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mozilla
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SUPERSEDED by https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox.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

Developer Tools
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
69Distinct people
80Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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SUPERSEDED by https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox.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

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 1:57:11 AM 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.

0510152013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 2 submissions, 6 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 17 mentions; 0 submissions, 17 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 0 submissions, 14 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC826
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC17017
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14014
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

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 GitHub

What Hacker News says

4 sources
gpm·Jun 13, 2020
It seems unlikely that there is any great conspiracy at play here to me... they found a good solution to a problem, they implemented it. Spidermonkey is a highly optimized carefully examined code base, it's not easy to replace wholesale or particularly low hanging fruit to be replaced with rust. Mozilla is working on replacing the wasm compiler, and eventually the compiler for "ion MIR" (an intermediate langauge that js is compiled to), with cranelift, a rust implementation of a compiler backend. See [1] for pretty pictures of this. It's been possible to use this backend to some extent since 2018 [2]. The best place I was able to find in the last 5 minutes to describe the current state of the integration is the doc comment at the top of this file [3]. In other words it looks like spidermonkey is not not being ported, it's just not being e
Read the rest
ntirely ported yet. [1] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/master/cra... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/9mvnrk/in_firefox_nig... [3] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/js/src/wasm... Edit: Another component of spidermonkey that is being rewritten in rust is the JS parser, that project is called smooshmonkey. You can read about it in the spidermonkey news letters [4] [5] [6], and there's an nice comment describing it at the top of this reddit thread [7] [4] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/2020/01/10/newsl... [5] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/2020/03/12/newsl... [6] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/2020/05/11/newsl... [7] https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/h0ddpi/smooshmonkey_n...
In Microsoft: Rust Is the Industry’s ‘Best Chance’ at Safe Systems Programming
roca·May 6, 2020
To understand this better, here's a good place to start in the Webkit source code: https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/blob/master/Source/WebCore/... That is the interface Webkit uses to draw "native theme" buttons and other controls on Mac. It is not using a real Cocoa NSButton for each button in the Web page. Instead, it creates its own internal DOM and CSS rendering objects (HTMLButtonElement, RenderButton respectively) which are cross-platform code. Every time it needs to draw a button, it calls virtual methods on RenderTheme. On Mac, the RenderThemeMac implementation calls down into Cocoa code to draw the background and borders of the button. (But not text; that wouldn't work in general, because in HTML a <button> can contain arbitrary HTML elements, and native buttons can't handle that.) That's pretty much the only involvement of Cocoa
Read the rest
native button code. Firefox works in a very similar way; here's the Firefox version of RenderThemeMac: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/widget/coco...
In Firefox 76

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