Ooof you thought you were clever, but you just look like a fool on the internet!
Comment on It's never been a better time to switch to Firefox
gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months agoyour memory might not works very well since it was never called plain “mozilla”
Candybar121@lemmy.world 7 months ago
arc@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Erm yes it was But here is a more or less chronological ordering of getting to Firefox today.
So yeah it’s a continuation all the way back. I also worked at Netscape at the time so I got to see much of this transition.
Dicska@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I was today years old when I learned that the first web browser I have ever touched was, in fact, the great grandparent of Firefox.
vimdiesel@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Very little though, almost all that code has been replaced/rewritten over the years along with all the new stuff that has been added.
arc@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Yup. Not much of it survives in the code since it was mostly rewritten from scratch but I guess if you looked at the nspr (portable runtime) or nss (crypto) code that there are remnants of those early days still in there.
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
I recall the switch from Mozilla to Firefox a being a huge improvement not just in loading time, but the user interface felt much less sluggish and keyboard navigation was better. To me it felt like they had ditched 80% of the code base to make a lean, mean browsing machine. They were both around for a couple of years so Firefox seemed more like a fork than a rebrand.
arc@lemm.ee 7 months ago
The way Mozilla worked and Firefox still works is there is a cross platform front-end implemented in XUL which is XHTML, CSS and Javascript. The engine underneath is the same (Gecko) but the frontend app over the top is what the user sees and controls buttons, menus, functionality.
Firefox was basically a fork of Mozilla stripped of the not-browser stuff and a cleaned up UI. It proved popular as a prototype so it grew into its own thing and Mozilla suite was abandoned. There is still a Seamonkey project that keeps Mozilla suite alive but it’s outside of the Mozilla foundation.
The reason it’s faster is that Mozilla was an entire suite expressed as a lot of XUL so it impacted loading times. XUL also had this neat trick that you could overlay XUL over the top of other XUL so the mail app was injecting buttons, menus and whatnot into the browser and vice versa. This was cached but it still had to be loaded. In addition and probably just as impactful, was that Mozilla shipped as dynamic libraries (DLLs) and a relatively small EXE, so it took time to start. In Firefox, the number of DLLs was reduced with static linking so it was more efficient to load.
Desistance@lemmy.world 7 months ago
If I remember correctly, XUL/XBL is dead. They removed that code a while back after they transitioned to WebExtensions. The current frontend is HTML, CSS and JavaScript.