
pohl
_As Peter Norvig argued, design patterns are bug reports against your
programming language._

Does anybody know what the actual quote is? I love this.

~~~
gabriel
There was a link: <http://www.norvig.com/design-patterns/>

I think you are looking for an exact quote but the link is to slides of a talk
:(

I also agree with the sentiment, but you Architecture Astronaut will no doubt
disagree.

You really can't just take a design pattern and apply it blindly across
languages. I spend far too much of my time on a C# application where I have to
deconstruct anti-patterns and make them more amenable to change.

~~~
pohl
Yeah, I've shared that sentiment for a while now, but it was the turn of
phrase that pulled me in, and I wanted to know whether to attribute it to
Peter or Brendan.

~~~
BrendanEich
I turned that particular phrase based on Peter Norvig's old Harlequin-era
talk.

I've also heard people say that "design patterns are feature requests", or
"the kindest form of feature request", but bug or feature -- what's the
difference?

/be

------
surrealize
One of the slides shows a benchmark where Rust beats GCC; it would be really
nice to see the code.

~~~
Ygg2
In what? Compilation speed? Atm Rust is no way the light nimble language they
need it to be.

~~~
pcwalton
Runtime performance. This is mostly an LLVM versus GCC thing.

Runtime performance is far more important to us than compiler speed—a fast-to-
compile Web browser is useless if it loses to existing engines in UX or
benchmarks (every cycle counts!)—but we continue to spend time on compiler
speed, because it's important for developers.

~~~
surrealize
> This is mostly an LLVM versus GCC thing.

So how does clang do on nbody.c?

------
wslh
I never liked Mozilla for a number of experiences:

Their transition from an open source project to an organization receiving
millions from the Google search box.

The restrictions (based on security reasons) to install an extension from a
site different than mozilla addons. For me this was a prequel of app stores.

Mozilla Thunderbird team had no respect for people who reported bugs: they
closed important bug reports.

Lack of respect for extension developers breaking compatibility between
versions and not clearly isolating extensions. I remember looking into the
TabMix Plus extension and seeing ~40 IFs handling special cases with other
extensions.

Lack of a good community (circa 2007) where complex questions were never
answered.

I can think about more disgusting experiences...

~~~
SkyMarshal
_> Their transition from an open source project to an organization receiving
millions from the Google search box._

I have no problem with this as long as they use the funding to continue
producing open source software. I don't think it would be possible for them to
compete with Chrome as a pure open source project with no major funding.
Mozilla's role since its founding of providing a viable alternative FOSS
browser is just as valuable and appreciated now as it was in the IE days,
imho.

 _> The restrictions (based on security reasons) to install an extension from
a site different than mozilla addons. For me this was a prequel of app
stores._

For a product aimed primarily at easily-duped non-tech lay people, I have no
problem with this either. As long as the addons remain FOSS.

 _> Lack of respect for extension developers breaking compatibility between
versions and not clearly isolating extensions._

As a FF user I can live with this, as long as the breaking changes move the
browser forward technically, or get rid of some legacy cruft, or similar. It's
definitely not in FF's interest either, as it incentivizes users to try other
browsers, so I expect it's on their todo list, just maybe not as high a
priority as other issues.

~~~
wslh
> As a FF user I can live with this...

The issue is from the developer perspective but also (although invisible) from
the user side. Extension developers make titanic work and users can loose some
extensions in the way of compatibility. Obviously important brands will never
be incompatible but less known extensions will.

