Technology

I am livid over her absolutely disgraceful management over Moz. When electron was building a de facto monopoly of Chromium on the desktop she made no moves to produces equivalent tooling. While Node grew into a behemoth she totally ignored it. The only thing that has come out of Moz in the last decade that mattered was Rust, and she’s already fired the Rust team. She is poison and serves only to suck up a salary that could fund development.

Mozilla needs its wake up call and to start being the underdog that makes something worth doing. With Manifest V3 and the anti-trust case on the horizon they have a fork in the road that will define what becomes of them. Hopefully she can make one good decision and it’ll be the right one.

Sounds too European for the "land of the free"

Specifically separate the browser side from the advertiser side. Get rid of that conflict of interest.

If this hurts Firefox more than it hurts Chrome, that's probably not a good thing for the health of the Internet. Google running the Internet unchecked would be bad for everyone.

It would be a pain for developers, but firefox and chrome using a gig of ram to view webpages and play videos is horrendous even with isolated design.

That can't be helped. Hard to explain well without knowing how much CS you're familiar with, but basically in order to guarantee security/user safety you have to sandbox each tab (basically running an entirely separate container program for each tab which constantly checks for illegal memory access to prevent it from being exploited), all separately running their own interpreters for javascript/typescript, HTML, CSS, all of which are very resource intensive (mainly javascript/typescript). There's not really any getting around this, no matter how well you design your browser.

Now, theoretically, with the growing popularity/advances in WebAssembly, and increase in usage of frameworks/graphics APIs like WebGPU, you could completely get rid of that sandboxing and completely get rid of the extremely slow javascript and html/css, in favor of completely using safe, compiled Rust programs. There's active research using versions of WASM which only accept completely safe code (mainly safe Rust code) so using memory bugs generated from user error to access data in different tabs becomes impossible (aside from potential unaddressed bugs in Rust itself obviously) and you don't need to sandbox each tab – the program practically sandboxes itself. Then you could potentially have browsers with thousands of tabs perform perfectly fine, assuming each of the websites is programmed competently.

But that's not going to happen, because billions of users rely on HTML/CSS and JS, and it's not pretty to transition away from. Getting rid of it would be like getting rid of pointy shoes, or getting rid of US Customary Units in the US, it's just not happening no matter how much benefit it would bring to users. It's not so much of a browser company issue as it is everyone ever would complain and potentially trillions of dollars of damage would be done. Also frontend web devs can barely punch out a "hello world" program in JS so there's no way most of them are gonna be touching Rust or Haskell or something.