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Comment by timothya | Hacker News Reader

> All IPC happens using the Chromium IPC libraries

Interesting that they chose to share code with Chrome. Since the two are competitors, I would have thought that they'd use completely separate implementations. It's interesting that open source makes this sharing possible.

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If someone's already written a perfectly good solution that's readily available you either

- pridefully write your own

- use theirs

I'm curious, why does pride come into the equation?

If the existing implementation is perfectly good, writing your own is either pride, stupidity, or a learning exercise.

I would take for granted that the Firefox developers aren't stupid, and that they have enough interesting work to do that they aren't going to spend time on it as a learning exercise.

Ah, okay. That feels a hyperbolic to be pride or stupidity, rather than just a poor analysis of the efficacy of an existing solution. Thank you for your response.

it took a bit of time for me to take serious pride in using other people's work. it's been so much easier to deliver anything since then.

I don't think pride always enters into it, sometimes you just need diversity of thought around a problem.

"We have to reinvent the wheel every once in a while, not because we need a lot of wheels; but because we need a lot of inventors." - Bruce Joyce

> Interesting that they chose to share code with Chrome. Since the two are competitors, I would have thought that they'd use completely separate implementations.

That's what open source is about: collaboration instead competition. Why compete when you can pool your resources together.

Mozilla does have a habit of rejecting code like WebDB/SQLite and PNaCl, so people are always surprised to see them reusing code, especially from Google.

Those weren't rejections of code as much as they were rejections of specifications and features.

I didn't know they had a history of rejecting SQLite - what are you referring to?

They have used SQLite to store bookmarks since Firefox 3: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Places.sqlite

But that doesn't mean they haven't rejected it elsewhere. Was just curious.

Edit: I see now. The WebSQL de-facto standard, which Mozilla rejected, essentially said: "use SQLite." Here's a discussion: https://plus.google.com/+KevinDangoor/posts/PHqKjkcNbLU

I think we imported that code around 2010 and heavily modified it. We are also planning to use Chrome's sandboxing code for Windows.

Mozilla is nearly entirely financed by Google, there isn't a sense of hate between the two organizations.

They also share NSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Security_Services (originally created by Netscape/Mozilla) and, I think, a few other things.

Yet (P)NaCl can go to hell. Brendan pls.

(I am aware that a fully sandboxed JIT is more complex to integrate than an IPC library)

The difference here is that we wanted to implement a multiprocess architecture. We don't want to implement (P)NaCl, since we don't think they're good for the web. We have no qualms with integrating code from other sources, we've done a lot of it. (Google Breakpad, WebRTC, numerous image and video decoding libraries, Freetype, libffi, ANGLE, the list goes on...)

As a further observation on this, Robert O'Callahan has a blog post [1] explaining Mozilla's stance on (not) implementing bad-for-the-web features; as an example to show this stance is long-lived, he mentions that engineers at Netscape/Mozilla implemented (in 1999) ActiveX support for Gecko, but kept it disabled by default on purpose despite a possible market share impact.

[1] http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/activex-all-over-again_2...

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