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0 pointswgjordan5y ago0 comments

If you stipulate that 'Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory safety and maintainability' (see parent comment), then a great many Internet users out there would choose Firefox if as a result of being written in Rust it's more secure, memory-safe (less crashing/bugs) and maintainable (more and better features).

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7 comments · 4 top-level

tleb_5y ago· 3 in thread

Maybe in the Hacker News bubble but that's not "a great many Internet users". People either use what is pre-installed, what they are used to or what their techy friend recommended them.

naniwaduni5y ago

That "what their techy friend recommended them" does a hell of a lot of work. It pretty much drove Firefox up to 30% market share once, remember.

emn135y ago

A counter point to that is that the impact of the tech sector on recommendations like that is ever shrinking - tech is normalized; everyday stuff where people feel comfortable making their own choices (and where the number of people that haven't made those choices pretty solidly yet is ever shrinking). The market is more mature, in essence.

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TheAdamAndChe5y ago

I think it's why Firefox's market share is declining too. I don't recommend firefox for non-technical users anymore because of its relative complexity and incompatibility with the modern web when compared to Chrome.

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Barrin925y ago

Neither Firefox or Chrome right now crash for me, they're actually both very stable and have been for a while, and memory consumption and performance bottlenecks seem to have largely moved from the browser engines themselves to the rich web applications.

I'm not convinced changes to the browsers themselves at this point is anything other than a very marginal improvement.

wpietri5y ago

Firefox is already sufficiently secure and low-crash for my tastes. I guess it's possible that more features would benefit me, but I'm not convinced.

twblalock5y ago

Changing languages is not a magic bullet. Browsers written in C++ can be just as safe and maintainable -- especially with the resources of large companies behind them, with tons of engineers and testers etc.

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