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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like Servo, the next-generation browser engine that brought the world Rust, is one of the teams being destaffed:

https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960

Servo showed there was plenty of room for browser perf beyond optimizing JS engines

Mozilla getting rid of their main product's most relevant R&D makes me fear they'll eventually announce Firefox replacing its internals with chromium

Can’t say I’m surprised there wasn’t much movement on that project in a coordinated fashion it had all the makings of a project without adequate staffing to complete its vision.

Can you elaborate on this? Because I remember the day Firefox became fast with an incredible amount of fondness, and that moment owed in large part to Servo.

Firefox is faster than it was, but it's still the slowest browser. I've gotten literally 2x benchmark scores from Safari on the same hardware, and the subjective difference is large. Servo propelled FF from "unusable" to "worth the tradeoff" but they didn't have the resources to make it fast.

My experience in daily use of Firefox post-Servo is that all page loads have essentially been instantaneous. This is of course subjective based in part on hardware, so I'm not disputing your assessment.

As far as I'm aware, Servo is at the bleeding edge of performance under the hood. Its hybrid glyph rendering system for example is state-of-the-art.

I'm no browser architect--I don't know how the rendering engines compare, and of course it depends on the site and the extensions used. I did just time some popular websites, and confirmed my impressions. For example, nytimes.com gives

0.5s on Safari with Adguard

1.6s on Chrome with uBlock Origin

2.5s on Firefox with uBlock Origin

which is pretty representative.

Have you tried it without ublock out of curiosity?

Without uBlock it's Chrome 2s, Firefox 3s.

Make sure it is not some extension in the background.

Because Firefox is the fastest on my Windows PC

That was in private windows with no extensions. I tried it on my Windows machine with no extensions too, and it was 1.44 to 1.51, basically margin of error. I know MacOS Firefox has really lagged on performance improvements in the past. It could be a Mac-only issue.

some bits "born for Servo" are integrated into Firefox, but that's far away from "post-Servo"

> Firefox is faster than it was, but it's still the slowest browser.

Please let's not present this as fact only to later find out it might be OS X specific.

The whole thing is open source, isn't it?

I wonder if anybody else is interested in having it developed. Maybe if a couple of star developers currently being laid off, or redirected to other stuff, started to put more effort into it, and the community started supporting them with donations, that could speed things up?

Firefox is widely popular, and its popularity is also wide among the techs-savvy, well-paid people. Pledging to pay $10/mo for Firefox development would make a difference if, say 20k, or 50k people subscribed. I suspect there is a chance to achieve such numbers with a well-run campaign.

How can I donate some money that is specifically for Firefox development?

I do not really care for or like the other products that Mozilla is developing, like VPNs etc but rather, I would like for my money to be used towards browser development.

Exactly. Somebody should organize a fund for that, add an easy subscription solution, like Patreon, make it widely known, and sort out all the legal and tax issues.

(Unfortunately, I don't see myself doing that. At least not yet.)

This was the only important team in the whole Mozilla organization. I'm looking for a browser to beat Chrome on my mobile on performance, and Servo was the best competitor.

At the same time this is not a big surprise to me: Mozilla was already becoming a PM driven organization instead of an engineer driven one. At least they gave us Rust, that will live on and be extremely successful.

And rav1e too.

If that's the case I might as well stop using Firefox. I enjoyed it because of its performance and to a small degree to stave off Google. I'm also a big fan of developing new technology to innovate, like with Rust.

But Firefox makes my web development work harder. It opens Gmail slower. And with this news, I have no reason to support Firefox. I don't want to stand behind a company that's de-prioritizing the only product I use.

All the MDN team as well

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