Sunday 7 January 2018
Ancient Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified
2007-2008 was an interesting time for Mozilla. In the market, Firefox was doing well, advancing steadily against IE. On the technical front we were doing poorly. Webkit was outpacing us in performance and rapid feature development. Gecko was saddled with design mistakes and technical debt, and Webkit captured the mindshare of open-source contributors. We knew Google was working on a Webkit-based browser which would probably solve Webkit's market-share problems. I was very concerned and, for a while, held the opinion that Mozilla should try to ditch Gecko and move everything to Webkit. For me to say so loudly would have caused serious damage, so I only told a few people. In public, I defended Gecko from unfair attacks but was careful not to contradict my overall judgement.
I wasn't the only one to be pessimistic about Gecko. Inside Mozilla, under the rubric of "Mozilla 2.0", we thrashed around for considerable time trying to come up with short-cuts to reducing our technical debt, such as investments in automatic refactoring tools. Outside Mozilla, competitors expected to rapidly outpace us in engine development.
As it turned out, we were all mostly wrong. We did not find any silver bullets, but just by hard work Gecko mostly kept up, to an extent that surprised our competitors. Weaknesses in Webkit — some expedient shortcuts taken to boost performance or win points on specific compatibility tests, but also plain technical debt — became apparent over time. Chrome boosted Webkit, but Apple/Google friction also caused problems that eventually resulted in the Blink fork. The reaction to Firefox 57 shows that Gecko is still at least competitive today, even after the enormous distraction of Mozilla's failed bet on FirefoxOS.
One lesson here is even insiders can be overly pessimistic about the prospects of an old codebase; dedicated, talented staff working over the long haul can do wonders, and during that time your competitors will have a chance to develop their own problems.
Another lesson: in 2007-2008 I was overly focused on toppling IE (and Flash and WPF), and thought having all the open-source browsers sharing a single engine implementation wouldn't be a big problem for the Web. I've changed my mind completely; the more code engines share, the more de facto standardization of bugs we would see, so having genuinely separate implementations is very important.
I'm very grateful to Brendan and others for disregarding my opinions and not letting me lead Mozilla down the wrong path. It would have been a disaster for everyone.
To let off steam, and leave a paper trail for the future, I wrote four blog posts during 2007-2008 describing some of my thoughts, and published their MD5 hashes. The aftermath of the successful Firefox 57 release seems like an appropriate time to harmlessly declassify those posts. Please keep in mind that my opinions have changed.
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