[bayindirh]

> Have you actually seen Firefox source code?

Yes.

> It's horrible; not one bit surprising that Chromium won!

Nope. It's just old (maybe older than you, even, IDK). It's Netscape, actually. It's very commendable that the codebase we're talking about has been successfully evolved up to that point [0].

[0]: https://arewefastyet.com

[tucnak]

> maybe older than you, even

Okay so what? I appreciate good code, not old code. I needed to patch _some_ web browser a few years back, and had attempted Firefox first for kicks. It was a very painful experience, a few weeks no gain. The system design is arcane, all over the place. I later attempted the same with Chromium, and it worked out beautifully. I'd eventually opted for QtWebKit at the time.

There's no beating around the bush; Firefox code is horrible. You could make an argument that it is "tradition", of course. I'm not convinced.

[bayindirh]

> I'm not convinced.

I have not written that to convince you about anything. My aim was to tell the truth, as is.

Like it or not, Mozilla Firefox as we know it is almost 24 years old that point. Before that it was living as Netscape Navigator (which was born in 1994), and tried to be cross platform since get go.

This means it has born in a place there was no version control, almost no modern programming language facilities, and you had to pull a lot of "neat" tricks to be able to run the same code on very different architectures. On top of that these guys invented "push" and Javascript along the way.

Also, codebases rot. This is another reality of software. As a codebase lives longer than their primary caretakers, even if people document everything, new maintainers have different opinions on how to do things, and things evolve in a way that primary designers didn't anticipate.

This is reality of the software. You don't have to like it, but you can't prevent it. Actually, everything rots in the stack. From hardware architectures to OSes, and everything on top of these...

> I'd eventually opted for QtWebKit at the time.

The funny thing is QtWebKit is a fork of Apple's WebKit, which is a fork of KDE's KHTML browser engine, which also Chrome has forked (from Apple), and evolved. So they had a lot of time to redesign something which was working very well from the get go. They didn't write something from scratch like Netscape guys, and they had an advantage here. Plus, the initial devs were from Mozilla, so they knew the shortcomings of Gecko, and avoided the problems.

All in all, Chrome had a second mover advantage with the added benefit of carrying learnt lessons of the first mover.

> There's no beating around the bush; Firefox code is horrible. You could make an argument that it is "tradition", of course.

There's no beating around the bush; Firefox code is old. You could make an argument that you didn't work with legacy systems in your life ever, of course.

I'm not convinced.