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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

> Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it

The fact that mozilla wasn’t interested in that really tells a lot about their priorities

I was really disappointed to see Mozilla drop Servo and I think it was the wrong decision for them to make, but seeing this take mere hours after seeing people in a thread about Android Firefox bashing Mozilla for prioritizing a rewrite of their mobile browser is certainly some whiplash.

And to a certain extent, I get it, I also think Servo was a more valuable project than Fenec. But let's not pretend that there's an obvious correct answer to "should Mozilla rewrite its browsers from scratch?"

Again, I say this as someone who wanted Mozilla to stick with Servo. It was a bad decision for them to drop it, I think there was a lot more value that could have been extracted from the project. But if Mozilla had stuck with Servo, I guarantee there would be people on HN right now saying, "why are they rewriting their browser engine, the current one works fine, why aren't they doing X? Shows a lot about their priorities. This is the problem with Mozilla, they're too focused on theory and engineering projects instead of just shipping a good browser." There's no winning.

> I think there was a lot more value that could have been extracted from the project

What exactly? They extracted the 2 pieces that worked better than the existing gecko stack (Stylo and WebRender). I'm a big fan (and small contributor) to Servo, but it's far behind on anything else (layout, networking, security, web api support...).

On a small level, I think that some of the areas it's behind on (security, layout) might have eventually turned out to be improvements. Stylo and WebRender were behind Firefox when they first began development as well, they were experiments to see if Rust could enable differing patterns. I personally think those experiments would have been useful to try and replicate for layout at the very least, although I don't know for sure if they would have yielded fruit.

On a bigger level, I think having a more easily embeddedable Firefox could change the dynamics around V8 and Chromium could end up being pretty important for the health of the web overall, including the health of Firefox.

There's an argument to be made here that none of that potential is gone because, hey, Servo is still being developed. But I think it could have gone faster with Mozilla's support behind it for longer, I think they would have served as an effective advertising/hype engine behind the technology. I think the dominance of Chromium for embedded applications does influence how developers approach the web in some minor ways.

On a really out-there level, I would like to see HTML-like interfaces proliferate in more apps, and Servo in particular has a very modular approach that could make it more feasible to bring in the DOM without bringing in languages like Javascript (yes, manipulation and events and all that stuff would need to be accessible without JS, but... it's certainly easier than it would be with Chromium, Stylo already makes some interesting applications possible). If I had to pick a company to push that effort that I didn't thing would horribly mess it up, Mozilla would be high on my list. And I vaguely maybe suspect that pulling more browser technologies out of the web could open up more technical fields and niches for Mozilla to get its hands into. Right now what that area mostly looks like is Electron or embedded Chromium. At most you have embedded JS engines like V8.

I'm hoping that there's some potential to do more interesting things, and I think it could have been valuable to Mozilla and it could have increased developer investment/mindshare if Mozilla was a bigger player in those areas.

But that's just my instinct, maybe I'm wrong.

Or they (Firefox folks) learned what happens when you (Netscape) try a major greenfield rewrite (Netscape v5) so ambitious that it becomes the example of why one should never rewrite.

And instead just back ported the lessons learned to make Firefox/Gecko better years earlier than a rewrite could.

That's why Servo exists in the first place. That's exactly the reason why always has been intended as a research engine, with an explicit focus on high modularity, and easy portability of single components, several of which were then incorporated into Firefox.

Especially the latter wasn't some kind of salvage, trying to squeeze value out of some theoretical project. It was an explicit goal from the beginning.

Facts don't matter, this is one of those QAnon things were people collectively fan-fiction an apocalyptic battle for them to be on the right side of based on nothing more than a vague dislike of women and minorities.

That they got a ton of valuable code and lessons which improved Firefox a lot? Seems like the investment into Servo paid off really well.

Except Mozilla did it twice IIRC.

And it really doesn’t matter whst conventional wisdom holds, when the architecture of a project is based on flawed assumptions, or things just changed since it was architected.

It has to be majorly refactored, period.

They fired everyone working on it and completely abandoned it while giving the CEO a million dollar pay raise the same year.

When are we going to talk about how openly corrupt Mozilla has become? They clearly have issues at the top that need to be fixed for the betterment of web.

> When are we going to talk about how openly corrupt Mozilla has become?

It's routinely discussed on HN, whenever a topic about Mozilla/browsers comes up. The real question in my opinion is what can we do about it? Start an awareness campaign? Stop using Firefox? Stop donating to Mozilla?

> Stop using Firefox?

And use what? A Chromium reskin and give up the web to Google?

Mozilla has (many) problems, but it remains the main organisation fighting for the open web.

I'd argue that the EFF is the main organization fighting for the open web.

The EFF is great and important too, but I feel like developing a competitive browser has more direct impact.

I agree, but that's a very generous description of what Mozilla is doing. I'd say they're less "developing a competitive browser" and more "keeping an uncompetitive browser on life support to continue to profit off it".

> Mozilla has (many) problems, but it remains the main organisation fighting for the open web.

Well, it’s a different organisation from MS and Google anyway. I’m not sure how much I’d say they’re fighting for an open web, so much as I’d say they’re fighting for their slice of it. But the end result is more or less the same.

There is not much we can do ourselves, they are hurting themselves more than we can hurt them.

We don't want to punish the corrupt, we want to save Firefox from them. If would be great if some organization could fork Firefox and work with Servo to make a usable browser, but that's going to be really expensive, and the new browser will have to make a name for itself. Also the organization will have to do better than Mozilla in terms of corruption, which, again, is not a given when a lot of money is involved.

While very frustrating, it's just not reasonable at all to call that fraud or corruption. To make that case, you'll need to also make the argument that the CEO's remuneration is unreasonable to the given market rate; and more specifically, that you might be able to hire somebody else and achieve similar results for meaningfully less cash, and the CEO and board know this, and they're overcompensating intentionally.

Now: I agree that the pay is absurd! I'm quite willing to believe she's not worth it, too. But she's hardly the first CEO to have ridiculous pay; nor am I convinced the board is overcompensating her for corrupt reasons - it may simply be a difference of perspective. And - perhaps I'm wrong, and this pay is a going market rate and a hypothetical cheaper replacement would do worse - I really don't believe that, but to call something corruption I'd need to be rather sure of that and of their knowledge of it.

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