FLOSS-812

Jonathan: Hey folks, this week David Ruggles joins me and we talk with Sylvester and Brian about Firefox, the original open source browser. Something of a perpetual underdog, but maybe it's time to take another look at. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly Episode 812, recorded Tuesday, December the 3rd.

Firefox and the future. It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and we're going to have a lot of fun today. First off, we've got the one, the only David Ruggles, the David Factor, the, the original David Ruggles, as opposed to all of those clones running around out there.

Hey, David, welcome.

David: You're just trying to bring in every single one of my handles from every possible source. Oh, I'm excited to be here today. In proper form, I am calling in from a Firefox based browser, so this is, this is awesome. I'm excited. In fact, I plan to do a lot of listening and not a whole lot of talking.

Jonathan: Oh, well, but I mean, you're kind of the, you're the, you're the expert co host this time. You're, you're the Firefox user. So you gotta, you gotta be on the ball to be able to jump in and ask questions. All the things that I wouldn't think to ask. I can do that. Yeah. So for those that don't know, that are not watching the schedule the way that we are, our, our Guests today are Sylvester and Brian of the Firefox project.

So from Mozilla and boy, there's a lot, there's a lot going on with browsers these days, and I am just thrilled that these guys are willing to be here and chat about it. There's. There's some things to talk about. So let's, let's go ahead and we will just go ahead and bring them on. So Sylvester and Brian, both welcome.

Glad to have you both. Thank you.

Brian: Glad to be here. Thanks. Thanks for having us.

Jonathan: Yeah. Let me start with Sylvester and just kind of give us the rundown of like where, where are you in Firefox? Where are you in Mozilla? Well, how do you, how do you fit into this, this thing that we all know and love?

Sylvestre: So I am, I am.

I started at Mozilla 11 years ago, and now I'm a director of engineering. I'm managing an organization of about 50 people. We do release management, release engineers, OS integration, engineering workflow, and some security work also. So we do a lot of things, and we touch a lot of different parts of the project.

All

Jonathan: right. And then, Brian, same question for you. Kind of help us get the mental map. Where do you fit into the organization?

Brian: Yeah, I'm a senior principal engineer working on Firefox and Gecko, the web engine that powers it. I joined Mozilla in 2013 and I've worked on a whole bunch of stuff from kind of dev tools to the desktop front end to platform and recently performance and a whole bunch of other fundamental stuff.

Jonathan: Yeah. Okay, perfect. Perfect. So both both very senior engineering types, which we love. We'd love to be able to ask the engineering questions. But before we get to engineering, I think there's some, there's some interesting history stuff to talk about. I don't think we've ever had like Mozilla or Firefox on the show.

So let's, let's talk about some ancient history and Firefox and Mozilla used to be Netscape. Is that, is that fair to say there's at least a connection to Netscape?

Sylvestre: Oh yeah. In a while, right? So we just celebrated the 20th birthday of Firefox a few weeks ago. Basically Firefox started on the ashes of Netscape.

So, you know, Microsoft decided to ship IE with Windows for free, and back in the day, we, Netscape was sold. Two users. So obviously it Netscape took a hit and some people decided to refactor on Netscape into what we call back then the Matia project. And then the project was renamed to Firefox and here 20 years after.

So, but it's also a, Firefox was really a revolution. We think about it like most of us in that call are pretty old. And remember what it in the day when had popups everywhere. And you didn't have tabs. So if you wanted to look three different websites, you have to open three windows. Now we have tabs and a proper blogger.

Firefox is a browser that created that.

Jonathan: Yeah. Boy, there's some, there's some cool history there. I remember Firefox 4. It's kind of a big memory I have because I was just getting active like in things and on the internet. And I remember when Firefox 4 was sort of the big push and I don't remember when that was.

Early, early 2000s I guess. And that was, that was a big deal because you know, there were cool things happening in Firefox and it's been a long time ago now. And I was, I was talking with David before the show and, you know, you kind of look at the, the, the current browser wars and the, the how shall we put this, the market share of Firefox is maybe not quite as big as what everybody would like.

And it, it occurred to me, Firefox has been in this position before. This is, this is not the first time that Firefox is, is approaching the the market as the underdog. And this in some ways is a comfortable position for you guys. And one of the things I think that we can dig into maybe today is like what, what cool things are coming because you know, when you're, when you're a bit of an underdog, that kind of gives you a bit of freedom, I think.

to to experiment and try things out. And so I'm, I'm hoping that you guys will have, have some neat things to talk about that you're kind of looking at with that, that you know, things coming, things down the pike where Firefox is going to once again, be sort of shaking up the entire ecosystem.

Brian: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a, tough position to be sort of the independent choice and not be the default on on most, most devices. But I think at the same time, in terms of, I think that's important for the platform in terms of having an open interoperable platform and then being able to compete on, you know, basic browsing fundamentals, performance, security, stability you know, managing web compatibility, and then you know, adding a bunch of, a bunch of new features to just make getting through that.

Getting through the day better, you know, people use their browsers for all sorts of things today. And so there's a bunch of stuff coming down the pike in the next year that we'd love to get into.

Jonathan: Yeah, but before we, before we dive into sort of what's coming, maybe let's, let's talk about some more of the like fundamentals.

So Firefox has been around for 20 years and If, if I forget this, David, you particularly, I'm gonna put a pin in this and you help me remember, if I forget, I want to talk about Rust too, because that's something big that Mozilla has been involved in. But I guess first, what, how, how big of a project is Firefox?

Like what, what does the line of code look like? How about, do you know, just off the top of your head, like in the, in the ballpark, how many commits there are? Let's, let's chat about the size of the thing.

Sylvestre: Sure. So it's one of the biggest project that we can find on the planet. Like we we love the expression.

It's not rocket science, but here it might be more complex at rocket science at time Because when you think about a brother you have to run untrusted code all day long and you have to keep the user safe And secure so for firefox to give you a scale of what we have i'm looking at the number We have more than 10 000 Contributor over the history.

We have about 1000 contributor per year. We have about 31 million of code. Of course, some of them are platform specific. So you don't always get all those code in your binary. Some of the code is Android specific. Some of them are Mac specific, et cetera. And we are close to 1 million commits in the code base.

So when you think about it software that has been alive for 20 years, how many of those are still alive? The Linux kernel.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Sylvestre: So windows. And Photoshop, there's only a few. So yeah, it's crazy the scale of what we do.

Jonathan: Yeah. You know, we, we had, we've interviewed some of the people that have been around for 20 years and there's, there's projects that you wouldn't necessarily think of, you know, like the core utils, you know, some of those have been around for a long time, Emacs and VI, but.

Most of those have gone through, like, big shakeups, and you know, we're not still using the same Unix core util source code from the Unix days, right? People have re implemented that now a couple of times. And there's now, you know, this interesting move to re implement it in Rust, which is really fascinating.

I have put my foot in my mouth a few times and said that Mozilla created Rust, and I've been corrected each time. No, no, no, no, no, that was this professor guy. And Mozilla just came along and used it. But, is it fair to say that Mozilla is responsible for a big part of where Rust is today? I think that's probably fair to say.

Sylvestre: I think Graydon was a Mozilla employee when he started that project. Oh, so I think it's a, I think it is a Mozilla product. Like it is, maybe I'm showing off, but it is something that Mozilla created and we had like 10 or 10 employees at some point working full time on Rust. And we are still contributing to Rust in many different places.

So to me, it's a Mozilla product. Correct me if I'm wrong, Brian.

Brian: Yeah. And to, to add on to that, I think nowadays it's a separate sort of spun off into an independent foundation and has huge traction in the ecosystem from tons of, you know, companies and open source supporters and, and and, and whatnot.

But I think in terms of what it was sort of designed to ...

Episode 812 transcript