[HN Gopher] What's the future of Servo?
___________________________________________________________________
What's the future of Servo?
Author : theBashShell
Score : 426 points
Date : 2020-08-14 11:23 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| masklinn wrote:
| Servo being gone is sad, SRT being gone is terrifying.
| tanilama wrote:
| There is a push to this project since like 4 days ago...pretty
| telling itself.
| dindresto wrote:
| How will Servo be affected by the Mozilla layoffs?
| dang wrote:
| This comment was posted before we changed the URL - see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24161984.
|
| I've made the replies top-level comments since the thread scope
| is now at this level.
| MR4D wrote:
| I don't understand something about many of the comments I've seen
| on HN regarding Firefox, Edge, Chrome, etc....
|
| Why does it matter if there is one source tree for all browsers?
| [0]
|
| Is it really a bad thing if Chromium is the base, and then
| Google, Microsoft, etc push out forks of it?
|
| Isn't that what we do in the linux world already with the kernel?
| Redhat, Ubuntu, Mint, etc all take a stock kernel from the git
| tree and then tweak it for their uses, yet we don't complain
| about that.
|
| [0] - Yes, I know people lost their jobs, and that sucks,
| especially in this economy. But my question isn't about the jobs,
| it's about having multiple browsers and why some people
| vehemently believe that multiple browsers without shared source
| code is critical to our future. THAT is what I don't understand.
| msclrhd wrote:
| If there's a bug between the specifications and Chrome, what
| incentive is there for Chrome to change? How do you
| check/verify the specifications if there is only one
| implementation?
|
| Given a single implementation, what incentive is there to
| develop open standards?
|
| How do you innovate (in standards, JavaScript performance,
| rendering, etc.) if there is only one group working on them?
|
| Case in point: Firefox is the only major browser to provide
| MathML support. Where is the incentive to get that implemented
| in the other browsers, especially given MathJax?
|
| Where is the competition to innovate in things like web tools
| (layout analysis -- esp. for flexbox, etc., accessibility
| property (WCAG, WAI-ARIA) navigation/investigation) given a
| single implementation?
| feanaro wrote:
| In addition to what the other comments are saying, it's not at
| all clear that maintaining a suitable fork of Chromium would be
| less work than maintaining a completely different browser
| implementation. Google is clearly trying to drive the web into
| an unsavoury direction so the divergence burden of such a fork
| might increase with time.
|
| Also, it's never a bad idea to implement the same thing twice,
| from scratch. Working with an existing codebase necessarily
| puts you into a certain mindset with its own trade-offs and
| constraints where moving in a certain direction might be much
| harder than if you are starting from scratch. Would we ever see
| innovations that Servo brought forth if all we had were
| Chromium forks? It's hard to say, but it's definitely not
| obvious.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| If Linux were the only operating system out there, and
| incidentally was completely controlled by a company that only
| kept it open source for its own amusement, would you still be
| singing this tune? I doubt it.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The difference is that the Linux Foundation doesn't have a side
| business getting a cut from every install of Apache Server or
| something. They do not have a strong stake in how people end up
| using Linux.
|
| Google has a strong interest in how people end up using the web
| and they have a particular vision for it, a vision that many on
| here disagree with.
|
| Imagine if IBM ran the Linux kernel. We would be hearing many
| of the same concerns.
| parenthesis wrote:
| Except that Linux isn't the only game in town, there are the
| BSDs and commercial alternatives.
| mplewis wrote:
| Linux have shown themselves to be trustworthy maintainers of an
| open project. Google have not.
| jdmichal wrote:
| The problem is that it's not just a base utility layer being
| shared. It's the entire web-standards stack. Which means that
| Google would now have pretty much free reign to push the
| standards wherever they wanted, because if it's in Chrome it's
| in everything except iOS.
| mojomark wrote:
| Why do software engineers feel the need to name abstract software
| after tangeable things, conflating search results? E.g., "Servo",
| "Containers", etc.
|
| Can we not find a simple naming convention that is less ambiguous
| and confusing to the rest of the world that uses both software
| and hardware? E.g. ServoSW, ContainerSW, or stick with names that
| have no hardware corollary?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Damn, I want to support Servo. Where do I throw my allowance on
| them?
| guerrilla wrote:
| My first post on HN using Servo. GitHub seems to work too. Pretty
| fast. Build was fast and easy too but huge (6GB including the
| .git) I sure hope this project surives.
| malkia wrote:
| Trying to build it on Windows, not so successful so far.
| paulrouget wrote:
| I recommend that you build (or download) the UWP version of
| Servo: https://download.servo.org
| vbezhenar wrote:
| What about other websites? Are they usable (even if slightly
| broken)?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Actually a lot of things are usable even if they are askew.
| Like the Google logo on search is way to the left rather than
| center. On the other hand, Facebook is complete chaos and
| totally unusable, for example.
| mst wrote:
| I'm torn between "so, same as on any browser" and "surely
| that's a feature" as a response to this :D
| slezyr wrote:
| That's a lightweight build for a browser.
|
| Chromium's folder with build and .git takes 40GB.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's the spirit.
| krick wrote:
| A follow-up question. Does it affect the future of Rust as well?
| What about it?
| umanwizard wrote:
| The servo team has been (either mostly or entirely, I'm not sure)
| laid off, so presumably the project is dead.
| Kelteseth wrote:
| > project is dead
|
| That's quite a drastic statement. Maybe the devs find another
| company that sponsors the development of servo?
| umanwizard wrote:
| I guess anything is possible, but why would anyone other than
| Mozilla want to develop Servo?
| DJHenk wrote:
| I think any big company who does not like Google's
| dominance on the web would want to do that. The reason they
| all switch to a chromium engine is not that they don't
| care, it's because it was too hard/expensive to develop
| their own engine. If Servo has any potential in that sense,
| I don't see why a company like Microsoft would not want to
| contribute to that.
| brianush1 wrote:
| Microsoft has made two working browser engines: Trident
| and EdgeHTML. They've killed both in favor of Chromium; I
| don't see how it would cost them less to develop Servo
| than to have kept working on EdgeHTML.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I said at the time that Microsoft should have stepped
| into to sponsor Firefox, and make a firefox-based IE.
| Surely between the two of them Chrome could get some
| better competition.
| lovelearning wrote:
| I think MS thinks very differently. Some months ago, one
| of their PMs said:
|
| "It's time for @mozilla to get down from their
| philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by
| Chromium, if they really 'cared' about the web, they
| would be contributing instead of building a parallel
| universe that's used by less than five percent?" [1]
|
| [1] : https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-guy-
| mozilla-should-g...
| megaman821 wrote:
| Not thinking about this too deeply, would Chromium become
| like Linux in this situation? Linux has heavily won the
| server market but many different flavors of Linux are
| being deployed still without a single, overwhelming
| winner. Maybe contributions like Stylo to Chromium could
| improve the web for a larger audience of people than
| Firefox could reach in its current state.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Wow, what a shitty attitude.
|
| Standards bodies are powerless if there's only one
| implementation.
| [deleted]
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Beyond shitty. As if hiding behind Chromium will help
| them. I'm sure GOOG can't think of
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=62rAjp5Nr9g
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/02/21/google
| -wa...
|
| Ways to mess with Chromium Edge. It's not like it's a
| company full of smart, engineers, capable of skirting
| around the law.
| gridlockd wrote:
| Ask yourself, why are "web standards" or "standards
| bodies" good? Why should they have "power"? The W3C held
| back the web platforms _for years_.
|
| What's the point of having an extremely complex standard
| that nobody else will ever implement anyway? Remember, it
| would take _billions_ of dollars to implement a
| competitive browser and then you have to give it away for
| free.
|
| If even a trillion dollar company like Microsoft thinks
| it's better to team up with a competitor rather than
| implement HTML all by themselves, it really should make
| you think.
|
| Consider, there's only one Linux kernel, there's no
| "Linux standard", just one kernel - and the world runs on
| it. I don't see people running around complaining about
| how that's a threat, even though it's much harder to
| switch operating systems than browsers. Sure, there's
| POSIX, but that's a tiny subset of Linux features.
| smabie wrote:
| I wouldn't call POSIX a tiny subset of Linux features.
| POSIX makes up the vast majority of the kernel interfaces
| that applications actually use. Stuff like epoll and
| io_uring are the exception, not the rule.
| umanwizard wrote:
| That's the view of one random person at Microsoft.
| winter_squirrel wrote:
| How many other companies with the capital to fund such
| development have a need for a new browser engine and would be
| willing to fund a team of engineers to work on such an engine
| vs just using chromium?
| jeswin wrote:
| Samsung, LG, many Chinese TV and mobile phone manufacturers
| etc. Samsung was a contributor to the Servo project, but
| I'm not sure to what extent they were helping.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| LG holds the remainder of the Palm WebOS assets, and has
| been doing decent things with them. So there's at least
| partially a history of them doing this kind of thing.
| Maybe there's a slight chance they might have an
| interest.
| rbanffy wrote:
| WebOS used WebKit last time I checked.
| mrec wrote:
| Microsoft might have done. Picking Chromium as the basis
| for their new Edge a couple of years ago, instead of
| Mozilla/Servo, was a disappointment at the time and I
| suspect will look even worse in future retrospectives.
|
| MS also seem to have a lot more interest in Rust than
| Google do.
| coldtea wrote:
| Mozilla should have ousted the executives, Cxx's and
| secretarial stuff -- not their sole chance of ever making their
| browser engine better...
|
| What's the deal anyway, is Mozzila a non profit for the
| development of the Firefox browser and an open FOSS web
| standards based web engine, or a sandbox for business types to
| play with and implement various BS ideas (ads, VPN, mobile OS,
| etc)?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a for-profit
| business. It just so happens that 100% of its shares are
| owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit.
| coldtea wrote:
| The sooner the profit corp dies off and eats humble pie
| then, the better.
|
| An actual community project should rise from this state of
| affairs, with tanginble, browser-oriented goals, not
| something dependent on Google's money...
|
| Here's the person who announced the firings... Nothing to
| do with development or FOSS, some laywer ex-Netscape
| employee:
|
| Winifred Mitchell Baker (born 1959) is the Executive
| Chairwoman and CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and of Mozilla
| Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that
| coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet
| applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
| Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and
| policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board
| of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of
| Directors.
|
| It's like the leeches that hang on to NGOs for a salaried
| office career, and don't do activism themselves...
|
| For all his faults, at least Brendan Eich was an actual
| developer, and with important contributions to the web and
| Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > An actual community project should rise from this state
| of affairs
|
| This is just so naive view ... it's always the abstract
| "community" which should step in and save the day.
| Recently it was LibreOffice too where people got all mad
| due to proposed branding and again "community" superhero
| was expected to step in, fork it and carry on the whole
| development.
|
| In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely
| community projects. They require full time paid
| developers and not few of them. They won't be able to
| survive without corporate sponsorship (and thus
| influence).
| coldtea wrote:
| > _In reality these projects are far too huge to be
| purely community projects._
|
| Mozilla is far too huge to not have money. Just 200M from
| those 600 million per year it took from Google, put in
| the bank, could pay for 50 developers/graphic designers/
| $200K per year to work on it for 20 years. That would
| have taken care of the engine for 2 decades...
|
| Instead they burnt money in BS ventures, Cxx salaries,
| events, and so on...
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 50 developers/graphic designers
|
| That is _way_ too low to be anything more than
| maintenance mode. By my estimation [1], you 'd want
| somewhere around 250 full-time equivalents to be able to
| declare the project in a healthy state.
|
| [1] Take the number I'd estimate for Thunderbird,
| multiply by 10 for Firefox-scale, then add another 20% to
| account for the operations that Thunderbird gets "for
| free" (e.g., maintaining server infrastructure) and
| accounting for the fact that email standards are far
| slower in innovation than browser standards.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| You're delusional if you think you can maintain a
| competitive browser runtime with 50 employees.
| coldtea wrote:
| I think you can maintain it with even less...
|
| KHTML was done by a tiny KDE team.
|
| After Apple adopted it, Webkit/Safari only had a small
| team of people working on it.
|
| A good team of 12-20 devs is better than some BS team of
| 250 with politics, communication overhead, lack of
| coherence etc that comes with scale...
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > KHTML was done by a tiny KDE team.
|
| Yes, 20 years ago.
|
| Fortunately, web technology did not evolve and grow at
| all since so it should be doable now too, right?
| Redoubts wrote:
| Kinda wonder what happened after the yahoo buyout.
| Supposedly Mozilla could have kept all the cash from
| yahoo's search deal, but still solicited revenue from
| google by making them the default instead. Where did that
| money go, and why not just earmark it for Firefox?
|
| https://gizmodo.com/yahoo-s-insanely-bad-deal-to-pay-
| mozilla...
| steveklabnik wrote:
| My understanding is that there was a lawsuit over this
| https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-mozilla-legal-
| fight-ov...
|
| I have not heard about this in a very long time (note
| this article is from December 2017), but also, litigation
| takes a very long time.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Nothing to do with development or FOSS
|
| Not exactly nothing to do with FOSS. She wrote the MPL.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
|
| Having said that, I do think these recent layoffs reflect
| badly on her if she is indeed responsible for them.
| scott_s wrote:
| Not only did I not know that a non-profit could wholly
| own a for-profit, not only did I not know that they could
| share executive leadership, I _certainly_ did not know
| this was the case for Mozilla.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Note that a for-profit owned by a non-for-profit is
| really a not-for-profit. Because the only things that the
| for-profit company can do with it's profit are reinvest
| it, or give it to the non-for-profit.
| scott_s wrote:
| Then what is the benefit of this arrangement?
|
| That is, based on what you said, it sounds like there is
| no meaningful difference between having a non-profit do
| all the work, and a for-profit doing work on behalf of
| the non-profit that owns it. But if that was the case,
| why would anyone bother with the extra layers? I'm
| inclined to assume there is _some_ reason for the extra
| layers, and I have difficulty believing those differences
| are in society 's best interest.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I think the difference is mainly in restrictions on what
| kind of activities a non-profit can participate in. I'm
| not sure on the details.
| doteka wrote:
| Taxes are a big reason. In many countries you can save
| quite a lot on revenue tax this way.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Because the only things that the for-profit company
| can do with it 's profit are reinvest it, or give it to
| the non-for-profit._
|
| It can also pay it's Cxx's nice salaries and hefty golden
| parachutes, which makes it a for profit for them...
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _community project ... rise from affairs_
|
| By the looks of it, Servo is a project that failed to
| deliver a new browser engine after years of work. If
| there were a chance that the project could be turned
| around to result in usable software, I'm sure Moz
| wouldn't have killed it. Is it worth the effort to pickup
| the project rather than starting from scratch? I don't
| know, and would appreciate if contributors share their
| opinion, or come up with a roadmap. By the reaction of
| some devs here on HN ("don't worry, Rust is safe; no
| really!") unfortunately I got the impression that the
| project was treated more as a showcase for Rust rather
| than a serious attempt at a new browser engine (please
| don't take it personally; I know this attitude from the
| "100% Javs" days and consider it a junior dev trait).
| Also, the "rise from ashes"/Phoenix metapher is no
| stranger to Mozilla, only that Moz picked the remains
| from Netscape; the effort to code a browser from scratch
| (in Java) had failed as well; it resulted in the Rhino
| JavaScript engine which is still heavily used.
| notriddle wrote:
| Parts of Servo succeeded, like the webrender GPU stack
| and the CSS selector engine.
|
| The parallel layout engine failed. It just kept running
| into corner cases that didn't handle parallel layout
| well. If you look in the layout_2020 folder in the source
| repository, you can see an in-progress pivot to a new
| approach that would hopefully have less problems, but now
| we'll never know.
|
| This isn't a surprise. It was supposed to be a research
| project; if parts of it didn't fail, that would be a
| surprise.
| Crespyl wrote:
| Servo wasn't intended to build a full engine to replace
| Gecko, just to prove out components (Stylo, WebRender,
| etc) that could be integrated back into Gecko proper,
| built in a way that takes full advantage of Rusts
| strengths, and it's been pretty successful by that
| measure, IMO.
|
| There was plenty more work to do (other commenters have
| mentioned a new layout engine), and I'm disappointed to
| see Mozilla abandoning such a core next-gen R&D project
| that has already brought substantial improvements to
| their main product.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| > Servo wasn't intended to build a full engine to replace
| Gecko, just to prove out components
|
| That's really not a true reflection of prior
| communications about Servo's goals.
| [deleted]
| toweringgoat wrote:
| Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially
| around he salary. You need a CEO, and Bay Area salaries are
| high.
|
| Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no
| experience will easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla,
| who IME pay a bit less). A plain manager of a 10-person team
| at a big bay area company will be earning close to 500k (and
| most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k
| range). Then you get your principal and distinguished
| engineers who can easily make 1M per year. 2.5M for someone
| leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and you do
| need _someone_ to lead that company - to make tose strategic
| decisions.
|
| You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made
| the right decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're
| also in a tough environment - maybe their CEO could be making
| better decisions that would boost usage - or maybe usage is
| entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person
| leading the company. And you need to retain them.
|
| And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's
| being done.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Oh come on, let 's stop it with the CEO bashing.
| Especially around he salary. You need a CEO_
|
| Citation needed.
|
| > _But you do need that person leading the company. And you
| need to retain them._
|
| I don't even need / want a company. I want the non-profit
| organization I was promised, with community leading, and
| perhaps 1-2 BDFLs to make the final decisions.
|
| Linux did well without a CEO...
| garmaine wrote:
| Those numbers are only true of a handful of household name
| tech companies that are very competitive to get into. I
| guarantee you that most line level people at most companies
| are not making 300-500k.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That presumes that a CEO should be making more than a
| distinguished engineer. The truth is that CEO salaries are
| completely public so there's much deeper competition for
| the highest-paid ones (the ones getting paid the most, not
| necessarily the best at the job) in an ever expanding
| bubble the increases the salaries from those making less
| ("this is what it takes to run an organization of this
| size"). If we had an actual way to measure value on the job
| things would be better (something like points above
| replacement) but no one has figured this out for large
| organizations that require cooperation (+ different kinds
| of value).
| craigsmansion wrote:
| > And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well
| it's being done.
|
| If I can take a literal potato, stick it in a pot, put that
| pot in an expensive chair in an expensive well-lit CEO
| office, have the potato's PA water it every day, and at the
| end of the year can claim more growth and sustainability,
| then "how well it's being done" kind of starts to matter.
| lultimouomo wrote:
| I think this reasoning is not straightforward for Mozilla
| as it would be for a traditional company.
|
| Normally, the shareholders own the company. They appoint
| the CEO, or a board of directors or whatever management
| structure, and they decide how much to pay them. It's the
| shareholders' company, it's the shareholders' right to
| decide whether to keep the C-suite and how much to pay
| them. Things can get a bit muddled with large public
| companies with many shareholders, or when there are dual
| class shares, which can partially insulate the management
| from the owners control, but it more or less works this
| way.
|
| In the case of Mozilla Foundation, AFAICS, this does not
| hold. The board of directors is completely self managing;
| they coopt board members and appoint the CEO of Mozilla
| Corporation.
|
| I might be very wrong about this, but since Baker is both
| the chairman of the foundation and the CEO of the
| corporation, it looks to me like she doesn't basically
| answer to anyone. It's a bit like she owns the company,
| except she didn't have to buy it. That's a pretty sweet
| deal.
| chronogram wrote:
| https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960
|
| Seems like it's a community project now.
| toweringgoat wrote:
| When it comes to Mozilla, "community project" is often
| equivalent to dead project. There are exceptions - Thunderbird
| appears to be doing OK - but my experience with Mozilla is that
| community is an afterthought - a place to hopefully get some
| free labour.
|
| That said, Servo did seem to be one of the more lively places,
| so perhaps it will continue.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not only Mozilla, that is the outcome of pretty much most
| FOSS projects when one doesn't have a solid income, only a
| selected few get to live from donations and patreon.
| toweringgoat wrote:
| Honestly, it varies.
|
| Rust seems to have a strong community of voluntary
| contributors, and could probably be run without company
| backing. Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects
| such as KDE and Gnome - primarily dependent on a wide base
| of volunteers.
|
| Then there are projects with a mix: plenty of volunteers,
| along with many commercial contributors - the commercial
| contributors tend to be more significant (certainly they
| add more code - but then they're the ones pushing new
| features for their customers) - but then there are enough
| volunteer contributions that the projects aren't dependent
| on the commercial entities. Linux Kernel, LibreOffice,
| Kubernetes, VSCode, come to mind. And with multiple
| commercial entities, it's not a tragedy if one drops out.
|
| Then there are those projects with a single commercial
| backer, and fewer volunteers. Those are the ones that die
| off when the company drops out. The question is - is Servo
| in this category?
| est31 wrote:
| Note that some of the Rust volunteers still get temporary
| contracts with Mozilla to realize big features. So not
| everything that was contributed by non-Mozilla employees
| was done so without Mozilla money.
| [deleted]
| jorvi wrote:
| > Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects such
| as KDE and Gnome
|
| I am not too up to date on KDE, but Gnome is mainly
| pushed forward by Red Hat, and recently by Canonical.
| Unpaid volunteers certainly make a decent amount of
| contributions but the vast amount of progress comes from
| corporations, not volunteers.
| pjmlp wrote:
| All the projects you listed get regular brief cases full
| of money, one just needs to have a look at their sponsor
| listings, which come down to the selected few I was
| mentioning.
|
| Even the Linux kernel would never had taken off beyond an
| hobby project had not been for contributions from Oracle,
| Compaq, IBM, Intel engineers during the early days.
|
| So yeah will Servo find such a benefactor, very difficult
| to say, but Samsung used to contribute, if I remember
| correctly.
| bzb4 wrote:
| Thunderbird is okay because it was basically a finished
| project when it was forcibly emancipated. Servo won't have
| the same luck.
| xacky wrote:
| Hopefully the community can improve it and make an independent
| project that isn't influenced by Google. I don't trust Mozilla
| to do so anymore.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Where will "the community" get the money to do so?
| chenzhekl wrote:
| I hope so too. But it's sad that, in practice, there're few
| successful big open-source projects without receiving support
| from commercial corporations.
| MatekCopatek wrote:
| What's the current outlook of Servo following recent events at
| Mozilla? Did any significant contributions previously come from
| the OSS community or was it more or less just Mozillians?
| aquova wrote:
| To jump on this, what is the scope of Servo anymore? It was
| originally supposed to eventually replace Gecko, but last I
| heard they had shifted to simply moving the more stable parts
| into Firefox with Quantum. What is the end goal of the project
| now, even before the recent layoffs?
| dathinab wrote:
| I think it kinda didn't had an end goal anymore.
|
| They had detected the most profitable improvements and moved
| them over to Firefox.
|
| So I'm not really surprised about them not continuing servo,
| even though it had been grate.
|
| I'm more worried about some of the other layoff.
|
| Further it feels a bit like they got in a place where they
| financially couldn't go on like before and fanned out to get
| more revenue streams but if that fails we might be down to
| chrome + safari, which would be horrible, tbh.
|
| If it really comes to that we might even want to try to push
| the EU to get financially involved or something.
| wongarsu wrote:
| >if that fails we might be down to chrome + safari
|
| Safari isn't available on Windows, and Google doesn't want
| a situation where they are the only significant browser on
| the most popular desktop operating system. Google is scared
| of antitrust action, getting another monopoly is the last
| thing they want.
| hinkley wrote:
| This is the problem with the low hanging fruit strategy.
| Everyone gets behind the 20% improvement. Almost nobody
| gets behind the 1% improvement. Those only happen by force
| of will (some developer doing it despite being told not
| to).
|
| In the end you are 80% of the way to the goal and the last
| 20% is politically insurmountable. This is, IME, a primary
| driver for the Lava Flow Antipattern.
| dthul wrote:
| Someone on Twitter mentioned Servo's "Layout 2020" project
| which would have ensured that Firefox's layout engine stays
| competitive:
| https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020
| Brakenshire wrote:
| A parallel layout engine would be a hugely important
| change for the web. Would mean the possibility of
| changing or animating layout relevant properties (which
| is almost all of them) without recalculating the entire
| page. This is the most important limitation for web UIs.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > It was originally supposed to eventually replace Gecko, but
| last I heard they had shifted to simply moving the more
| stable parts into Firefox with Quantum.
|
| Those don't sound like incompatible approaches. The monolith
| Gecko would be difficult to replace whole hog, a modular
| surgical approach seems more realistic.
| brundolf wrote:
| I've heard from people close to the team that Servo was never
| intended to replace Gecko wholesale, but was intended to be
| an exploratory research project where new browser engine
| innovations could happen and eventually trickle down to Gecko
| piecemeal.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| As a Gecko developer, I would agree with this.
| coldtea wrote:
| What's the scope of Gecko/Firefox anymore?
|
| If they don't invest in a new engine, and given that the old
| engine is not much to compare with Blink or even Webkit,
| what's left for them? Pocket and some BS VPN service?
| acdha wrote:
| > given that the old engine is not much to compare with
| Blink or even Webkit
|
| Do you have a citation supporting that? The old engine
| compares quite favorably with Chrome and Mobile Safari.
|
| https://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+79,chrome+84,safari+13
| ....
|
| https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/
| idoubtit wrote:
| > The old engine compares quite favorably with Chrome
|
| The provided links only compare API coverage, while other
| domains (performance, security...) are important. Even
| so, Firefox is clearly trailing Chrome, its main desktop
| competitor. It's not surprising since I've heard that the
| latter has much more man-power. And the gap will
| increase.
|
| I've looked at CanIUse, ignoring the features which are
| implemented but disabled by default. Chromes lacks 5
| features the Firefox has. The biggest two are MathML and
| VirtualReality, which were both available as experimental
| features in past Chrome versions but were removed for
| lack of interest in publishing or maintaining them.
|
| On the other side, Firefox lacks 25-30 features that
| Chrome has. A few of them are minor, but most of them
| seem complex.
| randall wrote:
| This could keep the company alive though. If they lose
| their goog contract (which is 99% certain) they will have
| very little revenue.
| dineshdb wrote:
| On the contrary, google contract has been rumored to be
| 99.99% certain (company sources).
| [deleted]
| yashap wrote:
| Now confirmed: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.co
| m/sites/barrycolli...
| infogulch wrote:
| Right on the heels of Mozilla's announcement to shutdown
| research on a promising potential next gen browser
| engine. Hm. I wonder if the renewal deal had an impact on
| which programs Mozilla cut besides raw funding.
| sroussey wrote:
| Likely the other way around. They didn't get as much as
| they wanted so they reprioritized and made cuts. Deals
| don't happen and end in a press release the next day.
| edoceo wrote:
| Without AMP:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozi
| lla...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Google needs Mozilla as much as Microsoft needed Apple
| and will be happy to fund them one way or another if only
| to look good in the eyes of the regulators. And it's
| pocket change to Google.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| I thought it was only the dev tools and mdn people? Although
| looking at twitter it appears it may be more?
| zucker42 wrote:
| The U.S. based Servo team got laid off. There's another team
| I think, and they were unsure last I heard.
| est31 wrote:
| IIRC nox was in the paris office, and jdm in the Torronto
| office.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Simon is also in Paris. He an nox both worked on the
| "layout 2020" project (with pcwalton).
| est31 wrote:
| Yes but Simon apparently wasn't laid off while jdm and
| nox were. It's not just the US servo folks affected.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| France has reasonable labor laws with respect to firing
| people, so the list of people fired there is not known
| yet.
| mst wrote:
| That would come as news to nox.
|
| Not that I expect him to have any actual motivation at
| this point given Servo is basically toast either way.
| jgraham wrote:
| I'm not/wasn't a member of the Servo team, but have collaborated
| with them, and if you get the opportunity to work with them I
| cannot recommend it highly enough.
|
| They have the kind of deep technical knowledge and ability to
| solve challenging problems you'd expect from a research group,
| coupled with the skills to make pragmatic tradeoffs and fix the
| complex real world problems needed to ship software. More than
| that, they are one of the most welcoming and friendly teams I
| ever worked with. The culture they created allowed them to take
| inexperienced new contributors and quickly ramp them up to a
| place where they were confident to solve challenging problems.
| Working in that environment and seeing what's possible has really
| raised my bar for workplace culture and mentorship.
| nokusu wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words it was a pleasure to hang with you.
| asajeffrey wrote:
| Thanks!
| paulrouget wrote:
| :D
| onion2k wrote:
| That's a great recommendation but isn't it a bit late? The team
| were laid off. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865
| garmaine wrote:
| Hence the recommendation. They're presumably looking for work
| now.
| lvh wrote:
| Surely immediately after a layoff is one of the better times
| to get a glowing recommendation? Some recruiters (and
| certainly plenty of hiring managers) read HN :)
| Brakenshire wrote:
| What absolute nonsense, Servo was the most important thing
| Mozilla was doing. If Mozilla isn't making the most promising
| and competitive investments in its browser (e.g. parallel
| layout) what is it for? The Quantum project, which is tied to
| Servo, is the only reason Firefox is still competitive.
| oscargrouch wrote:
| I wonder how much of this, has too do with social justice
| going to far in the harassment of Brendan Eich.
|
| I mean, maybe someone with his background in charge would
| know why its important for Mozilla to keep this kind of
| projects even if it looks they are not going anywhere,
| because this is what gives Mozilla meaning in the end.
|
| Im not a mozillian, so i might be totally wrong, but maybe
| this is a case of the MBA's taking over and trying to focus
| into what they have learned to do.. look at the profit
| margins and think they are spending too much in research
| projects.
|
| There are a lot of examples of other companies losing their
| engineering culture, starting to think more in terms of
| cash and profit, and finally vanishing its purpose and
| meaning.
|
| IBM(lost in the 80's), Microsoft almost loosing it in the
| Ballmer era, Sun, and the most proeminent case: Yahoo.
|
| Just to make it clear: Tech companies as any other company
| must have a good financial health and this is very
| important, but they cannot afford to loose their soul.
|
| Once their engineering and innovation culture is gone, they
| become void and suffer from a slow bleeding til the death.
|
| We must face it, our economical systems of incentives, the
| economical game generally speaking, its broken.
|
| And tech and arts are proeminent endeavors that tend to get
| trojan horsed by this yuppie mentality turning things that
| once had meaning, into meaningful cash cows that work for
| the few people that cash out from the corrupted source.
|
| (Apparently, it works a little better for industrial-level
| enterprises).
|
| My hope is that, with time, this will become more evident,
| and research find innovative ways to make a better
| economical game so that creative, art and engineering
| culture kind of companies can have a much larger life span.
|
| By the way, they had a pretty good leverage on Rust (and
| Rust was a really risk bet that ended doing great). The
| fact that they fired the people with this background just
| shows that they have no clue of what they are really doing.
|
| * Edit: just being clear about people with conservative
| views.. I dont like and even despise what he did
| politically speaking, but as long as he were a good fit for
| the job, and never forced his political and social views
| into the company, i dont agree with the outcome.. and the
| reason is starting to show up now.. Much more important
| things are starting to fall out, and in the end even people
| with progressive views and good engineering background
| ended fired in the long term. _
| Brakenshire wrote:
| It's not even a question of losing their soul, this is
| their core product.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| Would you feel the same way about, say, a CEO donating to
| NAMBLA? I mean, if they have a good technical background,
| does it really matter if the public face of the company
| is out there advocating for relationships between adults
| and young boys? It's just politics, after all.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Allen Ginsberg donated to NAMBLA[1] and people still read
| _Howl_ aloud in public.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg#Associat
| ion_wit...
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| Hm...you're right, I concede Allen Ginsberg should not be
| the CEO of Mozilla.
| oscargrouch wrote:
| There's no need to appeal by lowering the bar so i can
| relate/understand. I have a politically progressive point
| of view, that goes totally against what we are referring
| here.
|
| But lets not mix things up here. People that are
| conservatives and even homophobic in my experience have
| more to do with the cultural views of a giving period
| that they were raised and i think that in some cases, we
| must not take things lightly, but also give some time for
| them to rethink their values.
|
| And im pretty sure that kicking these people on the teeth
| wont help them to get integrated at all. The only thing
| they will learn in to lie better and be a better
| hypocrite.
|
| Here public/private boundaries are very important. So if
| the guy is tweeting about this point of view and damaging
| the image of the company, of course, this would be a good
| motive to fire him.
|
| But if he believe this in private, dont force others in
| the company to follow his socio-political views and is
| good in what hes doing, even if you dont like his
| political views, we should not fire anyone because of
| this.
|
| Pedophiles on the other way are people with very harsh
| psychological problems that may lead them to commit a
| very serious crime. You dont need to resort to this sort
| of rethorical trick to make me understand, as i already
| did before (you already have my empathy here as im on
| your side).
|
| Really, with time we learn that we are all handicapped
| here and there, and by becoming more humble about that,
| we learn that we need to accept and work with people with
| a lot of different views, backgrounds and actions or else
| we are all getting cancelled.
|
| We need to be more careful about social sidelining
| people, because we will just turn some people that were
| mildly into something to become real radicals and also at
| the same time losing good hands that would otherwise help
| us into build a better future.
|
| What make the most harm to the society: A guy
| contributing in private, financially, to entities that
| lobby for policies that goes against gay people or a CEO
| and board with impeccable and fair social and political
| views but that end doing actions that harm the core of a
| company that is best know for their engineering culture,
| good products, open source and freedom values?
|
| Because Mozilla will be vaporized in the coming years..
| does it really worth it?
| skissane wrote:
| One is a proposal, which at the time, was mainstream
| enough to gain the support of a majority of California
| voters. (And, even today, although I don't think it would
| get a majority any more, it probably still would get a
| significant minority of California voters supporting it.)
|
| The other is an extremely fringe view which has only ever
| been supported by a tiny percentage of the population.
|
| I also don't think Eich was "out there advocating" for
| something. He made a private donation, which was not a
| significant amount in the grand scheme of things ($1,000
| either way was not going to make any difference to the
| outcome). The law required that fact to be made publicly
| available, and then others publicised it; he didn't
| voluntarily choose to publicise his donation. When people
| publicly asked him about his beliefs on the topic, he
| avoided answering the question.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| So, hi. I'm gay. My partner of 4 years is from a
| different country. Because of that, one of the only ways
| we can live together is to get married and get one of us
| citizenship in the other's country that way. To say
| nothing of other rights related to marriage.
|
| Just so you know that. Again: Brendan Eich spent $1,000
| to hurt people like me. If gay marriage was not legal, my
| life would be significantly worse today.
|
| I didn't do anything when Eich was made CEO. I probably
| should have. Let's say I did. Would you say I'd be in the
| wrong for telling Mozilla that I disagree with their
| choice of CEO, because he directly hurt people like me
| and avoids answering questions about whether he's likely
| to do it again?
|
| Hm, here, try this. Instead of something provocative,
| let's try something else.
|
| Suppose Eich donated, say, $500 to strengthen the DMCA.
| Let's say be advocated for harsher punishments for
| anybody reverse-engineering a DRM scheme, even for
| interoperability or other non-piracy purposes. Then
| suppose he gave another $500 to lobby against net
| neutrality.
|
| When asked about these donations, let's say he refuses to
| answer or talk about them.
|
| Would you be comfortable with him leading Mozilla? Kinda
| seems like his values might be deeply in conflict with
| those of the organization, making him a poor choice for
| CEO. But also ... That's just politics, after all. Has
| nothing to do with his leadership or technical skill.
|
| > I also don't think Eich was "out there advocating" for
| something.
|
| You're right- he was paying other people to go out there
| advocating for it. Hardly better!
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Why do you even want to know, or judge, anyone's
| donations ? Do you ask store clerks who did they donate
| today ? Their manager ? Private life and personal
| decisions should be left personal.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think once you get to people in leadership roles they
| start having to set a good example for subordinates and a
| positive image for the company. Donor lists are also
| often public, especially at higher amounts.
|
| Not sure at what level within a company that becomes a
| relevant question. It's not for store clerks and store
| managers. It is for the CEO.
| marta_morena_25 wrote:
| No it really wasn't. Nobody except tech geeks care about
| Servo. What Mozilla needs to do is to provide a privacy
| aware browser that doesn't inform Google (and everyone
| else) about everything we do online. They can easily go the
| path Microsoft took and use Chromium as engine. Had they
| focused on that, I think they would be in a much better
| position than they are now (wasting millions on projects
| like Servo and Rust). Don't get me wrong... I love Servo
| and Rust, but from a business perspective it's suicide.
| kgraves wrote:
| I get the business perspective and there really is no
| disputing this.
|
| > Nobody except tech geeks care about Servo.
|
| This is a good point unless there actually non tech
| people that care about Servo.
| ummonk wrote:
| Every user cares about performance / responsiveness feel.
| pcwalton wrote:
| Given a choice between Chrome and Chrome, people will
| pick Chrome every time.
| jchw wrote:
| This is short sighted. Browsers live and die on their
| performance benchmarks and security track records. Like
| it or don't, "nobody but tech geeks" actually care about
| privacy.
| kelnos wrote:
| The problem is that of understanding, and of finding
| cause and effect.
|
| I know a few people who have been victims of identity
| theft. After hearing their stories, it was clear to me
| that it would not have happened if companies weren't
| tracking them and selling their personal data left and
| right.
|
| But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to
| accept identity theft as "something that just happens
| sometimes", even though it makes them very angry,
| frustrated, anxious, and eats up a lot of time and
| sometimes money. I think they do this because it's hard
| to point to one culprit as the cause, and so it feels
| like an intractable problem.
|
| If people could actually understand that their lack of
| privacy protections on the internet (and elsewhere) is
| one of the main factors in enabling things like identity
| theft, there would be more people who would affirmatively
| care about privacy.
|
| I'm not sure how to get people to make that intuitive
| leap on a large enough scale for it to matter, though.
| You're very right that people mainly care about browser
| performance (I'd even argue they don't care about
| security _that_ much, though certainly more than they
| care about privacy); I know several people who definitely
| know better and understand privacy issues on the
| internet, but still use Chrome because "Firefox is slow
| on macOS" or something.
| abraae wrote:
| > But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to
| accept identity theft as "something that just happens
| sometimes"
|
| A little like the way people talk about "cyber warfare".
|
| In real warfare, the enemy can attack your forces no
| matter what you do.
|
| In cyber warfare, you can build impenetrable defences.
| The only way the enemy can attack you successfully is if
| you make a mistake.
|
| This kind of thinking IMO is perpetuated by absurd tv
| shows where e.g McGee can hack into any computer system
| by tapping on his keyboard for a few seconds.
|
| It's harmless on TV, but in the real world it leads to
| complacency about security. People saying"poor Equifax,
| they were attacked" instead of "Equifax's security was a
| joke, and they left their system wide open for anyone to
| plunder".
| coldtea wrote:
| > _No it really wasn 't. Nobody except tech geeks care
| about Servo. What Mozilla needs to do is to provide a
| privacy aware browser that doesn't inform Google_
|
| Nobody except geeks and politically minded people care
| about privacy that much (if they didn't they'd already
| use Firefox with DDG, or Brave or at least Safari).
|
| People do care for faster, more conventient browser --
| that's why we switched from Netscape to IE (when Mozilla
| bloated and a for a little while IE6 was faster/better),
| then to Firefox, and then to Chrome.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Lots of people care about privacy if the intrusions are
| bad enough to notice. People really don't like it if they
| search for and buy a bicycle and keep getting ads for
| bicycles for weeks.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is terrible advice. It would mean that Google, by
| controlling Chromium, has complete and unchallenged
| ownership of the Web. You are suggesting one of Google's
| last remaining competitors in the space just fold and go
| home. At that point, we might as well literally just
| unplug everything and call the Internet experiment over.
|
| Do. Not. Use. Chromium.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| If Mozilla could maintain and develop Firefox then they
| can also maintain/develop a complex Chromium fork.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Well there's still Safari, but I agree, it's looking
| terrible for the open internet right now.
| moogly wrote:
| Safari is macOS/iOS only.
| se32point1 wrote:
| WebKit, the enginge for Safari, is not. Epiphany uses the
| same engine and is available for Linux. I'm sure there's
| a Windows WebKit browser as well.
| marmaduke wrote:
| Qt has a WebKit thingy so you can build a WebKit browser
| across platforms even in Python:
|
| https://pywebview.flowrl.com/
| CameronNemo wrote:
| They are pushing the Blink engine now instead, though...
| hvis wrote:
| Safari is still more or less the same engine as Chrome.
| Even after the fork.
| krick wrote:
| At first I, like everyone else, downvoted this comment,
| because "how dare you insult my Servo!", but then
| immediately took my vote back and then finally was forced
| to upvote that, because actually I agree. In fact, it's
| all somehow paradoxically backwards: I liked (I guess I
| can safely use the past tense now) _Mozilla_ (the
| company) because of Servo, and Quantum, and Rust, and
| amazing technical people who made it all happen, not some
| PR-bullshitters and lawyer-CEO. But I use _Firefox_ (the
| product), simply because it 's only feasible non-Google
| alternative out there I know, not because it's cooler or
| even better from the technical perspective. I don't give
| a fuck what engine they use, Blink and V8 are as fast as
| it gets. In fact, there was a time before Quantum when
| Firefox was actually slower than Chromium (and I'm not
| even sure it's different now, I just don't use it), and I
| used Firefox anyway. Worse than that, the only place
| where I actually care about engine performance is mobile,
| and Chrome just destroys Firefox there. And even then, I
| opt to use Firefox half of the time (i.e. when I don't
| need to google smth quickly in the middle of the
| conversation while moving in the crowd). I guess it's
| hard to imagine how somebody could use Firefox because of
| engine at all. It's definitely not the main selling
| point, by a long shot.
|
| Edit, to summarize: it's not that performance doesn't
| matter, it's just that currently it's hard enough to
| compete with Blink & V8. And, of course, Blink becomes
| better precisely because there is a competition they have
| to fight. (It will probably become worse when
| Gecko/Servo/Firefox dies.) But to be that competition
| without having shitload of money Google has is not fun
| right now. It's hardly a fight you can win. Easier just
| to ride on Google's back and to use Blink yourself.
| exlurker wrote:
| A good starting point:
| https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
| zelly wrote:
| It's quite usable as-is. Not sure why it hasn't gotten
| much attention. It's more privacy oriented than Firefox
| and is faster than Firefox. I have been using it on
| desktop Linux for years. I tried Brave and Firefox, but
| they both have bloat and phone home to someone by
| default, unlike UG. For all the time it takes to argue
| back and forth about which browser should take over next,
| you could have installed UG and moved on with life.
| encom wrote:
| It's Google code, so it cannot be trusted and should be
| assumed to be malicious. Calling it more privacy focused
| than Firefox is just absurd.
| ponker wrote:
| This is what happens when in a spasm of pique you throw
| your 1000x engineer CEO in the rubbish and replace them
| with a lawyer.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Wow, 1000X huh. That's a lot of force multiplication.
| cheez wrote:
| That was hilarious and a harbinger of things to come.
| thephyber wrote:
| Eich was CEO from March 24 to April 3 of the same year. I
| highly doubt that was much of the problem.
|
| Certainly losing his technical talent is likely to have
| contributed to the problems, but I suspect it's 100x more
| of Chrome's dominance and Mozilla's reliance on Google's
| search engine contracts for revenue.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't want to detract from anyone's pain but I have been
| looking for a tech stack change, and if my main plan doesn't
| work out, my backup plan was to segue back into browser work
| via Rust. So I guess in addition to getting comfortable with
| the idea of having to change default browsers sometime in the
| next couple of years, I also need a plan C.
| darksaints wrote:
| How long before there is a major commercially-backed fork of
| Firefox? As a huge Firefox fan, I'm incredibly dismayed at the
| priorities expressed in these layoffs, and I know it is gonna
| bleed through to browser performance and security sooner or
| later. I don't want to stick around and find out the hard way
| when it happens.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| Hmm. Most browsers use the webkit rendering engine internally.
| The problem is that browser engines are huge and require a lot
| of developers to maintain. I think the worst thing that could
| happen here is to have Firefox die, and we'd be that much
| closer to a webkit monoculture.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Chrome uses Bink.
| Snitch-Thursday wrote:
| Which is a forked descendant of WebKit, so GP is right or
| wrong depending on how you classify a fork.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| By that logic we can call both KHTML \s
|
| In reality Blink diverged significantly from WebKit and
| it doesn't make any sense to call Blink WebKit.
| esrauch wrote:
| Even if Blink and Webkit are separate (and they are still
| clearly closer than Gecko), we're getting to a Blink
| monoculture except for the iOS holdout (which is still
| only ~5% of all traffic, but generally high value and
| you're prevented from telling them to use another
| browser).
|
| It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also
| would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too
| (with their strategic changes).
| hinkley wrote:
| Where are you getting 5% of traffic as mobile Safari?
|
| Because I was scanning around to get a lay of the browser
| engine landscape and there seems to be tons of Safari
| traffic out there.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari
| also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink
| too (with their strategic changes).
|
| I'm not sure about that. WebKit is lagging slightly
| behind Blink (and Gecko to lesser degree), but I don't
| think it bothers Apple. Budget to develop WebKit is for
| Apple hardly a problem as well.
|
| Having independent browser engine gives them quite a lot
| of strategic power given their exclusive market share.
| Look no further than how they managed to single-handedly
| kill PWAs few months ago since it does not fit into their
| strategic goals (all apps must go through app store).
| esrauch wrote:
| I think it depends if a lot of pages start breaking.
| Right now it's not happening at scale, but I don't see
| them having any reason _not_ to refork Blink if more
| "only tested on Chrome" sites start breaking on Safari.
|
| I'd expect them to maintain all strategic decisions if
| they did refork, including disabling PWA features;
| there's nothing that says they have to enable PWAs just
| because they fork from Blink.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They did not managed to kill anything, there are plenty
| of markets where iOS is not a presence we care about and
| keep doing mobile Web applications, business as usual.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Ok, maybe I should have said "relegated to niche
| applications" instead.
| pjmlp wrote:
| iOS is only relevant in 30% of the world, if we are
| talking about niches here.
| [deleted]
| monadic2 wrote:
| I just assumed they were putting that under webkit.
| kchoudhu wrote:
| Where's the money in that?
| darksaints wrote:
| The same place that Mozilla finds it: by making deals with
| search providers.
| est31 wrote:
| Why would you fork Firefox instead of Chromium which has
| better website compatibility?
| monadic2 wrote:
| Blink has _worse_ behavior in my experience, they 're
| just popular. You know, the ie6 effect.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Ecosystem diversity, interest in servo, refusal to let
| "chrome win", privacy support baked in, etc. Why would
| you fork Chromium if you're interested in Firefox?
| est31 wrote:
| The large number of Chromium forks vs the comparatively
| tiny number of Firefox forks shows that there is barely
| interest in forking Firefox. Especially when you look at
| which forks have users you'll see that it's almost
| exclusively Chromium forks.
|
| Sure, ecosystem diversity and so on is great but the
| current forkers don't see a way to make money from that,
| otherwise they'd have done it.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Right at the moment when Firefox have regained reasonable
| performance, added and polished more things (including the new
| ecosystem of extensions matured) and became the best browser
| again, on all the platforms.
|
| I've just switched back to it (after using Chrome for years
| because of Firefox's slowness) and feel like I'm going to use it
| for quite a long anyway. I just hope somebody is going to keep
| making vulnerability patches.
| EwanToo wrote:
| I think a more meaningful link is:
|
| https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/27575
|
| It's a very sad situation, I hope Samsung or another organisation
| steps in to hire the team.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| NLnet was suggested in the discussion, and it would be a good
| fit culturally, but I wonder whether they have the resources to
| fund a project like Servo in any meaningful way.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I'd really like to financially support continued development
| of servo, so I hope something gets decided on quickly to
| centralize and organize funding of the servo devs. The longer
| this takes the more likely it is they just get another job.
| Sure you can find new talent but it will take them time to
| get up to speed with the project.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed to that URL from
| https://github.com/servo/servo above. Thanks!
|
| +title changed from "Servo Parallel Browser Engine Project"
| brundolf wrote:
| One blocker to picking up Firefox as a community project is that
| Mozilla still holds all relevant trademarks. So we may need a
| singular, well-branded, well-communicated fork to rally around.
| If everyone makes their own fork, all of them will fade off into
| obscurity.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Iceweasel is a thing already, isn't it?
| brundolf wrote:
| There are several well-known forks already. But what we need
| is a community focal-point, where everyone who thinks to
| themselves, "it's a shame what Mozilla did, I want to help",
| ends up directing that energy into the same place.
| danilocesar wrote:
| I remember when Nokia decided to kill meego, or when Canonical
| stopped pushing DEs (and firing a bunch of people with it). The
| exactly same reaction happened back then: people tried to save
| things, push public projects more in the open, move ideas to
| other companies or create a community repo to sell the idea of an
| independent project. None of them really lasted or got traction.
|
| It's sad, but the reality is that the fate of a project with only
| one major stakeholder is tied to that stakeholder's fate.
|
| I'm pretty sure they will all get other jobs, but we have to face
| the fact that the project itself will probably die.
| slim wrote:
| meego had two stakeholders (intel), but you make me wonder if
| Kaios could use servo
| fabrice_d wrote:
| I would love to, but it's far from being mature enough.
| padraic7a wrote:
| Ubuntu Touch is still going, fairly strong too, though I think
| it's aim is to fill a niche rather than challenge Android and
| iOS anytime soon.
|
| https://ubports.com/
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > Ubuntu Touch is still going, fairly strong too, though I
| think it's aim is to fill a niche rather than challenge
| Android and iOS anytime soon.
|
| Do you consider getting no major OEM adoption in 5 years
| "fairly strong?" Mobile OSes depend on network effects of
| both users and developers. It's no surprise it's a duopoly.
| lykahb wrote:
| In a few weeks most of the developers on the Servo team will get
| another job. The project could be picked up by other people later
| but only with a significant loss of knowledge and momentum.
|
| Now is the critical time for a another company to step in.
| Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or
| Google. This could be a chance for them to get a competitive
| independent browser again.
| untog wrote:
| MS _just_ decided to give up their independent browser. I
| really don 't think they're about to turn around and do it
| again.
| BLanen wrote:
| And Microsoft getting much influence in the Chromium project
| is unlikely.
|
| Of course google could be forced to by governments' actions.
| sroussey wrote:
| Microsoft could fork blink just like Google forked Apples
| WebKit which was forked from KHTML. Likely in < 5yrs.
| hinkley wrote:
| Has Apple done something that makes forking WebKit
| (today) no longer a viable option?
| rl3 wrote:
| > _MS just decided to give up their independent browser. I
| really don 't think they're about to turn around and do it
| again._
|
| Never underestimate Microsoft's ability to constantly change
| its mind.
| cure wrote:
| > Never underestimate Microsoft's ability to constantly
| change its mind.
|
| On a predictable schedule, too! Cf. their annual reorg,
| which leaves everyone confused for a good 3-4 months _per
| year_.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Put it under Microsoft Research for a while. Hedging your
| bets on something like this doesn't seem like a horrible
| idea.
| encoderer wrote:
| Exactly. This teams budget is probably less than Microsoft
| spends printing employee badges every year.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Doesn't really seem like a research problem?
| zelly wrote:
| As experienced developers they will find new jobs somehow. But
| it won't be to work on Servo.
|
| > Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or
| Google.
|
| Microsoft gave up on browsers a long time ago.
|
| If someone would want to use Servo outside of a hobby project,
| it would be Google to integrate it into Chrome. The chances of
| that happening is almost zero.
| justapassenger wrote:
| > Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or
| Google
|
| Why? They're more supportive of open source than they were in
| 2001, yes. But Google and Facebook are also big in this area.
|
| And MS business still relays a lot on vendor lock in to a great
| extent
| derefr wrote:
| Google and Facebook both have incentives to turn "browsing
| the web generally" into "interacting with their properties
| specifically", so that they can capture your eyeballs. They
| both continually extend into areas that seek to replace large
| swathes of the web with interactions within their walled
| gardens, so that they can then monetize those interactions.
|
| (Amazon has this incentive too, but they're just kind of
| incompetent at the execution, so people don't worry as much
| about them. See: the Kindle Fire tablet.)
|
| Meanwhile, Microsoft doesn't _currently_ own any property
| that operates by trying to replace "eyeballs on the web
| generally" with "eyeballs on that property specifically" to
| then sell those eyeballs to advertisers. They have Bing,
| Cortana, GitHub, Skype, maybe TikTok soon. None of those
| things will really change that stance. They're not "against"
| the web.
|
| Apple is in the middle on this spectrum. Apple doesn't make
| money off _web_ eyeballs, but they _do_ make money off
| _native app_ eyeballs (iAds), and also off native-app sales
| generally. So they 're motivated-enough in providing a decent
| web experience to be the main sponsors of the WebKit FOSS
| project; but they're also motivated to create APIs that allow
| their third-party devs to replace web experiences with native
| app experiences.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > Apple doesn't make money off web eyeballs, but they do
| make money off native app eyeballs (iAds)
|
| Apple shutdown iAd in 2016
| https://developer.apple.com/support/iad/
| craigsmansion wrote:
| > Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or
| Google.
|
| That would be precious: Microsoft taking Mozilla browser
| developers onboard, creating a browser, shipping it by default
| bundled with their OS, and being able to claim it's to
| _prevent_ monopolies.
|
| It would also be nice for those highly skilled developers who
| actually believed in the open web to be able to give the middle
| finger to those in middle and upper management for whom Mozilla
| is merely a stepping stone to some cozier job at a proprietary
| software house whilst running Mozilla into the ground.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > In a few weeks most of the developers on the Servo team will
| get another job.
|
| There's a pandemic, probably a global recession, massive tech
| layoffs everywhere, and tech interviewing is an absolute
| nightmare no matter how good you are. I'm not sure I'd be as
| confident unfortunately.
| bpicolo wrote:
| The hiring market for more senior roles seems fairly healthy,
| buts seems like more junior roles are tougher. The industry
| started the year with fairly more jobs than heads to fill
| them.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Microft should have rebranded firefox as IE. They already
| should 0 vision or threw in the towel. Don't look at theme for
| help.
| anaganisk wrote:
| Didn't they just revamp Edge with Chromium? Why would they want
| to revamp it again with an engine that barely has a market
| share.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Sure. At the same time, is it really smart for them to just
| completely abandon the idea of independence?
|
| There's a _lot_ that a browser can do for a company. Google
| has built GSuite and ChromeOS around Chrome - the integration
| with the browser is absurd and _right up Microsoft 's alley_.
|
| Microsoft could build Azure Active Directory, O365, Windows,
| etc, around a next gen browser and I think they'd be smart to
| do so.
| treis wrote:
| > Sure. At the same time, is it really smart for them to
| just completely abandon the idea of independence?
|
| It is. Chrome is so dominant at this point they're the de
| facto web standard. Other browsers have to put in
| significant effort just to play catch up and can't really
| offer any new renderer/js feature without Chrome's
| blessing.
|
| Plus, we have a decade's worth of evidence that Chromium is
| just flat out better than the competition. Even if we set
| aside the problems with market share the Chromium team has
| consistently put out a faster engine than Firefox or IE.
|
| Adopting Chromium allows you to (mostly) avoid putting
| effort into the rendering engine allowing you to focus on
| other features to differentiate yourself.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > Other browsers have to put in significant effort just
| to play catch up and can't really offer any new
| renderer/js feature without Chrome's blessing.
|
| Microsoft still runs the dominant operating system! They
| have a huge opportunity here to complete. The same way
| Chrome advertises on Google.com, Microsoft can provide
| _the default fucking browser_ that is HUGE.
|
| > Plus, we have a decade's worth of evidence that
| Chromium
|
| Chrome is 12 years old. It's been super popular for less
| than a decade.
|
| Its multiprocess architecture, by far its most long term
| scalable feature, was behind Internet Explorer's (they
| started multiproc trend with, iirc, IE8).
|
| > Even if we set aside the problems with market share the
| Chromium team has consistently put out a faster engine
| than Firefox or IE.
|
| Acquire Servo, do better? That's my entire point.
| haakon wrote:
| Servo is a research project. Microsoft spends a ton on
| research.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Would they spend it on a project that was written in Rust
| rather than one of their own languages though?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Microsoft is already supporting the Rust project, so,
| yes, I would not expect that to be a disqualifying
| reason.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Are any of their langauges a good fit for something like
| Servo? I haven't used C# a huge amount but everytime I do
| I find myself being more productive than writing C++ but
| ultimately slightly worried about performance and
| correctness (the biggest thing that stood out is the
| absolutely awful immutability in C#)
| oaiey wrote:
| Latest C# versions added a lot of language and library
| features allowing efficient writing of high performance
| code. And if you want to go a step further, unity has
| shown how (burst compiler)
| domenicd wrote:
| They had a project called "Midori" which was a new
| operating system (I believe including browser?) written
| in a C# derivative. The blog posts on it are fascinating
| stuff, diving into some greenfield decisions for both
| language design and OS design.
| http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/
|
| It's interesting to compare what we know of "Midori C#"
| to Rust.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Joe spoke on this topic at RustConf a few years back
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k
| ponker wrote:
| Sure. Microsoft is a pretty unpredictable company these
| days. They are supporting all kinds of weird and
| wonderful things. I'm sure there is some ruthless
| business reason behind all of it but I don't care if it
| helps the projects.
| monoideism wrote:
| "competitive independent browser again"
|
| The point would be the technology and independence from
| Google, not the market share.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| If Servo is dead, what could possibly be the future of Firefox?
|
| I don't want to browse the web with a Blink-based browser. Total
| browser homogeneity is the end of the free and open web. I don't
| want to use a non-free non-open web.
|
| Is the web dead to me?
| robotmay wrote:
| Are there any existing projects looking to build a new browser
| based around Servo? Assuming that it's partially dead at Mozilla
| it would be interesting to see alternatives to the current big
| browsers cropping up that use it.
| dethos wrote:
| indeed
| monadic2 wrote:
| Welp there goes like 90% of the optimism about the future of the
| web.
| bholley wrote:
| I led the Stylo project to integrate Servo's CSS engine into
| Firefox as part of project Quantum [1]. I have the utmost respect
| for the engineers on the Servo team, and am sad to see them go
| (though I am certain they will have no shortage of opportunities
| as to what to work on next).
|
| Servo had two major roles within Mozilla - as an incubator for
| novel browser technology we wanted to ship in Firefox, and more
| recently, as a lighter-weight vehicle for Mixed Reality products.
| The latter has been the focus for the last three years, and those
| products now appear to be winding down. But the former was a huge
| success - both Servo's parallel CSS engine and its GPU-based
| graphics layer are now shipping in Firefox.
|
| While it seems unlikely that Mozilla will continue to prototype
| things in Servo, we're still building lots of innovative
| technology (and writing lots of Rust code) directly in Firefox. A
| few of the teams have blogged recently about the work they're
| doing [2] [3], and I'd encourage anyone interested to check it
| out.
|
| The Servo team accomplished a ton and left its ongoing mark on
| the Web. These changes are tough for everyone within Mozilla, but
| are not indicative of any change in strategy for Firefox. Gecko
| is alive and well, and there are no plans to switch to Blink.
|
| [1] https://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html [2] https://mozilla-
| spidermonkey.github.io/blog/ [3]
| https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| My understanding is that everyone who knew how Layout 2020
| worked was fired, and therefore the project to integrate it
| into Firefox is effectively dead, meaning Firefox has no
| plausible way to compete with LayoutNG. I am not trying to be
| provocative, but that is pretty hard to reconcile with your
| statement.
| bholley wrote:
| Respectfully: The Firefox layout team did not have a plan to
| integrate Layout 2020 (lots of complicated technical
| challenges that remain unsolved), and doing so was never the
| basis of our strategy to compete with LayoutNG.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Then what _is_ your strategy to compete with LayoutNG? A
| concrete roadmap would be a lot more useful than platitudes
| about how great the Servo team is, which everyone already
| knows. Nobody seems to know what the future of Firefox
| looks like, or at least I 'm having a hard time finding
| that information.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| 2 of the people working on Layout 2020 (out of 3 afaik) are
| French employees, so haven't been fired yet. They may or may
| not be depending on how the negotiations between the
| management and employee representatives go.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I remember the goal was to replace gecko. A good webkit
| alternative is desparately needed on the web, a shame mozilla
| didn't see it through.
| kibwen wrote:
| As someone who has been following Servo since 2011, the
| stakeholders have always emphatically reiterated that the
| goal was _not_ to outright replace Gecko.
| bholley wrote:
| We made the decision several years ago to integrate Servo
| components individually rather than trying to replace the
| entire engine (for the reasons outpost in the blog post
| linked above).
|
| We invest a lot in Gecko though, precisely because it's
| important to have a world-class independent engine.
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