“Mozilla’s current networking library is in a sorry state.
Remnants of the old “mozilla classic” codebase pervade, and coupled
with the fact that it was designed for a radically different
non-threaded world where it was the primary scheduler for the
browser (and performance is abysmal because this is no longer the
case causing us to have to “poll” netlib to get any work done) —
we decided that it was about time to take the situation under
control.”
“The main function that the netlib kernel serves is to act as an
efficient data pipe between multiple physical transports (ie. file
system, network, etc.) and a standardized stream abstraction which
protocol handlers consume.”
“There are three main design goals in the Necko kernel
architecture – footprint, maintainability and performance.”