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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> Do you really see a clear link from "better/safer/faster browsing rendering component" to "better revenues" or "better business situation" for Mozilla? Because I don't think I do, and I suspect Mozilla didn't either, really.

Most people don't choose a browser based on principles or mission. Even if Firefox captured 100% of the market that did, it would barely move the needle in browser share.

Most people choose browsers based on fairly straightforward things, such as the default (many people never change this, which is why changing the default browser via bundled downloads has remained such an effective marketing strategy for decades), performance, the feeling of performance (which is different from actual performance), whether the websites they're visiting are supported, etc.

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Yeah, absolutely, which is why I think it's always going to be tricky for Firefox as long as there are corporate entities like Google and MS that have identified "having our own browser" as a competitive advantage.

When Chrome came on the scene it was a huge improvement, and Google seemed mostly-benevolent then, and the core of it was open source. And I worked in that codebase and met some of the people involved, and they were all good very smart(er-than-me) people that I met. The core engineering project itself has good foundations.

The problem is those folks gotta get paid. And so ultimately in the long run, Chrome has become the problem we always dreaded it would become.

Which is why, yeah, "we" (for some definition of we) need to come up with a way that these kinds of projects can get paid for outside of places like Google etc.

Mozilla almost feels like that, but from talking to the people I know who worked there... it's not.

> When Chrome came on the scene it was a huge improvement

I don't think people in general realise how big a jump it was. Process isolation demonstrated that a browser with a single event loop is not a given, and the idea of completely separating page loads from page renders was, for want of a better term, a true paradigm shift.

V8 showed that JavaScript didn't have to be disgustingly slow. I still remember the "Chrome Comic" booklet. Google made a big deal out of having hired some of the best compiler optimisation experts money could buy and pointed them towards a goal. V8 came out with two decades of hard-core, bleeding edge research behind it.

It took Mozilla nearly a decade to catch up with multi-process Firefox (ironically, the project was called "Electron"). Chrome had the benefit of being a pure greenfield project. Firefox had to retrofit a completely different processing and rendering architecture that broke pretty much all previous assumptions.

I recall writing a note to an internal Nokia-infused thread that "Chrome's process isolation is an idea too good not to steal". At the time I didn't know just how damn hard that would be to pull off without introducing multiple flag days. In the end Mozilla managed with one.

Yeah, back in 2008, Chrome was really a breath of fresh air, both in terms of performance and in terms of stability. And also for web developers, being the first browser to actually integrate devtools...

It depend on what you mean by "integrate".

Mozilla/Firefox had the extensions ecosystem that produced a bunch of interesting tools, which eventually crystallized as Firebug:

http://flailingmonkey.com/the-history-of-firebug

The multi-process Firefox project was called Electrolysis: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Whoops, my bad. Thanks for correcting the record.

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