19 ms·

"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

428 points by cs702 6y ago

condercet 6y ago
Mozilla has decided to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as a business strategy.
- burtonator 6y ago
  The HN community is going to hate on me for this but it's partially their own fault for spending money trying to differentiate in the browser. They should just focus on Chromium. It's going to win anyway. Mozilla has a small market share percentage and eventually the gap is going to be large enough they will have to abandon the FF code base anyway. It's looking like they're going to focus more on the consumer market and building consumer products and less on infrastructure. FF as needed back when all the browsers were proprietary. Sure... Google can do evil things with Chrome but Chromium is Open Source - it can always be forked. There's nothing advantageous in maintaining FF as a dedicate code base. It's just duplication. One of the major points of OSS is to prevent people from competing on things that are non-differentiating. If's OSS so they can fork it and make their own changes if they want.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - danShumway 6y ago
    If Mozilla can't maintain their own browser codebase that competes with Chrome now, what makes you think they'll be able to maintain a fork? The moment they fork it and make their own changes, they are now back in the same position they were in -- a separate codebase under separate branding that needs to keep pace with Chrome. There are two reasons forks work: - They allow you to pull upstream changes. That's nice, but pulling upstream changes doesn't work once your codebase starts to heavily diverge from its source, so getting that benefit means you can't make changes that are too divergent from the upstream. - They also allow you to get rid of upfront work and start from a solid base. That's also nice, but getting rid of the upfront work isn't valuable to Mozilla. Firefox is already basically on par with Chrome where most features are concerned. It's not the upfront work that's the problem, it's maintenance, advertising, and monetization. A Mozilla fork of Chrome would be effectively the same thing as giving Google control over the entire web standards process.
  - StevePerkins 6y ago
    For what it's worth, I agree with you. Chromium has won. It's the "Linux kernel" of web browsers. However, that DOESN'T necessarily mean that every Linux user has to run Ubuntu! I recently switched from Firefox to Vivaldi. Just because: 1. I got tired of nagging compatibility issues with websites that I can't easily do with out (e.g. bank and stock broker). 2. I dabbled with Opera once upon a time, and liked it. I don't trust Opera's current Chinese ownership, but the original developers formed this new company and their (Chromium-based) browser is quite nice. However, I still don't like the fact that Vivaldi is proprietary and closed-source. I would love to have a browser that is both built on a Chromium core, AND built for privacy by a trustworthy open-source company. If Mozilla would fill this niche, then I'd be back tomorrow. They've already sort of dabbled in this area, with their Chromium-based "Firefox Focus" browser for mobile devices. But that's a very thin shell with no features. I wish they would just acknowledge reality, throw in the towel on Gecko, and build an awesome Chromium-based browser. Microsoft managed to do it seemingly overnight, surely Mozilla could as well if they so wanted. FIREFOX'S VALUE-ADD IS NOT GECKO! It's all of the functionality layered on top of that engine.
    - jtxx 6y ago
      > I would love to have a browser that is both built on a Chromium core, AND built for privacy by a trustworthy open-source company. what about Brave?
      - StevePerkins 6y ago
        I tried them for a little while. Unfortunately, Brave's sync service just flat-out doesn't work. To the point where they have it disabled by default, and you have to crack open advanced settings to see if it will actually work reliably for you (SPOILER ALERT: It won't). I think they were too focused on making it "blockchain-based" and "crypto-trendy", and just can't build something sensible that works. THIS is the value-add that browser vendors can bring to the table going forward. Chromium the kernel has won. But at the user-feature level: 1. Google and Microsoft's Chromium-based browsers spy on you. 2. Opera's Chromium-based browser has Chinese ownership, and probably spies on you. 3. Brave is buggy and flaky with all of the user features that they've built on top of their Chromium-based browser. 4. Vivalid's Chromium-based browser is pretty awesome and solid, and probably doesn't spy on you. But it's closed-source. 5. Firefox is solid, and has good no-spying values. But their browser is not Chromium-based, and it's dying because the Internet is simply moving on away from it. With this list, Vivaldi is currently the "least-bad" option from my POV. But I would love to go back to Firefox if they would get real with the times.
  - BigJ1211 6y ago
    Just because two different codebases try to achieve similar things, doesn't mean it's duplication. It certainly serves not only consumers, but also businesses well to have firefox (and mozilla) so web standards don't get dictated by a single private entity.
  - est31 6y ago
    > Google can do evil things with Chrome but Chromium is Open Source - it can always be forked. It takes more to maintain a Chromium competitor than its source code. You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web. If Google decided to close the source code in 2030, nobody would be able to do anything about it. Mozilla would have laid off its last engineers by 2025 and they'd have found new jobs by now, having 5 year old outdated knowledge about how browsers work. Even if you have engineers with the required knowledge, you still need to organize them, etc. All of this takes time, and gigantic investments.
    - Someone 6y ago
      Because of its heritage (it’s a fork of WebKit, and thus started out as KHTML, which is LGPL licensed), I don’t think the Chromium code can be closed easily. They probably can split it and gradually replace most real functionality into a separate closed source part, like they did with Android, but that will take time.
    - criddell 6y ago
      > You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web. What kind of things are rapidly changing these days?
      - jlokier 6y ago
        JavaScript itself (ES language changes), APIs callable from JavaScript (there are a lot), CSS, HTTP(s)/TLS and evolving security, ever-evolving compatibility requirements to keep popular pages working, performance expectations of the rendering model (what must be smooth nowadays didn't used to be and it's expected by sites), things like WASM, WebGL (new version on its) & WebGPU, the sandbox, evolving security patterns (HTML/HTTP/JS security model is complex) and dealing with new security issues (it never stops), compatibility with OS version releases (always new issues), compatibility with GPU drivers (always new issues), video codecs. These things by themselves require a well-funded team to keep the browser relevant to modern sites. Well-funded because they take a lot of time and ideally to be done to a professional standard. The number of spare-time or independently-wealthy volunteers around to do the work seems thoroughly insufficent compared with what it would take to keep up. That list doesn't even have new user-visible features (so nothing to "sell" to users except "we still work with current sites"). They are just moving-target "basics", minimal expectations by users and sites to remain "current" on the web. I'm sure I've left off a lot too, it's just off the top of my head.
  - caeril 6y ago
    > but Chromium is Open Source It should be noted that the base Chromium packages still include Google-specific and Google-friendly features, such as automatically deriving your browsing profile from whatever Google account you happen to be logged into.
    - hu3 6y ago
      Indeed. Perhaps they could join gorces with the Ungoogled Chromium project: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
  - houreaction 6y ago
    so basically google controls the web? great. >They should just focus on Chromium. It's going to win anyway. Mozilla has a small market share percentage and eventually the gap is going to be large enough they will have to abandon the FF code base anyway. What does it matter if chrome has a large market share, so long as mozilla is profitable? Also, abandon a perfectly good browser for no reason?' >It's looking like they're going to focus more on the consumer market and building consumer products and less on infrastructure. >FF as needed back when all the browsers were proprietary. chrome is still proprietary! and there are dozens of chromium forks already! why in the world would anyone want another chromium fork?
poletopole 6y ago
Does anyone know what the consequences for this will be? WASM was what motivated me to learn Rust.
- dom96 6y ago
  I doubt anyone knows what the impact will be, all we can do is speculate. In the very short-term, I would definitely be surprised if we don't see it have a negative impact on the development of Rust and certain Rust projects such as wasmtime. In particular because so many of the top contributors appear to be full-time Mozilla employees[1]. 1 - https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contributors https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contribu...
- coreblocks 6y ago
  Time to put your eggs in Swift! :)
  - poletopole 6y ago
    I learned Swift several years back, but didn't see myself using it until SwiftUI came to be. I have my fingers crossed for RustUI.
    - benibela 6y ago
      I use Pascal With Lazarus is has a cross platform Desktop GUI
      - poletopole 6y ago
        Lazarus actually is impressive considering lack of the non-swift alternatives out there and that React Native still doesn't have desktop support. I'm glad you shared, because Pascal is a language I never looked into before, but it seems like it was ahead of its time, but I wonder if there are any modern dialects?
        6y ago
kiba 6y ago
Does Mozilla not make enough money to sustain long term investments?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  Mozilla Corp currently doesn't make much money at all, hence their problems. The majority of their funds come from a recurring Google donation, which has to be renewed every few years.
  - kryptiskt 6y ago
    It's not a donation. They pay for being the default search. They throw billions at Apple for the same, but nobody paints that as charity.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - x0x0 6y ago
      It's increasingly a charitable donation / obfuscation of their browser monopoly status since Mozilla has lost most of their leverage: Mozilla's marketshare has shrunk, and Google faces less and less competition for search. Why would Google pay for something they get for free, much less pay half a billion dollars. See the public numbers here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation under Combined income of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation
      - foepys 6y ago
        > Why would Google pay for something they get for free For the same reason Microsoft saved Apple: to prevent anti-trust inquiries
  - slezyr 6y ago
qppo 6y ago
I wonder if someone is going to pick up the mantle that Mozilla dropped. One of the FAANGs, maybe Oxide?
- oconnor663 6y ago
  I wonder if Microsoft could be interested. They've written a lot recently about investing in Rust internally. Also VSCode seems to be the de facto standard Rust IDE these days.
- monocasa 6y ago
  The ideal for me would be that a single company doesn't, but instead there's a proper foundation with a lot of members.
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  As a pre-revenue startup... Oxide can't do that, though they do employ me, and we are still using Rust for all the things, and don't plan on changing that.
fs111 6y ago
What is actually left of mozilla after this?
- darthrupert 6y ago
  Roughly 75% of the workforce and of course all the IP.
  - bronson 6y ago
    That's a lot of people. Honest question: what are they working on? Not devtools, Servo, and not much Rust, MDN, Firefox, ... Which are about their only projects I know or care about. What are the applying their formidable engineering talent to?
    - blub 6y ago
      Why would they work on the projects you or HN care about? This is why they got in trouble in the first place - spending money and engineering on projects with zero impact on their bottom line or on the metrics that matter around privacy and an open internet.
      - dx87 6y ago
        Those things had zero impact on their bottom line because there's no way to give them money for those things. All anyone can do is donate to the Mozilla Foundation where the money can get spent on whatever non-technical things the foundations wants.
        blub 6y ago
        Even if there were, that hypothetical income wouldn't even cover the salary of two developers. Who pays for programming languages or runtimes nowadays? Only very specialized users which don't have a choice.
- blub 6y ago
  The projects which are essential for Mozilla. These were all side-projects which maybe a FAANG can afford, but not a normal company. Mozilla was operating a long time under the mistaken assumption that they're a tech powerhouse when they're obviously not. You can lie to yourself only for so long before the market corrects your assumptions the hard way.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
varbhat 6y ago
What's the focus of Mozilla now given the layoffs of Rust,MDN,Wasmtime and Servo? Is Mozilla/Firefox becoming VPN company?
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  They're refocussing on the user experience of the browser. They're stopping their more developer friendly endeavours and research projects such as servo. The VPN client and Pocket are just ways to make money to fund browser development. Firefox itself does not and can not make money (and not from lack of trying). It turns out people don't want "ads", "nags" or "suggested content" in their browser.
  - yulaow 6y ago
    I understood the exact opposite, that they are moving out from the "focus on the firefox browser" mantra because it is not a competitive strategy anymore and they want instead to find and build new products.
    - ldng 6y ago
      Ok. They're lost. Again. Or should we say More ?
    - ChrisSD 6y ago
      They need to find a build new products to actually make a decent income. Firefox alone doesn't do that. They are still committed to the core browser.
      - shi314 6y ago
        When their other products sell, they would probably just use a chromium fork with FF branding and some tweaks to make it resemble FF to sell nostalgia like Ubuntu.
        anticensor 6y ago
rvz 6y ago
This shows that open-source in general is expensive for Mozilla but cheap for the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google who own their own Web browsers and have other open-source programming languages maintained by some of their employees full time. The actual reality of this is that they are still kept alive by a direct competitor for decades and haven't made anything to generate significant sources of revenue. Maybe they should turn into a Rust consultancy of some sort. I don't know. If the mission statement is about 'privacy' then it doesn't make much sense to continue to bite the hand that feeds them as its up to Google if they want to re-new their contract with Mozilla; which unsuprisingly they had to.
- thomascgalvin 6y ago
  For Apple, Microsoft, and Google, their open source activities are all loss leaders for their profitable ventures. Apple sells hardware, and most of their software offerings, like MacOS, their office suite, and Safari, and given away to convince people to buy that hardware. Also, it's not like they're spending a whole lot of time making Sarafi the best browser around. Microsoft's web browser was created (and bundled) specifically to prevent the web from disrupting their monopoly on the desktop, and their new browser is just a fork of Chromium. Google's browser was a way for Google to drive web technologies in service of their advertising platform. Mozilla's open source efforts are/were a loss leader for ... nothing. Their work was motivated by altruism, not profit, and that turned out to be, well, not profitable. That's why they're pivoting; altruism alone wasn't enough to pay the bills.
  - lostapathy 6y ago
    Is open source a loss leader for Apple, really? Or is it something they mostly get for free, but have to contribute a little back to shape it how they want? The point I read from GP, at least, was that open source is cheap for these big corps because they get a ton of benefit for it, but non-profit (either orgs or individuals) are bearing the brunt of the cost.
    - GeekyBear 6y ago
outworlder 6y ago
I wonder if Rust has enough momentum to sustain itself now.
- artursapek 6y ago
  I expect a bigger corp with a sustainable business model will scoop it up. Rust is too promising to die at this point.
  - eloff 6y ago
    I hope so, I bet on Rust for my latest venture. I'd be so sad to have to rewrite it in C++ down the road.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      Probably start now. C++20 is a much more fun language than C++11 was, which was itself overwhelmingly more fun than C++98 or C. C++23 and C++26 will continue the trend. If you are not constrained to shoehorn yourself into a C or C++98 environment, all the memory-safety worries Rust was supposed to help with fall away.
  - darthrupert 6y ago
    Is it though? Most of it seems to be hype. It’s great that programming languages get researched and improved, but do they actually improve? How is improvement measured?
    - dgb23 6y ago
      > How is improvement measured? This is a good question that like to get answered too. It is reasonable to assume[0] that the language can keep its promises. However I look forward to seeing data on this in the future. [0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe-systems-programming/ https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe...
      - 6y ago
aazaa 6y ago
> One thing I want to clarify: I was the engineering manager for this team. I didn't lead strategy for Rust — that's @nikomatsakis. And together with @luke_wagner I supported @linclark in leading strategy for Wasmtime and Wasm outside the browser. Looks like Lin Clark was one of those affected: https://twitter.com/linclark/status/1293207099766431744 https://twitter.com/linclark/status/1293207099766431744 edit: fortunately I'm wrong and need to read more carefully.
- mkl 6y ago
  Not like you're implying though: "I was not included in the layoffs, but I am deeply affected by them."
  - aazaa 6y ago
    Facepalm - I botched the interpretation of that one badly. No ill intended - I actually interpreted it as she was let go for some reason. Fortunately, I'm wrong. Doesn't look like a comment can be deleted.
protomyth 6y ago
Firefox doesn't have the developer tools that Chrome does so developers use Chrome to develop with meaning their websites work better in Chrome so Firefox is playing catch-up or just plain looks worse keeping adoption of Firefox lower. Mozilla solves the problem by killing development of developer tools insuring Firefox is an afterthought. Is there anyone in Mozilla management that has a technical bone in their body?
- lucasmullens 6y ago
  I'm sure management understands those teams are important. Who should they have cut instead? These are hard decisions. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that management doesn't understand tech, they obviously do, it's Mozilla.
  - protomyth 6y ago
    I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that management doesn't understand tech, they obviously do, it's Mozilla. What in these decisions should make that obvious? Just because its Mozilla doesn't mean its management staff understand tech. Cut the CEO salary and remove some management first.
    - mkozlows 6y ago
      They cut 25% of their workforce. That's 250 people. Figure all-in loaded cost of $200K per person let go, and that's $50 million in budget they cut. Mitchell Baker had made $2.5 million. You don't get $50 million out of non-technical cuts.
      - fgonzag 6y ago
        But a pay reduction to all C level execs would free up a few million that would allow you to maybe keep some of (what the community consider) Mozilla's most important projects. I used to donate to Mozilla until these news. In fact, I started specifically donating because of the Servo and Rust projects. I was impressed with the way Mozilla was pushing the envelope and once again returning to the forefront of tech, in an open source manner. Instead, C execs keep getting raises and the guys doing the real work keep getting axed.
baybal2 6y ago
This is why I call people to not rely too much on "opensource" software held on corporate life support.
a-nikolaev 6y ago
Maybe, donating to Mozilla would be nice, instead of giving to Wikipedia or other projects that don't need more money.
- AnonHP 6y ago
  Donations to Mozilla go to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organization. These layoffs are in Mozilla Corporation, which doesn’t get the donated money and is mainly funded by the partnership with Google for the search engine setting in Firefox.
  - jdashg 6y ago
    The foundation can totally fund the corporation at their leisure, so I'm not sure where this idea is coming from. Money is fungible, and if the foundation thinks the best use is funding e.g. dev-tools, they can either direct money to the corporation or how engineers themselves. (Usually the latter)
  - a-nikolaev 6y ago
    Any proper form of crowd funding Mozilla would be a nice thing to do, since they are doing a lot of work for our common good.
blub 6y ago
Mozilla's decision makes a lot of economic sense. They got rid of projects requiring lots of engineering effort with negligible benefits for the company or for the internet or for our privacy. I'm not sure at this point if it makes sense for them to keep the Firefox code base or give up, switch to Chromium and focus on what they do best - spy less on us than Google. When Microsoft gave up anyone paying attention knew this was coming. The only company that can still afford to develop a Chromium competitor is Apple. I hope they're not forced by the masses of web developers to switch to Chromium too.
- cordite 6y ago
  It’s still WebKit under the hood isn’t it? The JS engines are different though
  - pkilgore 6y ago
    HTML engine was forked from Webkit. It's called blink now, and from what I've read the fork was long enough ago to consider them separate pieces of software.
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    No, IIRC Firefox's render engine is called Gecko, and it's a completely separate (older I believe) lineage from Webkit. Ed: I may have misunderstood which "it's" you were referring to. Oh well.
    - cordite 6y ago
      I meant between Safari and Chrome. Saying Apple maintains their own, yet they share tech.
  - paavohtl 6y ago
    Chrome's rendering engine (Blink [1]) was hard forked from WebKit in 2013. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)
- 6y ago
simion314 6y ago
I am wondering if Mozilla considered to re-skin Chromium as similar to Microsoft.
Barrin92 6y ago
I always wondered how Rust at Mozilla was sustainable. Maintaining an ecosystem like that and bringing it into an already complex project like a browser is a huge undertaking that probably has eaten up significant amount of manhours. At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing but I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other products. I can't imagine that from a standpoint of time investment and technical improvement Rust ever made sense for Firefox to be honest.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing It also helps that Microsoft is in the business of selling IDEs.
  - regularfry 6y ago
    Interesting question: why isn't Mozilla in this business too? They've got a cross-platform desktop app toolkit sat right there, and big enough developer mindshare to be interesting. There's room for a Firefox-flavour web dev IDE in the market, surely? Firefox dev tools, only with edit-in-place and live debugging for server-side assets. Seems odd to me that they've never gone that way, given everything else they've tried.
    - trenchgun 6y ago
      Indeed.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      A web editor was actually an integral part of the original suite from which Firefox was derived.
    - Vinnl 6y ago
      They did have something that was intended to evolve into something like that, I think, but it was half-hearted, somewhat tucked away, and never gained any real traction: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/WebIDE https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/WebIDE
sg47 6y ago
Given Microsoft's recent forays into Rust, they should acquire these engineers and put their muscle behind Rust.
- Rochus 6y ago
  They also have people in the C++ committee (even making proposals to add features made popular with Rust also to C++) and they have their own C++ toolchain.
dx87 6y ago
> The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too. Two days ago, the CEO said that focusing on technologies like Wasmtime was one of their plans for the future[1]. Now we find out that they're actually getting rid of the team. They really doubled down on the corporate speak for this round of layoffs. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing-mozilla/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...
- Ygg2 6y ago
  Why call it corporate speak, when it's plain old lying?
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Being more charitable, it's possible they changed their minds, rather than they were lying.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      That would be really weird. When I think more charitable with Mozilla, I think of "one hand does not know what the other one is doing".
    - FireBeyond 6y ago
      It wasn't a change of mind. This was the layoff blog post. They just didn't mention it. Tuesday blog post: "Wasmtime is our future!" "We're going to be smaller across the board". Thursday it becomes apparent that the Wasmtime was laid off on that Tuesday. "... specifically, a much smaller future ..."
  - estebank 6y ago
    Po-tay-to, starchy tuber of the plant Solanum tuberosum.
  - adsjhdashkj 6y ago
steveklabnik 6y ago
Hi everyone, the Rust core team has been talking about making a statement on this, but I left this comment in a personal capacity yesterday: ------------------------ Mozilla employs a small number of people to work on Rust fulltime, and many of the Servo people contributed to Rust too, even if it wasn't their job. They also pay for the hosting bill for crates.io. They also own a trademark on Rust, Cargo, and the logos of both. Two people from the Rust team have posted about their situation, one was laid off and one was not. Unsure about the others. Many of the Servo folks (and possibly all, it's not 100% clear yet but it doesn't look good) have been laid off. The vast majority of contributors and team members are non-Mozilla, though the Mozilla folk are very important. Rust will survive. This situation is very painful, and it has the possibility of being more so, but (thanks to a lot of work from people (not speaking of myself here) who used to be at Mozilla!) Rust is bigger than Mozilla, and has been on a long road towards diversification. Some other companies have stepped up to pay a bunch of the bills that Mozilla used to pay, namely Amazon and Microsoft. Here's hoping that we get even more involvement in the future.
- lachlan-sneff 6y ago
  Thank you for commenting here Steve. The fallout from the layoffs is possibly quite harrowing but, from my biased point of view, this may be a watershed moment for Rust. It'll have to expand beyond its incubating organization. (And don't cut yourself short, your actions are a significant part of why Rust has such a promising future.)
- mcqueenjordan 6y ago
  Totally agree, Rust will survive. AWS is investing heavily in Rust. If anyone who is reading this was affected by these layoffs and you want to continue to work in Rust, get in touch with me. We have many Rust opportunities open across the company on a variety of different teams.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Any Rustaceans who have been working at Mozilla, have probably done so for the mission that Mozilla work on (publicly), not too earn a ton of money. Amazon/AWS, who's main goal is closed down infrastructure, is the opposite of that mission. Worth keeping in mind when trying to recruit people from the opposite spectrum of yourself.
shawxe 6y ago
From many of the comments in this thread, one might think that FAANG companies invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outside the context of a "profit model." Whatever is going on at Mozilla right now, the notion that a piece of open source software even needs to be profitable (let alone supported by a single large company) in order to continue existing is ridiculous. I'll concede that there are unique challenges associated with developing a web browser (it's certainly a moving target) and that there need to be several people working on it full time, but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? I'm not saying what's going on with Mozilla isn't absolutely terrible, but the notion that Firefox or Rust are going to somehow just go away (and that this is what was destined to happen all along because Mozilla is not profitable) just doesn't really make any sense.
- maccard 6y ago
  > but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? Have you any examples of any large OSS projects that don't have this problem? > As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? gcc [0] has a list of maintainers, which features a lot of redhat email addresses. The ruby maintainer is employed by Heroku. CPython is maintained by a RH employee. The linux kernel is mostly comprised of people paid to develop by their employers. [0] https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS
  - 1MachineElf 6y ago
    To the parent commenter's credit, none of those companies own the rights to the GCC/CPython/Ruby trademarks like Mozilla does with Rust.
  - jpgvm 6y ago
    PostgreSQL is probably the best example. It's maintained by many people from many different companies.
627467 6y ago
I'm not technical enough to understand what are the strategic implications of this. I have been reading a lot of reactions to this that involves hitting at C-level of MozCorp (mostly around their pay, but also perceived lack of focus?) so I wanted to understand what are the strategic changes that management is enacting. Is building a web-based platform not a priority for Mozilla anymore? What is? Or is it that the layer of intervention on the web platform has shifted to other things, other than rendering engine and documenting it's capabilities?
voldacar 6y ago
Hopefully this will mean fewer "We're rewriting $WORKING_SOFTWARE in Rust!!!" posts
- justaguy88 6y ago
  But then what will we click on?
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  Am I to read that as you rooting for Rust to die?
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    No, just the overenthusiastic rustafarians
- goto11 6y ago
  Why so? It is not Mozilla going around rewriting random projects in Rust.
AsyncAwait 6y ago
Is the plan now to sabotage every core Mozilla project people care about and focus on selling 3rd party VPN services?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
blargmaster33 6y ago
Good! Rust us woke SJW garbage!
mola 6y ago
Mozilla tech brought value right? MDN bright value right? Wasm, rust etc, brought value. But no profit. Could it be that profit isn't synonymous with value? Just a thought.
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  Of course it isn't. Think about the value Linus Torvalds created with his contributions to Linux and git. He's wealthy, sure, but not even a fraction of that value generated profit for him.
twblalock 6y ago
Rust, not Firefox, is likely to be the enduring legacy of Mozilla. Rust will survive if Mozilla does not. I doubt Firefox will.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
I think for Rust to succeed long term it needs to be run more like C/C++ with standards and multiple compiler implementations for as many platforms as possible. I would be very nervous betting on Rust for a big long term project if there is uncertainty about Mozilla’s future.
coldtea 6y ago
Time to get off the Firefox train. Brave (the browser) it is...
coldtea 6y ago
I'd like to see Microsoft stepping up to the plate and hiring the Rust team...
throwaway4u2c 6y ago
What if Google executives negotiated a deal to pay Mozilla more in exchange for killing Rust development, considering Rust threatens Golang dominance?
deleted 6y ago
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jlokier 6y ago
One reasons some people use Rust is to target WebAssembly and WebGL. Will this change at Mozilla mean that evolving features in WASM, WebGL and other "advanced but it works on all evergreen browsers" features becomes a less interesting target as Firefox starts to fall behind the leading edge due to lack of developers, but still has enough users to make the "lowest common denominator" fall behind as well? Or will Firefox keep up somehow? Or will it stop keeping up, and site/webapp developers working with leading-edge web platform features like evolving WASM just drop FF from concern at the cost of a few percent more users? I know plenty of developers already don't test or know much about Firefox, and many sites don't work properly on it. I've had a number of commercial sites where I couldn't even login or couldn't pay except by switching to a different browser. But I have the impression people that folks working on leading-edge tech stuff are a bit more likely to include FF in their matrix, and the assumption is FF is quite up to date (more than Safari) so it's worth bothering with as an alternative target.
sjwmozilla 6y ago
Oh man Microsoft or some other less activist company needs to sponsor rust

428 points by cs702 6y ago

condercet 6y ago

Mozilla has decided to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as a business strategy.

burtonator 6y ago
The HN community is going to hate on me for this but it's partially their own fault for spending money trying to differentiate in the browser. They should just focus on Chromium. It's going to win anyway. Mozilla has a small market share percentage and eventually the gap is going to be large enough they will have to abandon the FF code base anyway. It's looking like they're going to focus more on the consumer market and building consumer products and less on infrastructure. FF as needed back when all the browsers were proprietary. Sure... Google can do evil things with Chrome but Chromium is Open Source - it can always be forked. There's nothing advantageous in maintaining FF as a dedicate code base. It's just duplication. One of the major points of OSS is to prevent people from competing on things that are non-differentiating. If's OSS so they can fork it and make their own changes if they want.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- danShumway 6y ago
  If Mozilla can't maintain their own browser codebase that competes with Chrome now, what makes you think they'll be able to maintain a fork? The moment they fork it and make their own changes, they are now back in the same position they were in -- a separate codebase under separate branding that needs to keep pace with Chrome. There are two reasons forks work: - They allow you to pull upstream changes. That's nice, but pulling upstream changes doesn't work once your codebase starts to heavily diverge from its source, so getting that benefit means you can't make changes that are too divergent from the upstream. - They also allow you to get rid of upfront work and start from a solid base. That's also nice, but getting rid of the upfront work isn't valuable to Mozilla. Firefox is already basically on par with Chrome where most features are concerned. It's not the upfront work that's the problem, it's maintenance, advertising, and monetization. A Mozilla fork of Chrome would be effectively the same thing as giving Google control over the entire web standards process.
- StevePerkins 6y ago
  For what it's worth, I agree with you. Chromium has won. It's the "Linux kernel" of web browsers. However, that DOESN'T necessarily mean that every Linux user has to run Ubuntu! I recently switched from Firefox to Vivaldi. Just because: 1. I got tired of nagging compatibility issues with websites that I can't easily do with out (e.g. bank and stock broker). 2. I dabbled with Opera once upon a time, and liked it. I don't trust Opera's current Chinese ownership, but the original developers formed this new company and their (Chromium-based) browser is quite nice. However, I still don't like the fact that Vivaldi is proprietary and closed-source. I would love to have a browser that is both built on a Chromium core, AND built for privacy by a trustworthy open-source company. If Mozilla would fill this niche, then I'd be back tomorrow. They've already sort of dabbled in this area, with their Chromium-based "Firefox Focus" browser for mobile devices. But that's a very thin shell with no features. I wish they would just acknowledge reality, throw in the towel on Gecko, and build an awesome Chromium-based browser. Microsoft managed to do it seemingly overnight, surely Mozilla could as well if they so wanted. FIREFOX'S VALUE-ADD IS NOT GECKO! It's all of the functionality layered on top of that engine.
  - jtxx 6y ago
    > I would love to have a browser that is both built on a Chromium core, AND built for privacy by a trustworthy open-source company. what about Brave?
    - StevePerkins 6y ago
      I tried them for a little while. Unfortunately, Brave's sync service just flat-out doesn't work. To the point where they have it disabled by default, and you have to crack open advanced settings to see if it will actually work reliably for you (SPOILER ALERT: It won't). I think they were too focused on making it "blockchain-based" and "crypto-trendy", and just can't build something sensible that works. THIS is the value-add that browser vendors can bring to the table going forward. Chromium the kernel has won. But at the user-feature level: 1. Google and Microsoft's Chromium-based browsers spy on you. 2. Opera's Chromium-based browser has Chinese ownership, and probably spies on you. 3. Brave is buggy and flaky with all of the user features that they've built on top of their Chromium-based browser. 4. Vivalid's Chromium-based browser is pretty awesome and solid, and probably doesn't spy on you. But it's closed-source. 5. Firefox is solid, and has good no-spying values. But their browser is not Chromium-based, and it's dying because the Internet is simply moving on away from it. With this list, Vivaldi is currently the "least-bad" option from my POV. But I would love to go back to Firefox if they would get real with the times.
- BigJ1211 6y ago
  Just because two different codebases try to achieve similar things, doesn't mean it's duplication. It certainly serves not only consumers, but also businesses well to have firefox (and mozilla) so web standards don't get dictated by a single private entity.
- est31 6y ago
  > Google can do evil things with Chrome but Chromium is Open Source - it can always be forked. It takes more to maintain a Chromium competitor than its source code. You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web. If Google decided to close the source code in 2030, nobody would be able to do anything about it. Mozilla would have laid off its last engineers by 2025 and they'd have found new jobs by now, having 5 year old outdated knowledge about how browsers work. Even if you have engineers with the required knowledge, you still need to organize them, etc. All of this takes time, and gigantic investments.
  - Someone 6y ago
    Because of its heritage (it’s a fork of WebKit, and thus started out as KHTML, which is LGPL licensed), I don’t think the Chromium code can be closed easily. They probably can split it and gradually replace most real functionality into a separate closed source part, like they did with Android, but that will take time.
  - criddell 6y ago
    > You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web. What kind of things are rapidly changing these days?
    - jlokier 6y ago
      JavaScript itself (ES language changes), APIs callable from JavaScript (there are a lot), CSS, HTTP(s)/TLS and evolving security, ever-evolving compatibility requirements to keep popular pages working, performance expectations of the rendering model (what must be smooth nowadays didn't used to be and it's expected by sites), things like WASM, WebGL (new version on its) & WebGPU, the sandbox, evolving security patterns (HTML/HTTP/JS security model is complex) and dealing with new security issues (it never stops), compatibility with OS version releases (always new issues), compatibility with GPU drivers (always new issues), video codecs. These things by themselves require a well-funded team to keep the browser relevant to modern sites. Well-funded because they take a lot of time and ideally to be done to a professional standard. The number of spare-time or independently-wealthy volunteers around to do the work seems thoroughly insufficent compared with what it would take to keep up. That list doesn't even have new user-visible features (so nothing to "sell" to users except "we still work with current sites"). They are just moving-target "basics", minimal expectations by users and sites to remain "current" on the web. I'm sure I've left off a lot too, it's just off the top of my head.
- caeril 6y ago
  > but Chromium is Open Source It should be noted that the base Chromium packages still include Google-specific and Google-friendly features, such as automatically deriving your browsing profile from whatever Google account you happen to be logged into.
  - hu3 6y ago
    Indeed. Perhaps they could join gorces with the Ungoogled Chromium project: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
- houreaction 6y ago
  so basically google controls the web? great. >They should just focus on Chromium. It's going to win anyway. Mozilla has a small market share percentage and eventually the gap is going to be large enough they will have to abandon the FF code base anyway. What does it matter if chrome has a large market share, so long as mozilla is profitable? Also, abandon a perfectly good browser for no reason?' >It's looking like they're going to focus more on the consumer market and building consumer products and less on infrastructure. >FF as needed back when all the browsers were proprietary. chrome is still proprietary! and there are dozens of chromium forks already! why in the world would anyone want another chromium fork?

poletopole 6y ago

Does anyone know what the consequences for this will be? WASM was what motivated me to learn Rust.

dom96 6y ago
I doubt anyone knows what the impact will be, all we can do is speculate. In the very short-term, I would definitely be surprised if we don't see it have a negative impact on the development of Rust and certain Rust projects such as wasmtime. In particular because so many of the top contributors appear to be full-time Mozilla employees[1]. 1 - https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contributors https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contribu...
coreblocks 6y ago
Time to put your eggs in Swift! :)
- poletopole 6y ago
  I learned Swift several years back, but didn't see myself using it until SwiftUI came to be. I have my fingers crossed for RustUI.
  - benibela 6y ago
    I use Pascal With Lazarus is has a cross platform Desktop GUI
    - poletopole 6y ago
      Lazarus actually is impressive considering lack of the non-swift alternatives out there and that React Native still doesn't have desktop support. I'm glad you shared, because Pascal is a language I never looked into before, but it seems like it was ahead of its time, but I wonder if there are any modern dialects?
      - 6y ago

kiba 6y ago

Does Mozilla not make enough money to sustain long term investments?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ChrisSD 6y ago
Mozilla Corp currently doesn't make much money at all, hence their problems. The majority of their funds come from a recurring Google donation, which has to be renewed every few years.
- kryptiskt 6y ago
  It's not a donation. They pay for being the default search. They throw billions at Apple for the same, but nobody paints that as charity.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - x0x0 6y ago
    It's increasingly a charitable donation / obfuscation of their browser monopoly status since Mozilla has lost most of their leverage: Mozilla's marketshare has shrunk, and Google faces less and less competition for search. Why would Google pay for something they get for free, much less pay half a billion dollars. See the public numbers here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation under Combined income of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation
    - foepys 6y ago
      > Why would Google pay for something they get for free For the same reason Microsoft saved Apple: to prevent anti-trust inquiries
- slezyr 6y ago

qppo 6y ago

I wonder if someone is going to pick up the mantle that Mozilla dropped. One of the FAANGs, maybe Oxide?

oconnor663 6y ago
I wonder if Microsoft could be interested. They've written a lot recently about investing in Rust internally. Also VSCode seems to be the de facto standard Rust IDE these days.
monocasa 6y ago
The ideal for me would be that a single company doesn't, but instead there's a proper foundation with a lot of members.
steveklabnik 6y ago
As a pre-revenue startup... Oxide can't do that, though they do employ me, and we are still using Rust for all the things, and don't plan on changing that.

fs111 6y ago

What is actually left of mozilla after this?

darthrupert 6y ago
Roughly 75% of the workforce and of course all the IP.
- bronson 6y ago
  That's a lot of people. Honest question: what are they working on? Not devtools, Servo, and not much Rust, MDN, Firefox, ... Which are about their only projects I know or care about. What are the applying their formidable engineering talent to?
  - blub 6y ago
    Why would they work on the projects you or HN care about? This is why they got in trouble in the first place - spending money and engineering on projects with zero impact on their bottom line or on the metrics that matter around privacy and an open internet.
    - dx87 6y ago
      Those things had zero impact on their bottom line because there's no way to give them money for those things. All anyone can do is donate to the Mozilla Foundation where the money can get spent on whatever non-technical things the foundations wants.
      - blub 6y ago
        Even if there were, that hypothetical income wouldn't even cover the salary of two developers. Who pays for programming languages or runtimes nowadays? Only very specialized users which don't have a choice.
blub 6y ago
The projects which are essential for Mozilla. These were all side-projects which maybe a FAANG can afford, but not a normal company. Mozilla was operating a long time under the mistaken assumption that they're a tech powerhouse when they're obviously not. You can lie to yourself only for so long before the market corrects your assumptions the hard way.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

varbhat 6y ago

What's the focus of Mozilla now given the layoffs of Rust,MDN,Wasmtime and Servo? Is Mozilla/Firefox becoming VPN company?

ChrisSD 6y ago
They're refocussing on the user experience of the browser. They're stopping their more developer friendly endeavours and research projects such as servo. The VPN client and Pocket are just ways to make money to fund browser development. Firefox itself does not and can not make money (and not from lack of trying). It turns out people don't want "ads", "nags" or "suggested content" in their browser.
- yulaow 6y ago
  I understood the exact opposite, that they are moving out from the "focus on the firefox browser" mantra because it is not a competitive strategy anymore and they want instead to find and build new products.
  - ldng 6y ago
    Ok. They're lost. Again. Or should we say More ?
  - ChrisSD 6y ago
    They need to find a build new products to actually make a decent income. Firefox alone doesn't do that. They are still committed to the core browser.
    - shi314 6y ago
      When their other products sell, they would probably just use a chromium fork with FF branding and some tweaks to make it resemble FF to sell nostalgia like Ubuntu.
      - anticensor 6y ago

rvz 6y ago

This shows that open-source in general is expensive for Mozilla but cheap for the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google who own their own Web browsers and have other open-source programming languages maintained by some of their employees full time. The actual reality of this is that they are still kept alive by a direct competitor for decades and haven't made anything to generate significant sources of revenue. Maybe they should turn into a Rust consultancy of some sort. I don't know. If the mission statement is about 'privacy' then it doesn't make much sense to continue to bite the hand that feeds them as its up to Google if they want to re-new their contract with Mozilla; which unsuprisingly they had to.

thomascgalvin 6y ago
For Apple, Microsoft, and Google, their open source activities are all loss leaders for their profitable ventures. Apple sells hardware, and most of their software offerings, like MacOS, their office suite, and Safari, and given away to convince people to buy that hardware. Also, it's not like they're spending a whole lot of time making Sarafi the best browser around. Microsoft's web browser was created (and bundled) specifically to prevent the web from disrupting their monopoly on the desktop, and their new browser is just a fork of Chromium. Google's browser was a way for Google to drive web technologies in service of their advertising platform. Mozilla's open source efforts are/were a loss leader for ... nothing. Their work was motivated by altruism, not profit, and that turned out to be, well, not profitable. That's why they're pivoting; altruism alone wasn't enough to pay the bills.
- lostapathy 6y ago
  Is open source a loss leader for Apple, really? Or is it something they mostly get for free, but have to contribute a little back to shape it how they want? The point I read from GP, at least, was that open source is cheap for these big corps because they get a ton of benefit for it, but non-profit (either orgs or individuals) are bearing the brunt of the cost.
  - GeekyBear 6y ago

outworlder 6y ago

I wonder if Rust has enough momentum to sustain itself now.

artursapek 6y ago
I expect a bigger corp with a sustainable business model will scoop it up. Rust is too promising to die at this point.
- eloff 6y ago
  I hope so, I bet on Rust for my latest venture. I'd be so sad to have to rewrite it in C++ down the road.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    Probably start now. C++20 is a much more fun language than C++11 was, which was itself overwhelmingly more fun than C++98 or C. C++23 and C++26 will continue the trend. If you are not constrained to shoehorn yourself into a C or C++98 environment, all the memory-safety worries Rust was supposed to help with fall away.
- darthrupert 6y ago
  Is it though? Most of it seems to be hype. It’s great that programming languages get researched and improved, but do they actually improve? How is improvement measured?
  - dgb23 6y ago
    > How is improvement measured? This is a good question that like to get answered too. It is reasonable to assume[0] that the language can keep its promises. However I look forward to seeing data on this in the future. [0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe-systems-programming/ https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe...
    - 6y ago

aazaa 6y ago

> One thing I want to clarify: I was the engineering manager for this team. I didn't lead strategy for Rust — that's @nikomatsakis. And together with @luke_wagner I supported @linclark in leading strategy for Wasmtime and Wasm outside the browser. Looks like Lin Clark was one of those affected: https://twitter.com/linclark/status/1293207099766431744 https://twitter.com/linclark/status/1293207099766431744 edit: fortunately I'm wrong and need to read more carefully.

mkl 6y ago
Not like you're implying though: "I was not included in the layoffs, but I am deeply affected by them."
- aazaa 6y ago
  Facepalm - I botched the interpretation of that one badly. No ill intended - I actually interpreted it as she was let go for some reason. Fortunately, I'm wrong. Doesn't look like a comment can be deleted.

protomyth 6y ago

Firefox doesn't have the developer tools that Chrome does so developers use Chrome to develop with meaning their websites work better in Chrome so Firefox is playing catch-up or just plain looks worse keeping adoption of Firefox lower. Mozilla solves the problem by killing development of developer tools insuring Firefox is an afterthought. Is there anyone in Mozilla management that has a technical bone in their body?

lucasmullens 6y ago
I'm sure management understands those teams are important. Who should they have cut instead? These are hard decisions. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that management doesn't understand tech, they obviously do, it's Mozilla.
- protomyth 6y ago
  I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that management doesn't understand tech, they obviously do, it's Mozilla. What in these decisions should make that obvious? Just because its Mozilla doesn't mean its management staff understand tech. Cut the CEO salary and remove some management first.
  - mkozlows 6y ago
    They cut 25% of their workforce. That's 250 people. Figure all-in loaded cost of $200K per person let go, and that's $50 million in budget they cut. Mitchell Baker had made $2.5 million. You don't get $50 million out of non-technical cuts.
    - fgonzag 6y ago
      But a pay reduction to all C level execs would free up a few million that would allow you to maybe keep some of (what the community consider) Mozilla's most important projects. I used to donate to Mozilla until these news. In fact, I started specifically donating because of the Servo and Rust projects. I was impressed with the way Mozilla was pushing the envelope and once again returning to the forefront of tech, in an open source manner. Instead, C execs keep getting raises and the guys doing the real work keep getting axed.

baybal2 6y ago

This is why I call people to not rely too much on "opensource" software held on corporate life support.

a-nikolaev 6y ago

Maybe, donating to Mozilla would be nice, instead of giving to Wikipedia or other projects that don't need more money.

AnonHP 6y ago
Donations to Mozilla go to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organization. These layoffs are in Mozilla Corporation, which doesn’t get the donated money and is mainly funded by the partnership with Google for the search engine setting in Firefox.
- jdashg 6y ago
  The foundation can totally fund the corporation at their leisure, so I'm not sure where this idea is coming from. Money is fungible, and if the foundation thinks the best use is funding e.g. dev-tools, they can either direct money to the corporation or how engineers themselves. (Usually the latter)
- a-nikolaev 6y ago
  Any proper form of crowd funding Mozilla would be a nice thing to do, since they are doing a lot of work for our common good.

blub 6y ago

Mozilla's decision makes a lot of economic sense. They got rid of projects requiring lots of engineering effort with negligible benefits for the company or for the internet or for our privacy. I'm not sure at this point if it makes sense for them to keep the Firefox code base or give up, switch to Chromium and focus on what they do best - spy less on us than Google. When Microsoft gave up anyone paying attention knew this was coming. The only company that can still afford to develop a Chromium competitor is Apple. I hope they're not forced by the masses of web developers to switch to Chromium too.

cordite 6y ago
It’s still WebKit under the hood isn’t it? The JS engines are different though
- pkilgore 6y ago
  HTML engine was forked from Webkit. It's called blink now, and from what I've read the fork was long enough ago to consider them separate pieces of software.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  No, IIRC Firefox's render engine is called Gecko, and it's a completely separate (older I believe) lineage from Webkit. Ed: I may have misunderstood which "it's" you were referring to. Oh well.
  - cordite 6y ago
    I meant between Safari and Chrome. Saying Apple maintains their own, yet they share tech.
- paavohtl 6y ago
  Chrome's rendering engine (Blink [1]) was hard forked from WebKit in 2013. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)
6y ago

simion314 6y ago

I am wondering if Mozilla considered to re-skin Chromium as similar to Microsoft.

Barrin92 6y ago

I always wondered how Rust at Mozilla was sustainable. Maintaining an ecosystem like that and bringing it into an already complex project like a browser is a huge undertaking that probably has eaten up significant amount of manhours. At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing but I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other products. I can't imagine that from a standpoint of time investment and technical improvement Rust ever made sense for Firefox to be honest.

rumanator 6y ago
> At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing It also helps that Microsoft is in the business of selling IDEs.
- regularfry 6y ago
  Interesting question: why isn't Mozilla in this business too? They've got a cross-platform desktop app toolkit sat right there, and big enough developer mindshare to be interesting. There's room for a Firefox-flavour web dev IDE in the market, surely? Firefox dev tools, only with edit-in-place and live debugging for server-side assets. Seems odd to me that they've never gone that way, given everything else they've tried.
  - trenchgun 6y ago
    Indeed.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    A web editor was actually an integral part of the original suite from which Firefox was derived.
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    They did have something that was intended to evolve into something like that, I think, but it was half-hearted, somewhat tucked away, and never gained any real traction: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/WebIDE https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/WebIDE

sg47 6y ago

Given Microsoft's recent forays into Rust, they should acquire these engineers and put their muscle behind Rust.

Rochus 6y ago
They also have people in the C++ committee (even making proposals to add features made popular with Rust also to C++) and they have their own C++ toolchain.

dx87 6y ago

> The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too. Two days ago, the CEO said that focusing on technologies like Wasmtime was one of their plans for the future[1]. Now we find out that they're actually getting rid of the team. They really doubled down on the corporate speak for this round of layoffs. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing-mozilla/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...

Ygg2 6y ago
Why call it corporate speak, when it's plain old lying?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Being more charitable, it's possible they changed their minds, rather than they were lying.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    That would be really weird. When I think more charitable with Mozilla, I think of "one hand does not know what the other one is doing".
  - FireBeyond 6y ago
    It wasn't a change of mind. This was the layoff blog post. They just didn't mention it. Tuesday blog post: "Wasmtime is our future!" "We're going to be smaller across the board". Thursday it becomes apparent that the Wasmtime was laid off on that Tuesday. "... specifically, a much smaller future ..."
- estebank 6y ago
  Po-tay-to, starchy tuber of the plant Solanum tuberosum.
- adsjhdashkj 6y ago

steveklabnik 6y ago

Hi everyone, the Rust core team has been talking about making a statement on this, but I left this comment in a personal capacity yesterday: ------------------------ Mozilla employs a small number of people to work on Rust fulltime, and many of the Servo people contributed to Rust too, even if it wasn't their job. They also pay for the hosting bill for crates.io. They also own a trademark on Rust, Cargo, and the logos of both. Two people from the Rust team have posted about their situation, one was laid off and one was not. Unsure about the others. Many of the Servo folks (and possibly all, it's not 100% clear yet but it doesn't look good) have been laid off. The vast majority of contributors and team members are non-Mozilla, though the Mozilla folk are very important. Rust will survive. This situation is very painful, and it has the possibility of being more so, but (thanks to a lot of work from people (not speaking of myself here) who used to be at Mozilla!) Rust is bigger than Mozilla, and has been on a long road towards diversification. Some other companies have stepped up to pay a bunch of the bills that Mozilla used to pay, namely Amazon and Microsoft. Here's hoping that we get even more involvement in the future.

lachlan-sneff 6y ago
Thank you for commenting here Steve. The fallout from the layoffs is possibly quite harrowing but, from my biased point of view, this may be a watershed moment for Rust. It'll have to expand beyond its incubating organization. (And don't cut yourself short, your actions are a significant part of why Rust has such a promising future.)
mcqueenjordan 6y ago
Totally agree, Rust will survive. AWS is investing heavily in Rust. If anyone who is reading this was affected by these layoffs and you want to continue to work in Rust, get in touch with me. We have many Rust opportunities open across the company on a variety of different teams.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Any Rustaceans who have been working at Mozilla, have probably done so for the mission that Mozilla work on (publicly), not too earn a ton of money. Amazon/AWS, who's main goal is closed down infrastructure, is the opposite of that mission. Worth keeping in mind when trying to recruit people from the opposite spectrum of yourself.

shawxe 6y ago

From many of the comments in this thread, one might think that FAANG companies invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outside the context of a "profit model." Whatever is going on at Mozilla right now, the notion that a piece of open source software even needs to be profitable (let alone supported by a single large company) in order to continue existing is ridiculous. I'll concede that there are unique challenges associated with developing a web browser (it's certainly a moving target) and that there need to be several people working on it full time, but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? I'm not saying what's going on with Mozilla isn't absolutely terrible, but the notion that Firefox or Rust are going to somehow just go away (and that this is what was destined to happen all along because Mozilla is not profitable) just doesn't really make any sense.

maccard 6y ago
> but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? Have you any examples of any large OSS projects that don't have this problem? > As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? gcc [0] has a list of maintainers, which features a lot of redhat email addresses. The ruby maintainer is employed by Heroku. CPython is maintained by a RH employee. The linux kernel is mostly comprised of people paid to develop by their employers. [0] https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS
- 1MachineElf 6y ago
  To the parent commenter's credit, none of those companies own the rights to the GCC/CPython/Ruby trademarks like Mozilla does with Rust.
- jpgvm 6y ago
  PostgreSQL is probably the best example. It's maintained by many people from many different companies.

627467 6y ago

I'm not technical enough to understand what are the strategic implications of this. I have been reading a lot of reactions to this that involves hitting at C-level of MozCorp (mostly around their pay, but also perceived lack of focus?) so I wanted to understand what are the strategic changes that management is enacting. Is building a web-based platform not a priority for Mozilla anymore? What is? Or is it that the layer of intervention on the web platform has shifted to other things, other than rendering engine and documenting it's capabilities?

voldacar 6y ago

Hopefully this will mean fewer "We're rewriting $WORKING_SOFTWARE in Rust!!!" posts

justaguy88 6y ago
But then what will we click on?
AsyncAwait 6y ago
Am I to read that as you rooting for Rust to die?
- secondcoming 6y ago
  No, just the overenthusiastic rustafarians
goto11 6y ago
Why so? It is not Mozilla going around rewriting random projects in Rust.

AsyncAwait 6y ago

Is the plan now to sabotage every core Mozilla project people care about and focus on selling 3rd party VPN services?

deleted 6y ago

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blargmaster33 6y ago

Good! Rust us woke SJW garbage!

mola 6y ago

Mozilla tech brought value right? MDN bright value right? Wasm, rust etc, brought value. But no profit. Could it be that profit isn't synonymous with value? Just a thought.

perryizgr8 6y ago
Of course it isn't. Think about the value Linus Torvalds created with his contributions to Linux and git. He's wealthy, sure, but not even a fraction of that value generated profit for him.

twblalock 6y ago

Rust, not Firefox, is likely to be the enduring legacy of Mozilla. Rust will survive if Mozilla does not. I doubt Firefox will.

spaetzleesser 6y ago

I think for Rust to succeed long term it needs to be run more like C/C++ with standards and multiple compiler implementations for as many platforms as possible. I would be very nervous betting on Rust for a big long term project if there is uncertainty about Mozilla’s future.

coldtea 6y ago

Time to get off the Firefox train. Brave (the browser) it is...

coldtea 6y ago

I'd like to see Microsoft stepping up to the plate and hiring the Rust team...

throwaway4u2c 6y ago

What if Google executives negotiated a deal to pay Mozilla more in exchange for killing Rust development, considering Rust threatens Golang dominance?

deleted 6y ago

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jlokier 6y ago

One reasons some people use Rust is to target WebAssembly and WebGL. Will this change at Mozilla mean that evolving features in WASM, WebGL and other "advanced but it works on all evergreen browsers" features becomes a less interesting target as Firefox starts to fall behind the leading edge due to lack of developers, but still has enough users to make the "lowest common denominator" fall behind as well? Or will Firefox keep up somehow? Or will it stop keeping up, and site/webapp developers working with leading-edge web platform features like evolving WASM just drop FF from concern at the cost of a few percent more users? I know plenty of developers already don't test or know much about Firefox, and many sites don't work properly on it. I've had a number of commercial sites where I couldn't even login or couldn't pay except by switching to a different browser. But I have the impression people that folks working on leading-edge tech stuff are a bit more likely to include FF in their matrix, and the assumption is FF is quite up to date (more than Safari) so it's worth bothering with as an alternative target.

sjwmozilla 6y ago

Oh man Microsoft or some other less activist company needs to sponsor rust