Andy McKay

Jan 14, 2015

Mozilla uses what


Today there was a blog post about Angular. One of the main things in there seems to be that:

Google has a good name in web technology, so if they push a JavaScript library it must be good ... right?

I’ve seen this happen multiple times, especially in an development agency staffed by non-technical managers. Managers ask developers to pick a framework and justify it. They can write a long list, but in the end they’ll get to a bullet point like “Google uses it” or “Google built it”.

The problem with that - any large organisation uses a large amounts of differing and competing technologies. Mozilla uses a huge number of open source projects and libraries. I’m not even going to list the things we use in just our web applications because it’s ridiculously long. And that’s just one very small part of Mozilla.

More than that, not only do we use a lot of projects - we write a lot of open source projects. Have a look at the Mozilla github repo and again, that’s one very small part of Mozilla.

It’s easy to assume that Google makes Angular and make associations with Gmail and so many other great things. But Google doesn’t use Angular for everything. Just like Mozilla doesn’t use node.js for everything.

Choose an open source technology for the right reasons, but avoid linking a technology to a brand and clouding your judgement.