Tangentially, but on the subject of alternate browser engines, how is Servo doing these days? Has anyone managed to keep that project alive after the Mozilla layoffs in 2020?
Servo had trouble getting 10k per year funding for just basic CI expenses.
When I see hype around a new browser engine from scratch I am immediately skeptical, unless those 'donations' turn into 'corporate sponsorships'.
All thanks to Google; 'funding' more than 85% of Mozilla, which not only having a direct competitor browser going against what Mozilla is standing for, they continue to fall behind features that Google pushes into the web standards committee at the W3C with Mozilla sitting there doing nothing, but going along with it, but late.
Mozilla failed because for 14+ years it was unable to make money for itself other than Google and could not move away from them when they ate their lunch and quickened their decline.
> I'll take 100 monthly donations over one corporate sponsor any day.
I didn't say 'one corporate sponsor', but let's go with the '100 monthly donations'.
How many of those developers are active and full time like awesomekling? Less than 5?
With a simple observation on their Patreon / GitHub sponsorship page, paying $4 a month average with 100 people is hardly enough to support a single developer, even with the $1K monthly going to only one developer for building a browser and especially with less than 5 active developers. Realistically, corporate sponsors would make this more sustainable.
It was an R&D project and, if you look at the bits that made their way in to Firefox, a fairly successful one. Stylo, WebRender, various parsers etc...
I'm not doubting you, I'm just curious what was written. I'd expect stuff like "Servo is an experimental browser engine," or, "We don't currently have plans to replace Gecko with Servo" (which was obviously true at all times in history), but I'd be surprised to see something like "Servo will never replace Gecko." But maybe I just didn't see that messaging - could be!
It's also worth mentioning that "replacing Gecko" may be the wrong way to look at it. More reasonable is for Gecko and Servo to eventually come into alignment - somehow. That's what happened in practice, in a way that has a lot more of Gecko than Servo, but in theory it could have happened the other way, with a lot more Servo. Even in that situation, I wouldn't say Servo "replaced" Gecko - it's more complicated than that.
For Mozilla, Servo was an experiment. Experiments can end up as full products, or parts of them, or not at all. I think it's clear one possible outcome of the experiment was a full browser (I was personally rooting for that all along). It didn't end up that way, but when people say a full browser was never the intention, I think that's not accurate history.
Not off hand (and Mozilla's official marketing rarely goes so low-level as to mention the browser engine itself by name), but (as someone who has been hanging out in Rust spaces since 2011) I recall the Servo devs always being very careful to disclaim any intentions to wholesale replace Gecko in Firefox (though I did always wonder if they were instructed to do so, as a way to keep Gecko contributors from rebelling).
Product success could happen through convergence with Gecko (as actually happened, but again, the convergence could have been tilted the other way), or through Servo powering something separate from Gecko (for an example of that, in later years Servo was meant to power Mixed Reality projects, which is a story in itself; but other ideas include Servo as an embedded engine, or powering distinct tabs in Firefox and other obvious ideas).
In some of those options Servo could have been a full browser engine or even a full browser. I think there was always a hope for that. I'm sad it didn't happen, but it's still a big success in several important ways. Anyhow, I just hope the history doesn't get rewritten as "the goal was always exactly what happened in the end."
Indeed, that's not my goal, I wish that Servo would have been developed even further and still hope that it might happen someday, somehow.