Mozilla should've finished rewriting Firefox completely in Rust to give them an Unique Selling Point. They didn't because of management's hubris to build their own mobile operating system to take on Google (its largest financier). Google probably warned them that it would pull back its money if FirefoxOS managed to grab any significant market share. So it was destined to fail from day one.
I'm surprised they didn't integrate their own internet search engine into Firefox. But the contract with Google probably prohibits it and Google would immediately pull the plug on Firefox if it got wind of it anyway.
>Mozilla should've finished rewriting Firefox completely in Rust to give them an Unique Selling Point. They didn't because of management's hubris to build their own mobile operating system to take on Google (its largest financier).
Firefox is like 25 million lines of code. Incredibly complex code, much of it decades old and wrapped in layers of legacy architectural patterns (see XUL, XBL), with severe backwards compatibility considerations (if you break existing websites or people's extensions, they might switch and not come back).
You suggest that NOT rewriting all of that in a couple of years is "hubris"?!? Rust 1.0 didn't happen until 2015 mind you, and Firefox OS was canceled in 2016. The timeline doesn't even make sense.
This kind of nonsense is why I can't take HN seriously when it comes to discussions about Mozilla. Criticisms are perfectly fine (and there are plenty of legitimate criticism to make) but people just abandon all logic when it comes to them for some reason and upvote mindless drivel because Mozilla Bad.
FYI, there are more than 6 million lines of Rust in Firefox, so it's not like it hasn't been happening.
Porting code from one language to another is much faster than writing it from scratch. I'm currently porting my own code from Python to C++ and it's a snap.
Mozilla could've chosen to port the C++ code to Rust, but they didn't because they had other "frivolous" priorities.