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Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

Given the Mozilla is turning on the developer network, discontinuing RD in to the browser space, and focusing on "other products" like VPN, Pocket, and other services I am left to wonder if there is a future for Firefox at all

Dev Tools is dead, Servo is Dead, MDN is dead, what is left.

The current administration of Mozilla seems to want to turn it into a "consumer services" company focused instead of a browser developer. I am wonder how much longer before they drop the pretense, shut down the foundation, and change their mission statement

hell I would not be surprised that with in 5 years they do not fall in line with what Microsoft called for [1] a little over a year ago and just make Firefox another Chromium based browser...

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-guy-mozilla-should-g...

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I wonder if the alternative is for the Rust foundation to one day buy out Firefox and pull it out of the claws of Mozilla if they are just going to have a nonprofit receiving donations not even going towards Firefox. Has anyone figured out what jacked up reason this is? My best guess is that if Mozilla is seen as selling adspace services (default browser search engine in this case) it is somehow seen as a for profit venture and would not allow them to have a non profit status, but at that point why not just have Firefox be like Chromium vs Google Chrome? Firefox Libre and Mozilla Firefox.

I fail to understand why we cant directly donate to Firefox and only Firefox. Most people really dont care for anything else Mozilla is doing outside of Rust and Thunderbird and tbe latter two seem to have a solid future as far as I can tell.

The complex legal structure of Mozilla has always been some what sketchy to me anyway, The Foundation at this point I believe hardly has anything anyway, most of the employees I believe work for the Mozilla Corporation, which is owned by the foundation, but the Mozilla Corporation is for-profit, and is where most of the assets (IP, Pocket, etc) for Mozilla is owned.

At this point I see the Foundation has simply being a Marketing ploy for the corporation as they abandoned the core mission of the foundation long ago, it is just another for profit company at this point

Which is a damn shame. I'm okay with them building real products to subsidize the cost of developing Firefox, but they acquired Pocket which isn't really going to rake in much money from what I can tell anyway.

Well, a direct consequence of the ownership structure is that Mozilla hires FAANG-caliber engineers while paying them approximately 60% of what FAANG would (since there's no RSUs).

> I fail to understand why we cant directly donate to Firefox and only Firefox.

Because the amount of money donations bring in pales in comparison that the search engine deal does, but since that's something they actually sell, it (and therefore Firefox) is managed by the Corporation. At least, that's how I understand it.

Or have the Rust foundation continue to develop Servo, with financial support from corporations and users who would benefit from an independant browser engine.

I'd prefer a new browser that drops e.g. pocket in favor of secure communications features at this point.

>MSDN is dead

I think you mean MDN. MSDN is the Microsoft variant ;)

You are correct, I have fixed the above...

> discontinuing RD in to the browser space

Not just the browser space; they axed e.g. all their people involved in AOM and video R&D, despite being a founding member.

A Chromium based Firefox would further kill it off. It would only give Google full control of the web and is a very poorly thought out idea. It would cost more money to rebuild in Chromium than continue investing in Firefox. It would offer no better ability to bring in revenue either.

> what is left

Most of the Gecko, Firefox Desktop, and Mobile teams?

Gecko is stagnate and in maintenance mode, all of the improvements to Gecko come from Servo, thus no servo no improvements

>>Firefox Desktop, and Mobile

I am not sure what you mean here, these are core products so sure they remain, but they are advance on the backs of the other teams, the core parts of both FireFox Desktop and FireFox Mobile depend on the advancement of all the components that go into them, thus if all R&D is shut down which is appears has been, it is functionally a Maintenance project now...

Sure we may get things like Moving the Address bar from the top to the botton in FF mobile, big whoop-de-do....

All of the cools things coming out of Servo, DevTools, and other core systems are gone now....

> Gecko is stagnate and in maintenance mode, all of the improvements to Gecko come from Servo, thus no servo no improvements

I think you misunderstand. Servo was a way to test and prototype things, and some of those have been merged into current gecko/firefox.

Gecko is not in "maintenance mode", it is in active development.

I'd love if Servo development continued, but the picture you paint is just plain wrong.

That was a "Microsoft engineer", not any official stance or statement.

why is dev tools dead?

They laid off all of the developers in the DevTools Team, in the Servo Team, and in the MDN teams in the last round of mass layoffs.

Not all of the developers: https://twitter.com/FirefoxDevTools/status/12936787391175761...

Well, from the same developer a few days later: https://twitter.com/FirefoxDevTools/status/13012047173226455...

That's a disappointing update. I hope they enjoy their new position at least.

shame... Firefox dev tools are superior to Chrome’s, in my experience

Here is the note on the investment cut in MDN: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/08/an-update-on-mdn-web-docs/

Three of the four MDN engineers are still there, but their manager and all of the tech writers were made redundant. It's a damn shame, but it's not dead yet.

Documentation with no writers maintain it is pointless. It will quickly become stagnant and cause more harm than good

No documentation is often better than outdated documentation.

What I can't figure is how much browser core debugging will suffer with DevTools no longer available to inspect misbehaving in-the-wild JS/HTML/CSS -- code that behaves "right" on Chrome but not FF.

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