Mozilla Will Ship Its First Rust Component In Firefox 48 (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Softpedia: Mozilla announced today plans to ship its first ever Rust code with the production releases of Firefox. The first ever Rust components will arrive in Firefox 48, scheduled for release on August 2, 2016. After teasing Rust features last year, the Mozilla Foundation announced today that Firefox 48 would contain a new media stack component that's entirely coded in Rust. The first Firefox component to feature Rust code was not chosen at random because media components often execute malicious code when parsing multimedia files. "This makes a memory-safe programming language like Rust a compelling addition to Mozilla's tool-chest for protecting against potentially malicious media content on the Web," says Dave Herman, Director of Strategy at Mozilla Research. During tests of this Rust-based media component in Firefox's unstable builds, Mozilla says that after one billion uses they have yet to see a crash or issue in the Rust media component. Last month, Mozilla released the first versions of Servo, a minimal browser created in Rust code alone. At around the same time, Microsoft open-sourced Checked C, an extension to the C programming language that brings new features to address a series of security-related issues.

Comments

I dumped Firefox, and I feel fine

[DNS-and-BIND]

I recently quit using Firefox after 2-3 years using it full time as my primary browser. Why? It wasn't because of this Rust or whatever. It was because Firefox was slow as hell and the plugins were spotty and would stop working for no reason. Firefox was intended as a bare-bones browser, if you want extra functionality then use plugins. Fine, I get it. But when FF constantly changes, it breaks the plugins and they stop working.

I use FF for real, when I need plugins to work then I need them to work, right then. No futzing around or filing bug reports on the developer's page. Or waiting a month or two for a new version to come out. Fuck that noise. After that happened a few times, I still kept Firefox because I don't like changing things for no reason. After it kept happening, I started looking for alternatives. After a plugin that I really need stopped working on my Firefox (but apparently nobody else's) that was the last straw. Buh-bye Firefox.

I'm using Vivaldi now and it's surprising that I haven't had any plugin issues or web page incompatibilities. Perhaps because it's just a re-skin of Chrome. Anyway, I'm finished with Firefox for this lifetime. It's still installed on my machine but I won't be installing it on the next box I buy. Enjoy your descent into irrelevance and boutique browser status. Although I suspect Slashdot will continue to cover every brain fart that comes out of Mozilla even after Firefox goes below 1% market share.

Re:rust community

[gweihir]

Indeed. A tech-community that allows SJWs to dictate terminology to them is weak and not worth being part of in the first place. At least they signal to anybody with a clue that they are broken in the head early on.