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by liquidpele
945 days ago
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This was my first thought too… They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight. They ignored people’s complaints about memory issues for years. They didnt keep one tab from crashing the whole thing for years, followed chrome to fix. Frankly Mozilla really is a dinosaur and seems to lack any real practical innovation. |
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HN has a serious revisionist history problem w/r/t Mozilla.
The memory problems, and the lack of multiprocessing, were both hamstrung by the Firefox extension model, which allowed nearly unlimited customization of the browser, at the expense of nearly unlimited ability to muck up the internals of the browser. It led to any poorly coded extension being able to cause all sorts of memory leaks, sluggishness, bugs and crashes.
And yet techie types were screaming bloody murder when they started talking about "innovation" via transitioning away from the XUL foundations. They didn't care about performance or security so long as their XUL extensions kept working, they said. I remember those threads well.
edit: oh look, there's one in this very thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349686
Certainly they could have made more progress and faster, had they not had a huge existing community to transition, unlike Chrome who had a completely fresh start and far more resources.