[patientzero]

I think people remember a Mozilla that never was. Mozilla was saved by Firebox which Mozilla the organization would have successfully blocked if their institutional processes were not the reason their community was frustrated.

I don't think their processes have ever been better, they got initial and later injections of code from outside. Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around, but their bus has always gone in the direction of the same cliff.

[avar]

> Rust/servo was the moment when I thought they might turn it around.

Because greenfield parallel rewrites of giant production codebases have such a fantastic track record, that we might as well add "in a novel programming language we're inventing while we're at it" just to make it interesting?

[dale_glass]

But Rust is actually a successful language, and the idea of writing a web browser in it is actually a good one.

Security is a huge concern for something like a web browser, which is a thing that keeps on increasing more and more in complexity. So far it seems Java is dead in the desktop space, and .NET has a very minimal impact, so it seems a compiled language is the way to go.

And Rust's excellent support for multithreading is also a big boon since now multicore CPUs are a standard and keep on getting more and more cores.

Overall the idea of building a very safe and performant browser seems like a great one.

[suslik]

Is Java truly dead for desktop? I like Rust, don't get me wrong, but is there anything written in Rust for desktop on the scale of Jetbrains IDEs?

[patientzero]

They had decades to ship next and they didn't want to be bug for bug backwards compatible. Local optimums in hell don't have a path to heaven.

I think demise by drastic jump stories work because the examples are few and notable. Most projects accumulate experts in moving around the wrong optimum who then block plans of getting free that aren't too conservative to possibly work.

[asadotzler]

I was there through all of it and you couldn't be more wrong. If you're not just making things up, you're clearly too out of the loop to have anything to offer.