Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how people think and talk about Firefox. It’s also a cathartic moment for me personally: I’ve spent the last two years pouring my heart and soul into...
At Mozilla, we keep security-sensitive bug reports confidential until the information in them is no longer dangerous. This week we’re opening to the public a group of security bugs that document a major engineering effort to remove the rocket science of writing secure browser code and make...
Last time, I argued that shared mutable state should be considered harmful. To avoid it, threads need to own their data and communicate asynchronously. The traditional approach to asynchronous programming involves a lot of callbacks: every potentially-asynchronous operation needs to bundle...
David Baron put this up in Mozilla’s San Francisco office a while back: This is cute way of saying that writing safe concurrent code is, at present, rocket science. This is unfortunate, because the future of computing is shaping up to be all about concurrency. Fundamental engineering...
I’ve had a lot of websites over the years. The first one went live when I was eleven years old, and was admittedly much more about style than substance. That one was on Angelfire, the next on Tripod, then a Xanga, then self-hosted MovableType and WordPress. You can probably find them all of them...
Loose Screws
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.Donald Knuth This is an unfinished blog post started some two-and-a-half years ago...
Loose Screws
We’ve struggled for a long time to programmatically measure the objective performance impact of add-ons on Firefox. While a perfect solution is still far off, we’ve recently started down an interesting new avenue: automatically measuring the impact of add-ons on the computer power consumption...