Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox

EinatYahav@lemmy.today to Technology@lemmy.world – 546 points –
Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox
arstechnica.com
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as Firefox is the only browser that can't trace its lineage back to Apple and WebKit

What a slap on Konqueror's face.

I don't really see it this way it's just marketing. Saying "all other browsers descend from big bad corporate Apple" is scary, saying "all other browsers descend from another open source project" is meh.

You have a point. But still, they could have added an "ackshually" footnote or something.

Unfortunately, KHTML was discontinued in 2023 (according to Wikipedia)

I mean yes no kinda Konqueror simply accepted a bunch of downstream patches, including a name change.

...more or less. It could for a long time use all three of KHTML, WebKit (fork of KHTML) and QtWebEngine (Blink wrapped for Qt, that is, a fork of WebKit), they recently removed KHTML support because noone was updating it and it hadn't been the default for ages.

If they hadn't implemented multi-engine support in the past they probably would've switched over to "whatever Qt provides" right-out, it's KDE after all. Ultimately they're providing a desktop, not a web browser. Back in the days they did decide to roll their own instead of going with Firefox but it was never a "throw project resources at it" kind of situation, there were simply KDE people who felt like working on it. Web standards were a lot less involved back around the turn of the millennium, and also new and shiny. Back in the days people thought that HTML 4.01 Strict and XHMTL would be a thing that servers actually would start to output instead of the usual tagsoup.

If you're that kind of person right now I'll point you in the direction of Servo. No, Firefox doesn't use it and it's not a Mozilla project any more, Firefox only included (AFAIK) parallel CSS handling, the rest is still old Gecko.

That's quite the bummer. But still. Saying that almost all browsers can trace their lineage to Apple and Webkit is technically correct, but it's just a half-truth. As Apple and Webkit were once based on KHTML.