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Comment Re:No, you really havent avenged anything. (Score 5, Insightful) 1350

Unfortunately, Stephane Charbonnier is one of the people who were killed in this latest attack. I really hope you're right that Charlie Hebdo will keep going, but it's a lot easier to recover from physical damage to offices than it is from having the staff that make the magazine what it is killed. :(

Comment Re:What do they spend the money on? (Score 1) 161

Browsers are pretty complicated, yes. Things like low-latency high-performance VMs, hardware-accelerated video pipelines, plus the details, like actual HTML parsing, CSS layout, a network stack, and so forth. Also, what matters is not just the complication but how fast you're trying to change things, and people are adding new things (flexbox, more complicated CSS layout modes, mode DOM APIs, etc) faster than ever before.

But also, in addition to a browser Mozilla is working on FirefoxOS, which involves a whole separate bunch of developers, since it's not like the browser developers are writing things like the dialer app for FirefoxOS. Also, you need QA, not just developers.

And yes, Mozilla has 1000-ish employees, for what it's worth.

It's not just Mozilla. If I look at https://www.openhub.net/p/chro... I see on the order of 600 committers with commits in the last month. And that's not even counting whoever is working on the non-open-source parts of Chrome. And not counting, again, QA and so forth.

And the worst part is, this is not a new development. Microsoft had over 1000 people working on IE6 in 1999, according to http://ericsink.com/Browser_Wa...

So yes, browsers, complicated.

Comment Re:Chrome Soon? FireFox on the other-hand... (Score 1) 67

The "let" keyword is not the same thing as "let blocks" and "let expressions".

The keyword looks like this:

    let x = 5;

and is in ES6. A let block or let expression (neither of which is in ES6) looks like this:

    let (x = 5) alert(x);

so that "x" is only in scope for the duration of the let block. It's syntactic sugar for:

{
    let x = 5;
    alert(x);
}

Comment Re:Chrome for Android and Safari for iOS? (Score 4, Informative) 74

> So, they're running Android and iOS on your
> computer to run the same binaries as those
> platforms?

No. "They" are allowing you to connect your Android or iOS device to your computer (likely via USB), then debugging the on-device browser using the Firefox debugger running on your computer. That way you're debugging the thing you actually want to debug, but using the same developer tools you're using for your other debugging, and which therefore you're already familiar with.

Comment What is the point? (Score 4, Insightful) 88

What was the point of Firefox? IE was free and was a proven and already well-established browser. By your logic, we never should have built Firefox and the Web should have stalled with IE6 in 2002.

The world needs a truly open mobile OS as much as it needed a truly open browser a decade ago. Android is open in name only and Google is hurriedly moving its most lucrative components into closed proprietary services and apps that aren't a part of open source Android. iOS is as closed as everything Apple does. Windows is getting some nice HTML5 support for apps, but not nearly enough. There's clearly an opportunity for HTML5 apps to compete on mobile if someone can build a solid alternative platform to the monopolies and silos we're all stuck with today.

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