Comment by IainIreland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IainIreland | Hacker News Reader

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> most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go.

This is not the case. Servo worked on big experimental moonshot projects. They had some major successes (Stylo, WebRender), but the rest of the Firefox team wasn't sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I don't think Servo ever made up more than a small fraction of the overall Firefox workforce. They had to pick and choose their projects. Note, for example, that Servo embeds SpiderMonkey instead of writing its own JS engine from scratch: https://github.com/servo/rust-mozjs

Don't worry! SpiderMonkey still has additional cool projects coming down the pipeline, none of which are dependent on Servo.

This is correct. Servo's Stylo parallelized CSS parser shipped in Firefox's "Quantum" performance release, but a huge part of the overall performance improvement came from profiling the whole system. Fixing lots of small hot spots in Firefox frontend and Gecko really added up. It's easy for tiny performance regressions to creep in here and there.

Many people are badmouthing Mozilla because they disbanded the group working on their pet language, Rust, as if this was synonym for Firefox technology. There are many things that Mozilla does beyond working on Rust.

No, just no. they were badmouthing Mozilla because they didn't like mozilla firing their rust resources while they continue to pay enormous amounts for a CEO and other higher ups while Firefox's market share is in a death spiral currently. The only thing that can save it is better branding and "gotta have it features" which Rust can bring, along with stability.

I'm not trying to defend their management, but my opinion here is that they concluded that investing in a new language wouldn't be the best/fastest way to evolve Firefox. Google may have money to invest in a new language, but Mozilla probably needs to be more focused.

The executive pay shows that their conclusions about where money should be allocated have severe issues, so it's hard to trust that choice without more justification.

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