Bobby Holley - Mozilla Hacker & Everything Else.
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 Quantum’s headline act, known as Stylo, and it means a lot to see it so well-received. But while all…
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 Firefox’s front-end, DOM APIs, and add-on ecosystem secure by default. It removed a whole class of security…
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 continuation logic as a callback function which gets invoked when the operation completes. This is great in…
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 constraints like power usage are steering microprocessor manufacturers away from single-core architectures. If the…
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 archived somewhere if you try, but I won’t disturb their slumber by linking to them here. I didn’t have…