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.
Comment on It's never been a better time to switch to Firefox
arc@lemm.ee 10 months agoErm yes it was But here is a more or less chronological ordering of getting to Firefox today.
- Netscape Navigator
- Netscape Communicator 4.x (a suite of email, browser, calendar, HTML composer)
- Netscape Communicator 5.0 is abandoned as a commercial product because engine is getting old
- Netscape open sources Netscape Communicator 5.0 as Mozilla with the proprietary bits & crypto stripped out. BTW Mozilla was the internal name of Netscape exposed in the user agent and easter eggs like about:mozilla
- Netscape / Mozilla starts NGLayout which is a rewrite of the HTML engine
- NGLayout becomes Gecko
- Mozilla suite is based on Gecko using extensible XUL architecture
- Netscape themed browser released based on Mozilla with proprietary AOL stuff like AIM client
- A bunch of other things happening at this point like versions of AOL, Compuserve using Gecko
- AOL basically shreds Netscape laying off most of the staff, tosses some money to get Mozilla Foundation going.
- Mozilla foundation splits the browser into Firefox which doesn’t use XUL for the browser shell is the Mozilla / Gecko code base
- Mozilla foundation also splits email into Thunderbird along similar lines
- Firefox progresses to where it is 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.
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
arc@lemm.ee 10 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 10 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.
arc@lemm.ee 10 months ago
There are still bits of XUL around but I believe the preference is to use HTML elements wherever possible and they’ve been stripping elements out.
Dicska@lemmy.world 10 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 10 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 10 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.