Hacker News Reader

Comment by varbhat | Hacker News Reader

Looks like Mozilla is becoming VPN company shifting it's previous focus which was on browserware.

Mozilla VPN seems to be just rebranded resell of Mullavad VPN with Mozilla Goodies.

Mozilla Monitor seems to use https://haveibeenpwned.com/ (also as seen in Firefox desktop)

Mozilla Firefox Private Network looks like another Cloudflare Warp's rebrand (with litte good additions maybe?) seeing that it uses Cloudflare .

Mozilla Firefox is also losing it's usershare and Management division may force in future to ditch Gecko and adopt Webkit/Blink in the hope that it could bring more userbase (just my thought) to lessen maintainance and focus on revenue.

If it brings revenue for them doing this,then it is absolutely good for them , but we are slowly loosing the Original Mozilla as Company based on Philosophy.

View on HN

They are going through the necessary but deeply painful process of diversifying their income away from Google payments, which is much easier said than done.

Mozillas initially incredible partnership with Google, from which they earn the vast majority of their income, essentially turned toxic once Google started experimenting with Chrome. On that day Google’s favourite browser to support shifted from Firefox to Chrome.

Being financially reliant on your main competitor is a deeply troubling and dysfunctional position to be in.

Regardless of how good it started, its time to move on.

This is only necessary because the company has been honorably mismanaged for so long and lacks any sort of consistent vision.

Maybe Mozilla should also look into reducing leadership compensation or at least have it reflect the performance of the company.

s/honorably/horribly/?

> lacks any sort of consistent vision

I have no insider knowledge of how well it’s been managed so I’ll leave that to other commentators.

However I’d say that their vision for openness is part of their curse.

Google in developing Chrome are not held to the same community expectations.

It’s expensive to build and maintain a modern day browser and the competitors have deep pockets to the extent of it being worth completing even at a loss due to the benefits of controlling the platform (being the browser platform).

Mozilla have to extract value somewhere. But where should it be?

I think the challenge is to reframe that Mozilla are maintaining an open commons that all are welcome to visit for free without access fees while also metaphorically “selling cool drinks nearby for a price”.

If the community won’t let them charge for anything they do, and claim “extraction/extraction!” with every move they are destined to go under.

I think the most useful framing for Mozilla fans is:

What here should be part of our global commons and needs to be freely available and what would I/we be willing to pay Mozilla for that extends or compliments these core offerings?

I think I should add part ( if not majority ) of the reason Google started developing Chrome was because the initial Firefox 4 vision, e10s, and its expected performance improvement didn't deliver.

Google was forced to do it by themselves.

>If the community won’t let them charge for anything they do, and claim “extraction/extraction!” with every move they are destined to go under.

I dont ever see that from Mozilla community. No one is bashing them for starting side business or charging for something other than the Browser. The problem is none of their side project were successful in business terms.

>Being financially reliant on your main competitor is a deeply troubling and dysfunctional position to be in.

This seems like an inherent problem with sufficiently large companies; the more areas the expand into, the harder it is not to compete.

>and Management division may force in future to ditch Gecko and adopt Webkit/Blink in the hope that it could bring more userbase (just my thought) to lessen maintainance and focus on revenue.

They laid off most people working on Servo, so the adoption of WebKit/Blink seems rather likely.

I certainly hope it doesn't come to that. Servo was really starting to show serious improvements in both memory usage and speed relative to Gecko and Webkit. It would be a shame to see Firefox devolve into just another rebranded Webkit browser, particularly since everyone loses when things devolve to a monoculture.

Servo was never actually the heir-apparent to Gecko.

Never officially. But I think once they started to migrate components into Firefox it seemed obvious that the experiment was a "success" and that it was on the path to replacing gecko (starting piece by piece and maybe eventually making a switchover).

Mozilla developer here.

The Gecko team was mostly spared from the layoffs. There is no intention to cease Gecko development.

I really hope this is true, but there as been absolutely zero clear communication from Mozilla VP and above managers about being committed to Gecko. Why is Firefox CTO not writing a blog post about that?

You sure? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung...

> Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way.

1) That was written in 2013

2) It was an attempt to rebuild a browser engine up from the ground up on modern hardware - and large parts of that work landed in Firefox.

I've tracked their progress for quite some time. There was never a concrete plan to replace the DOM handling components of Gecko with the DOM handling components of Servo.

It was written in 2013... when Servo was announced. Servo was originally intended to replace Gecko. Anything else is a retcon.

Saying "large parts of that work landed in Firefox" is misleading. A browser engine is a huge thing, and most of Servo is not in Firefox. If you just want to replace a few parts, creating an entirely new engine from scratch is far from the most efficient way.

Why does this matter? Well, because decisions have consequences. Way back in 2013, they were feeling pressure from Chrome, and decided the best way to compete was to rewrite the browser engine (in a brand new language to boot). The original engine stagnated, and here we are 7 years later. What a colossal failure.

> It was written in 2013... when Servo was announced. Servo was originally intended to replace Gecko. Anything else is a retcon.

Here is a quote from the Servo wiki from 2014, which is the earliest snapshot present in the WaybackMachine archives.

>Servo is explicitly not aiming to create a full Web browser (except for demonstration and experimentation purposes). Rather it is focused on creating a solid, embeddable engine. Although Servo is a research project, it is designed to be "productizable"—the code that we write should be of high enough quality that it could eventually be shipped to users.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140718030420/https://github.co...

The words "Firefox" or "Gecko" do not appear a single time in the blog post you cited originally. This is because there were no plans to replace Gecko with Servo at that point in time. They did plan for that possibility, and it was probably a minor goal, but the primary goal was research, as they stated in both the blog post and the wiki entry. They were hoping that they could replace parts of Gecko, I'm sure, but it was never a given.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

In your quote, they didn't want to create a full browser, but they did want to create a full engine. And it was designed to be "productizable." I think it supports what I'm saying.

Servo was the last big plan from Mozilla to turn things around. Since then, we've just gotten Pocket, random bundled add-ons, etc. It seems like they are mostly just content to slide into irrelevance. And I am very sad about that. I do honestly wish Servo had succeeded, although I thought it was pretty obvious it wasn't going to.

Also, while I'm airing grievances, I think it's very likely that having a few big chunks of Firefox/Gecko be written in Rust is going to be a maintenance burden that will slow down development even more. Now that Mozilla has laid off the Rust and Servo people, what are they going to do?

>Here's the thing though: What this Servo dev thought of as "production ready" and what the Gecko team thinks is "production ready" are very different things. In Gecko-land, it's not enough to do best-practice things like continuous integration, regression tests, error handling, etc. For Gecko, it's also about compatibility -- both with 25+ years of web content (much of it malformed) and a wide range of supported combinations of operating systems and hardware.

>If you're working on Servo, you can be much more strict about what hardware combinations you support and what kind of content renders well. Look, there's a reason that the lineage of all widespread web engines go back 20+ years: it's much easier to incrementally improve that engine while ensuring that you're not breaking anything than it is to start over from scratch.

>I would also like to point out that you don't have to take my word for it: It has taken at least 3 years (probably closer to 4 years) to get WebRender ported over to Gecko from Servo and get it running well enough to the point that we can start saying that it will likely reach 100% deployment within months instead of years.

>My point is that, while Servo was great for demonstrating new ideas and producing eye-popping demos, it was not going to replace Gecko anytime soon, regardless of what those few Servo developers thought. In all the time I've worked at Mozilla, I have never once heard anybody in charge of Firefox say that we were going to do a wholesale swap out of Gecko with Servo.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200815135321/https://tildes.ne...

Thanks for that link!

We might be arguing past each other. He says this:

> Unfortunately a narrative kind of built up around all this stuff that Gecko developers were a bunch of bumbling idiots who were just maintaining a bunch of outdated bloatware, while the Servo project was where all the action was.

This is precisely my complaint. Firefox really did need some sort of strong direction to save it, and Servo was all they came up with. I don't think it was just a few self-important Servo devs, I think (at least part of) management was in on it too. In fact, the blog post above was signed by Brendan Eich, which I find really disappointing (I thought he, at least, was smarter than that...).

Anyway, once Servo sucked all the other oxygen out of the room, Firefox was really doomed. Now Servo is dead and we have... a few incremental improvements to Gecko to show for it. I definitely feel bad for the guys working on Gecko the whole time. That said, they could've came up with some "response" to Servo, but they didn't.

If they switched to webkit there'd be no more reason to use it over degoogled chromium.

I mean, a WebKit-based Firefox would at least be a distinct engine, and a cross-platform one at that. (WebKit isn't very well-represented on Windows in particular.)

Contrast a Blink-based FF, which would basically just be Brave.

Unless there are very significant differences that are noticeable to mass user base, the engine is not a relevant factor in browser market share. When chrome came charging in, Microsoft had let IE fall so far behind that even to my 74-year-old opa, chrome was noticeably better.

People largely don't choose firefox over non-degoogled chrome today. All browsers on iOS are reskinned safari with different accounts for synced bookmarks and tabs, and yet people choose to use different iOS browsers for various reasons, the browser's engine not among them.

It pains me to think about, but from a realpolitik perspective it makes zero sense for Mozilla not to slap an orange fox on chromium and call it a day,

For me, and everyone I know personally that uses Firefox, the primary motivation for using Firefox is because it uses a non webkit/blink engine, and we want browser diversity. If that goes away we there is a lot less reason for us to stick with Firefox.

Although I suopose there is still manifest v3...

I fear that if Firefox switched to webkit or blink, they might lose a significant number of existing users without a clear way to win back more.

I wonder what the future is for Rust?

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/08/18/laying-the-foundation-...

The writing is on the wall at this stage. The current Mozilla have no will to keep maintaining Gecko, which in their eyes is seen as burning money which could be spent on "Product".

I am getting very much downvoted. Any fallacy in my reply? Please tell me so that i can correct it in future

To me your comment seems based on a misguided idea of what Mozilla is about. I recommend reading https://civilityandtruth.com/2020/08/13/mozillas-uncertain-f... for some good background.

I know it's against HN policy to complain about downvotes, but I think your response is not covered under that rule in that you are looking to learn, not to vent. You have my upvote, at least.

No idea why, I reread your post a few times and see nothing wrong with it. Likely some people see Mozilla different to others based on their perceived view on "Philosophy". Which they might disagree on.

And I dont see any of your comment about diverging into other product market a bad thing at all.

Is Gecko open-source? If not, I hope they do open-source it before ditching it.

Ofcourse, Gecko is Open Source. There are many forks of Gecko and Firefox too.

Browsers would be forked then. But,maintainance and adding features require lot of effort which is almost impractical by single dev/group without much funding in the world of ever changing large web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com