Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

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

It is because it doesn't make money. An expensive research project (Servo) that was not worth the effort for Mozilla.

Mozilla needs to find better ways of making money and not depending on Googles' money.

Now thanks to the US v Google anti-trust trial, Mozilla doesn't know if they should support Google for keeping them alive for their hundreds of millions of dollars or being going against them for Google to be broken up for more competition.

Either way Google's search AND browser monopoly is held together by paying its competitors such as Apple (for Safari) and Mozilla (for Firefox).

View on HN

That sounds like an amazing failure of imagination to me. I see at least 3 excellent angles.

1. Chrome beat Firefox in the stability/security area. Its usage of multiple processes, sandboxing, etc is excellent, while Firefox failed to adapt. Servo seems to have an excellent potential for coming up on top there, being both more secure, and having higher performance.

2. There are actually markets interested in security. Think say, banking, military, industry, IOT. There are various laws coming requiring companies to take security seriously. Servo has a lot of potential there too. There's potential for both projects that have security as a selling point, and regulatory compliance.

3. Embedding. Like I said, using a web engine as a component seems to have been forgotten in modern times. Surely that can be sold to somebody, because there are plenty use cases for embedding web engines in stuff.

> 3. Embedding. Like I said, using a web engine as a component seems to have been forgotten in modern times. Surely that can be sold to somebody, because there are plenty use cases for embedding web engines in stuff.

It's not forgotten. Microsoft has WebView2 which uses the same engine as MS Edge and it can be included in your .net applications.

If OTOH you want an ActiveX then you can buy AntView, which wraps WebView2 in an ActiveX control.

Disclaimer: AntView is a control sold by my company.

While this is great brainstorming, that doesn't mean it's a viable business plan. Having a large highly qualified dev-team working on experimental stuff for now over a decade and no likelihood of completion anytime soon and without a business plan is pretty tricky, even for a non-profit.

In general, for research of that type (of scale) it doesn't strike me as generally very viable to rely on commercial support, and such a niche technicality is surely not going to collect enough donations to run on that alone. If we want to fund this because it's an interesting option for the future in the long term, governments are going to need to chip in - and it looks like that's at least partly at play here (or even primarily), i.e.: system working as designed.

>1. Chrome beat Firefox in the stability/security area. Its usage of multiple processes, sandboxing, etc is excellent, while Firefox failed to adapt. Servo seems to have an excellent potential for coming up on top there, being both more secure, and having higher performance.

They did adapt, and the HN types got mad at them for breaking the old-style extensions, which were effectively incompatible with multiple processes, sandboxing, performance, etc. And were totally incompatible with Servo at a fundamental level.

>2. There are actually markets interested in security. Think say, banking, military, industry, IOT.

Those industries are infamous for doing things like having applications that only support IE9 in Windows XP. Security may matter to them in theory but in practice it is clearly far lower on the priority list than stability and supporting one golden path. Getting them to adopt something novel and experimental for use cases they want to be thoroughly boring and unchanging for 15 years is never ever going to happen.

As someone that compiled and ran Servo and submitted a couple of patches, it had a long way to go (years of development) before it would have been production ready in its entirety.

> Now thanks to the US v Google anti-trust trial, Mozilla doesn't know if they should support Google for keeping them alive for their hundreds of millions of dollars or being going against them for Google to be broken up for more competition.

Why would they not publicly support Google when Google are the ones keeping Mozilla alive? I'm all for journalistic integrity, but I don't think Mozilla could pull that one off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com