Jamie gave the open source Mozilla project about a year and a half, including the months of pre-source release preparation (and I think that's being generous.) Brendan Eich and Mitchell Baker didn't give up so easily and thirteen-plus years later they're still giving all they've got to make sure that Mozilla continues to be successful in promoting choice, opportunity, and participation on the Web.
Some things are worth fighting for and I believe that the Web is one of those things. I'm proud to work with some of the founding members of mozilla.org and think it's a phenomenal thing that such talented people are willing to commit their professional lives to the Mozilla mission when there were and still are far sexier opportunities available to all of them.
A different answer might be that it does so much more that a slowdown is part and parcel of doing all that's necessary in a modern browser.
Firefox 1.0's USP at a time when browsers were bloated was its lack of bloat. IMO thats less of an issue now.
Phoenix was fast. I liked that. I should go try to compile it and run it on W7 and see what it does on modern websites.
Speed and ability to render correctly are my killer features for browsers.
No surprise that it remained a Netscape project for so long.
Thank you. It never occurred to me that you need a lot more processing power to compile code than you do to run the software you're creating. You just saved me a lot of heartache in a few months once it's time to start compiling. I love HN.
/srsly
Most of the small to medium sized project I have worked on compile in what seems like an instant.
However, I work on a medium-to-large code-base at work and it takes around 8 minutes to compile on our build server and around 12-15 minutes on my dev machine. Even these speeds seem tremendously slow to me. I can't imagine being a developer on a huge C++ project and having to wait tremendously long build times. When your compile times aren't near instant it really changes how you program. That feed back loop of code-compile-run-repeat becomes more like code-double check code-code some more-compile-surf the web-run-repeat.
It never occurred to you because it isn't true! You could for example write a trivial raytracer that compiles in seconds and takes hours to render a scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig
(via codinghorror: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/lived-fast-died-you... )
Other links for unused footage and annotated version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush#External_links
Near the end Jamie says (slightly paraphrasing): "This could all turn into television again... a small number of companies controlling what we see or hear."
And now we basically have Facebook, Twitter and Google as the big entry points for finding things on the web. I realise that we're not living in this closed system that's push only.. I just thought there was a slight parallel there.
Awesome insight. Absolutely breathtaking. Explains so much of what happens at larger companies.
It prompted me to write up some of my own thoughts on the current day Mozilla Community: http://daniele.livejournal.com/80677.html
