this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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It's never been a better time to switch to Firefox (www.androidpolice.com)
submitted 1 year ago by AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
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• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons. • While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model. • Mozilla's focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google's ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.

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[–] arc@lemm.ee 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Erm yes it was But here is a more or less chronological ordering of getting to Firefox today.

  1. Netscape Navigator
  2. Netscape Communicator 4.x (a suite of email, browser, calendar, HTML composer)
  3. Netscape Communicator 5.0 is abandoned as a commercial product because engine is getting old and Microsoft is being anti-competitive
  4. 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
  5. Netscape / Mozilla starts NGLayout which is a rewrite of the HTML engine
  6. NGLayout becomes Gecko
  7. Mozilla suite is based on Gecko using extensible XUL architecture
  8. Netscape themed browser released based on Mozilla with proprietary AOL stuff like AIM client
  9. A bunch of other things happening at this point like versions of AOL, Compuserve using Gecko
  10. Microsoft pays AOL a huge amount of money to not use Gecko in AOL client and make a lawsuit go away
  11. AOL lays off most of the Netscape staff & tosses some money to get Mozilla Foundation going
  12. Mozilla foundation splits the browser into Firefox which doesn't use so much XUL in the browser but is still the Mozilla / Gecko code base. It proved popular because it was more focused and loaded a bit quicker.
  13. Mozilla foundation also splits email into Thunderbird along similar lines
  14. 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.

[–] Dicska@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I was today years old when I learned that the first web browser I have ever touched (NN) was, in fact, the great grandparent of Firefox.

[–] vimdiesel@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year 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 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I recall the switch from Mozilla to Firefox as being a huge improvement not just in loading time, but the user interface felt much less sluggish overall 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. Both browsers were around for a couple of years so Firefox seemed more like a fork than a rebrand.

[–] arc@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 XUL elements out.