It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then...decided it wasn't worth pursuing any further.
The big one for Google is transformer models, they basically invented LLMs only to play catchup with OpenAI later.
Mozilla successes have always been focused on the web browser, from the very beginning. Even the name reflects that: "Mozilla" stands for "Mosaic killer", Mosaic was the leading web browser at the time. They beat Mosaic with Netscape, they beat IE with Firefox, beating Chrome was their mission, and Rust and Servo were their weapons. It is sad that they dropped the ball.
Like Xerox (and Google), Mozilla tried doing some side projects, but unlike Xerox, they didn't have money to burn from their quasi-monopolies, and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect.
I’m sure Rust started out as something intended to help with their browser work. But it became a general purpose programming language pretty early, right? I think it is… working pretty hard to find a reason to not include Rust as a innovative, non-browser piece of tech.
Anyway, I don’t really think it detracts from your broader point to count Rust as a separate thing from the browser.
IMO what we've seen learnt from ChromeOS and later their stab at firefox OS is the merit in treating the browser as the system. For that there was a lot of wisdom in making rust that capable. Seeing oxide make their stack is incredibly validating.
It started out as something to make elevators more reliable. Not even joking (mostly).
Google has been Mozilla's main source of revenue since around 2006. For Mozilla to exist, all they have to do is keep Google happy.
It's kind of a nice deal for Mozilla, despite being a huge conflict of interest.
If I was Google, I'd do something to set Mozilla back on that track. But oh well, Google these days is even more dysfunctional. They're about to lose search.
https://thisdayintechhistory.com/08/06/apple-and-microsoft-c...
Servo and Ladybird are the future. I’m astounded by how quickly Ladybird is proceeding, with far fewer people than Mozilla. It’s been inspiring to see what that project is doing.
edit: I mean dumping Gecko for Chromium, not Servo.
Maybe their primary addressable market is nerds, but I guarantee more people quit using Firefox because of websites not working correctly or Google's marketing than because of any of the things that HN loves to complain about.
> How will my donation be used?
> These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
Notice what donations aren't used for: Firefox.
Sure, only nerds would pay for it, but not all products have to capture 100% market share.
(They don't even block the streams, only logins. I can watch, but not spend money. Perfectly reasonable.)
Back in the day, it was not entirely unheard of having two significantly different frontend implementations - one for IE, another for Netscape, with quite unhealthy amounts of parser hacks to hide code from the browsers.
Possibly naively, but I think it's not that bad nowadays? (At least it wasn't so in late '10s.) Some things are Chrome-only, or Apple-only, but I rarely see "not supported in your browser" - the majority of features is generally standards compliant, and all those newcomer engine problems (like in the article) are mostly because there's a lot to implement.
You should ask that how many of the standard features are brought by someone else without huge influence of Google. If you cannot get anything new, when it is enough that Google says "no", then in reality there is only one browser.
I would not be happy to pay that much for a beer
It's dishonest to compare that to "the technology of the future", especially when nobody chooses their browser based on whether a page loads in 82ms or 70ms. They mostly choose browsers based on familiarity and marketing and what's preinstalled. Chrome is fast enough for most people that they're not gonna switch just because their dweeb nephew mentioned some other browser might be marginally faster.
And they didn't toss Rust aside either. New bits of Firefox continue to be written in Rust to this day. That was actually the primary reason Servo was dropped - the bits of the browser engine that could be replaced with Servo bits easily had already been replaced. Rewriting Gecko slowly was deemed more practical than committing to 5+ years of parallel development and hoping that by the end it would be possible to replace millions of lines of Gecko code in one fell swoop.
Mozilla doesn't deserve to survive. New players deserve our support, like servo and ladybird.
Even with an enormous budget from Google (500M, I think per year) they managed to ruin everything, including Firefox, the thing bringing them those 500M.
To me it looks as if Baker is an undercover person put there to sabotage Mozilla. Tldr: funded by Google, made absolutely everything in her power to run it into the ground
I'm not saying she has done a good job, but a lot of the early Netscape people like Brendan Eich have done nothing but sing her praises.
If anything, how come she didn't make it a success on the very limited market?
Even if she wasn't a bad actor in the beginning, she could have changed her opinion and be seduced by the money.
Just for comparison: a few people made a completely new engine in a few years. Task often thought as impossible (they had 200k USD for the start). Mozilla started servo, then when they saw its going well, decided to abandon it?
So what was Mozilla spending the money on? Many have requested the ability to donate for Firefox development, but it was never allowed: they (she?) wanted to distribute the donation money on things they thought were important?
For years they made decisions that the uses hated. How else to explain this?