Comment on Google's trying to DRM the internet, and we have to make sure they fail

• SankaraStone@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Servo Folk. It’s one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That’s where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn’t be Mozilla’s problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla’s market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.

  Have you heard of Electron? It’s the use of Chromium’s Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn’t there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko’s way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It’s a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink’s based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.

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  • nomadjoanne@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Oh wow. Thanks for that explanation. It only has made me angrier at Mozilla. They have completely lost their way and forgotten their original mission.

    I wonder why Mozilla didn’t want their own rendering engine to compete with Blink…

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    • SankaraStone@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I mean they already have one, Gecko. And since they also made Servo, they took a lot of the good parts and incorporated it into Gecko, which led to the speed up (they parallelized a lot of the processes and started using people’s GPUs more).

      And they have made Mozilla VPN and had it integrate with this this multi-account container add-on (addons.mozilla.org/…/multi-account-containers/) that lets you sandbox your internet browsing (like you can set up a google account container, a Facebook/Instagram container, a banking/finance container). So those have been privacy pluses in the years since Baker canned the Rust and Servo teams, blaming Covid-19 all while giving herself a raise. And Firefox seems to be competitive with Chrome in terms of speed of web rendering and whatnot: androidauthority.com/firefox-vs-chrome-which-web-…

      And there’s just some simple things in Firefox by default, like clicking on a simple button to disable most of the javascript that’s janking everything up on a website and making it simple and readable, that just make it so much better than Chrome.

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      • nomadjoanne@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        From what you’ve said though there seem to be benefits from cleaning up Gecko in order to make it feasible to turn it into something similar to Electron.

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