In all fairness, GitHub also has much to benefit from this too, playing host of the Mozilla git mirror, which also has a relatively large number of refs: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev
In Introducing Git protocol version 2mozilla
gecko-dev
JavaScript2013–2025
mozilla / gecko-dev · Archived
gecko-dev
SUPERSEDED by https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox. Read-only Git mirror of the Mercurial gecko repositories at https://hg.mozilla.org
69Distinct people
80Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
SUPERSEDED by https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox. Read-only Git mirror of the Mercurial gecko repositories at https://hg.mozilla.org
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- chromium/chromium · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- webkit/webkit · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 7:02:50 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year80 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-11-26 19:11:13 UTC to 2025-05-15 22:12:15 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 17 | 0 | 17 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 0 | 14 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Firefox is a fast, reliable and private web browser from the non-profit Mozilla organization.
Contributing
To learn how to contribute to Firefox read the Firefox Contributors' Quick Reference document.
We use bugzilla.mozilla.org as our issue tracker, please file bugs there.
Resources
Firefox Source Docs is our primary documentation repository
Nightly development builds can be downloaded from Firefox Nightly page
If you have a question about developing Firefox, and can't find the solution
on Firefox Source Docs, you can try asking your question on Matrix at
chat.mozilla.org in the Introduction channel.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
3 sourcesIt's not just Chrome.
Chrome maintains the list that most browsers use, but it's not the only browser using the list.
Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE 11, Edge, and others are all using HSTS-Preload lists based off Chromium's.
You can see for yourself that Firefox is preloading the `app` TLD in it's preload list at [0], and Opera is using the Blink engine, so it's using Chromium's list directly.
As for the other browsers, sadly they aren't open sourced so you can't see their exact list that they use, but seeing as they base their list off Chromium's, I'd wager that they will include this TLD in their lists as well soon enough. They both already include other TLDs which are in the HSTS preload list (like .bank, .google, and .foo).
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/security/ma...
In Introducing .app, a more secure home for apps on the webScalability to large numbers of files and large numbers of changesets.
For the large number of files one https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc... is one source. There's some earlier discussion of the same issue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549679 that goes into some technical details.
There has been some work on git since then to address some of those issues (e.g. see https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/02/03/scaling-g... ) but it's not clear to me that it helped enough to catch up to where Mercurial is for large repos.
For large numbers of changesets, just try running "log" or "annnotate" on any file with a long history in git. I just did this simple experiment:
1) hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/
2) git clone https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev.git
3) (cd mozilla-central &&
Read the rest
time hg log dom/base/nsDocument.cpp)
4) (cd gecko-dev && time git log dom/base/nsDocument.cpp)
It's not quite apples to apples because the git repo there has some pre-mercurial CVS history in it. But note that I'm not even using --follow for git and the file _has_ been renamed after the mercurial repo starts, so git is actually finding fewer commits than mercurial is here.
Anyway, if I do the above log calls a few times to make sure the caches are warm, I end up seeing times in the 8s range for git and the 0.8s range (yes, 10x faster) for mercurial.
That all said, most repos do not have millions (or even hundreds of thousands) of changesets or files. So the scalability problems are not problems for most users of either VCS.