On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 10:07:28AM -0700, mark.erik...@gmail.com wrote:
- I am very happy with the current Fennec app and its UI, and
don't understand why Mozilla feels a need to drop that product
and create a new one from scratch.
We're not creating a new one from scratch. Many of the component
parts of Fenix already existed, and the core is basically the
same as Fennec. That said, there are many reasons:
1) GeckoView, which is a more or less drop-in replacement for
Android's WebView, is designed to be used by any application
which needs to embed web content on Android, including
potentially other web browsers. It's an important part of our
core mission to make sure the web remains a viable living
standard, with multiple competing implementations, to avoid the
sort of stagnation and vendor lock-in we saw when IE6
essentially ruled the world.
2) We also already needed to maintain WebView-based browser
front-ends for configurations where shipping our entire
rendering back-end was not viable or practical. Given that we
already need to maintain these separate, already-compatible
front-end and back-end implementations, having to maintain an
entirely separate browser with a completely different front-end,
and a lot of different back-end glue, is just not a good use of
resources.
3) GeckoView and the Fenix front-end are much more modern
frameworks than Fennec. They were architected from the ground up
using all of the knowledge and experience that we've gained
developing Fennec and a number of other experimental browsers
over the years. The result is that they are not only much easier
to develop and maintain, but also much faster and more resource
efficient.
4) The current Fennec browser, unlike Fenix and our desktop
browsers, is very much single-process by design. Web content
runs in the same process as the browser UI. The native Java UI
allows us to use threading to work around some of the
performance problems inherent in this sort of design, but it
doesn't give us any of the security properties of process
isolation, which are becoming increasingly important in the age
of Spectre attacks. If we wanted to continue maintaining Fennec
apart from Fenix, we would need to drastically rearchitect it to
support process isolation for web content. And, given that
Fenix and GeckoView were designed to handle this from the start,
again, that would just not be a good use of resources.
--
Kris Maglione
UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.
--Dennis Ritchie
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