Mozilla Laying Off Around A Quarter Of Their Employees

[pal666]

Firefox accounts for most of Rust development these days. 14% of the codebase has been converted to Rust already

so basically, microscope is required to see rust's impact

[Neraxa]

The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers - Drew DeVault's blog

Some people yearn for the bad old days of the sea of Flash when about 80% of web users installed the flash plugin just to use their favorite video website.

Generally regarding multimedia and being "turing complete regarding multimedia, this is done to stave off the hideous flood of proprietary plugins like Flash, Java, Unity3D, Real Player, etc etc. If the browser does not have this, you WILL have these nasty plugins and almost everyone will install these nasty third party plugins, but which will be unavailable for smaller share OSs like the BSDs. So the BSD user wouldnt be able to access that video content such as Youtube.

Probably 80% of web users use video, 3D game playing, even editing and writing documents, through their browser, If the browser does not include these features, you will have crappy 3rd party closed source plugins that only work on Windoze. Its better for the browser to build it on and support it on all OSs with open source code. I also support the web apps concept, which is where people can install sandboxes applications within the web browsers sandbox, and allows document saving to a single document directory for that app. This helps also promote cross platform applications and avoid the flood of single OS applications that has plagued the world.

The web browser has to have a complex layout engine just do table tables, images, CSS and HTML and all of those things a browser has to display. It makes no sense to artificially just do a half baked implementation of that. Web designers generally need good layout control and presentation, and if the browser wont do, youll have the flood of nasty proprietary layout plugins that do it.

So hell no, lets not go back to the web of the 2000s with all of the proprietary plugins and flash garbage.

On programming languages, if no programming language is available that meets its needs, there is nothing wrong with a browser developer putting together their own language that meets the needs of their browser, and also is useful for other projects as well. C/C++ is a garbage application environment and pretty much every C app of any big size has major security issues.

On the issue of WebAssembly, the browser is executing code anyway, so this is just a more efficient way of doing it that can support other languages other than Javascript. WebAssembly is not a more complicated thing to implement than Javascript, its actually quite a bit simpler.

Regarding DeVault's article, his method of counting words is deceptive, and primative. If you have programmed for the web, you know that the APIs are powerful, but certainly something that one can grasp and use, and would actually not be an insurmountable challenge to implement them. Standards go into far more detail and specificity to be complete than a normal programmer would need in daily use.

On the CVEs, that falls squarely on C and the lack of safety and the need to ban risky programming practices like pointer arithmatic, or move to another language. ANY application that uses that language, can end up with major security problems, and most of them have.

[lyamc]

I like Firefox and I like Rust.

I also like "Get woke go broke" and it's hilarious. They pushed out the creator of Javascript for a donation. Now he's off doing great things and Mozilla's laying off employees

[ed31337]

Some people yearn for the bad old days of the sea of Flash when about 80% of web users installed the flash plugin just to use their favorite video website.

Count me out on that one. The bad old days were definitely bad. Flash sucked ass -- it was a Godsend when Apple decided to ban Flash and forced everyone into HTML5. I don't want to watch videos in my browser, but it sure is nice that everybody else does, because now I can download the videos using standard protocols that were previously pretty well obfuscated in the Flash/Real Player bad old days.

The web browser has to have a complex layout engine just [to] do tables, images, CSS and HTML and all of those things a browser has to display. It makes no sense to artificially just do a half baked implementation of that.

This is where your thinking starts to go down the wrong path. All that complexity for the layout engine is a large part of the problem with today's web. It was made excessively complicated during the browser wars, not to give web designers a better framework to build upon, but to lock out upstart competition in the browser market.

HTML sucks because it requires a full parser, but not just a full parser, a parser that can tolerate and silently solve HTML mistakes in ways that were previously entirely undocumented until the WhatWG HTML specification came out (forget the w3 "official" specs, totally worthless!).

But then that's not enough, you need a whole other parser for the entirely different CSS format. And yet another parser + an interpreter for JavaScript. And now probably another one for Web Assembly... Not to mention all the network protocols and extensions going on. This is a treadmill that never ends.

The web doesn't need to be this complicated. Someone needs to put their foot down and force people into a much more coherent spec that doesn't require umpteen different parsers and complexity up the wazoo for a compelling web experience. There will be knashing of teeth getting people to abandon the old crap and migrate, but we did it once before when Apple banned Flash and forced people to move to HTML5. We could do that again, but move to a more sane spec that doesn't require such a complicated set of components to build an operational browser.

Regarding DeVault's article, his method of counting words is deceptive, and primative. If you have programmed for the web, you know that the APIs are powerful, but certainly something that one can grasp and use, and would actually not be an insurmountable challenge to implement them.

Here is where you're dead wrong. It IS an insurmountable challenge. If it were easy, Firefox would've been fast and rendered perfectly long ago. If it were easy, there would be plenty of other viable web browser engines available too.

Instead, today most browsers are stuck with Chromium as a base (or the older Web Kit, a precursor to Chromium), with Firefox barely staying alive as the sole alternate browser engine implementation.

[hotaru]

They pushed out the creator of Javascript for a donation. Now he's off doing great things and Mozilla's laying off employees

the only "good" thing he did was creating JavaScript, and he did such a shit job of it that it took over a decade to fix it.

now he's off running a cryptocurrency scam disguised as a crappy clone of Chrome.

[lyamc]

the only "good" thing he did was creating JavaScript, and he did such a shit job of it that it took over a decade to fix it.

now he's off running a cryptocurrency scam disguised as a crappy clone of Chrome.

If by "scam" you mean "open source and profitable" then yes

Troll harder

[crystall]

so basically, microscope is required to see rust's impact

That's over 3 million lines of code. When rewriting C++ - which is the most common scenario for Rust - we remove on average 5 lines of C++ for every line of Rust we add. It had a huge positive impact in terms of productivity.

[pal666]

That's over 3 million lines of code.

i.e. even microscope isn't enough?

we remove on average 5 lines of C++ for every line of Rust we add

well, i was never fond of your c++ skills

[L_A_G]

Am I the only one shocked to learn that they actually have any employees, let alone about 1000? I truly believed it was a 1 or 2 man operation at this point.

That's probably because of everyone else of that 1000 either being in management or working on things other than the business-essential browser.

So will this bring things on track? Not really when, according to Ars Technica, those layoffs are going to be focusing on developer tools rather than moonshots, side projects and making terminology in the code and documentation less clear because the terminology could potentially upset someone at some point down the line.

Why am I so annoyed over them focusing the layoffs on developer tools? Because they're pretty damn fundamental as the most basic requirement (other than actually running) for a web browser; Being able to display websites correctly. How do site developers ensure this? With the developer tools and that's what's getting gutted.

It's crazy to think how much time, money and effort they've put into things like Rust/Servo, WebAssembly and FirefoxOS, none of which have lived up to the resources used on them.

[hotaru]

If by "scam" you mean "open source and profitable" then yes

by "scam" I mean that they try to convince people it's a real cryptocurrency, but then they seize tokens from users' wallets.