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What's the future of Servo?
- dindresto 6y agoHow will Servo be affected by the Mozilla layoffs?
- dang 6y agoThis comment was posted before we changed the URL - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24161984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24161984. I've made the replies top-level comments since the thread scope is now at this level.
- umanwizard 6y agoThe servo team has been (either mostly or entirely, I’m not sure) laid off, so presumably the project is dead.
- Kelteseth 6y ago> project is dead That's quite a drastic statement. Maybe the devs find another company that sponsors the development of servo?
- winter_squirrel 6y agoHow many other companies with the capital to fund such development have a need for a new browser engine and would be willing to fund a team of engineers to work on such an engine vs just using chromium?
- jeswin 6y agoSamsung, LG, many Chinese TV and mobile phone manufacturers etc. Samsung was a contributor to the Servo project, but I'm not sure to what extent they were helping.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoLG holds the remainder of the Palm WebOS assets, and has been doing decent things with them. So there's at least partially a history of them doing this kind of thing. Maybe there's a slight chance they might have an interest.
- rbanffy 6y agoWebOS used WebKit last time I checked.
- mrec 6y agoMicrosoft might have done. Picking Chromium as the basis for their new Edge a couple of years ago, instead of Mozilla/Servo, was a disappointment at the time and I suspect will look even worse in future retrospectives. MS also seem to have a lot more interest in Rust than Google do.
- TylerE 6y agoYes, picking something that was useable 3 years ago to build a product released 2 years ago instead of an alternative that isn't close to being done NOW was surely a massive strategic miscalculation.
- mrec 6y agoBy "Mozilla/Servo" I meant "the Mozilla Firefox codebase along with Servo as its research testbed", not just Servo itself (which AFAIK was never intended to be a generally-shippable browser). Could have been clearer, yes.
- umanwizard 6y agoI guess anything is possible, but why would anyone other than Mozilla want to develop Servo?
- DJHenk 6y agoI think any big company who does not like Google's dominance on the web would want to do that. The reason they all switch to a chromium engine is not that they don't care, it's because it was too hard/expensive to develop their own engine. If Servo has any potential in that sense, I don't see why a company like Microsoft would not want to contribute to that.
- brianush1 6y agoMicrosoft has made two working browser engines: Trident and EdgeHTML. They've killed both in favor of Chromium; I don't see how it would cost them less to develop Servo than to have kept working on EdgeHTML.
- Ericson2314 6y agoI said at the time that Microsoft should have stepped into to sponsor Firefox, and make a firefox-based IE. Surely between the two of them Chrome could get some better competition.
- gsnedders 6y agoEdgeHTML was a fork of Trident, as much as they liked to trumpet it as a new chapter. A fair bit did change, but it was far from a new browser engine. (Much longer ago, they were also responsible for Tasman.)
- lovelearning 6y agoI think MS thinks very differently. Some months ago, one of their PMs said: "It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than five percent?" [1] [1] : https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-guy-mozilla-should-give-up-on-firefox-and-go-with-chromium-too/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-guy-mozilla-should-g...
- coldtea 6y agoMozilla should have ousted the executives, Cxx's and secretarial stuff -- not their sole chance of ever making their browser engine better... What's the deal anyway, is Mozzila a non profit for the development of the Firefox browser and an open FOSS web standards based web engine, or a sandbox for business types to play with and implement various BS ideas (ads, VPN, mobile OS, etc)?
- umanwizard 6y agoMozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a for-profit business. It just so happens that 100% of its shares are owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit.
- coldtea 6y agoThe sooner the profit corp dies off and eats humble pie then, the better. An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs, with tanginble, browser-oriented goals, not something dependent on Google's money... Here's the person who announced the firings... Nothing to do with development or FOSS, some laywer ex-Netscape employee: Winifred Mitchell Baker (born 1959) is the Executive Chairwoman and CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and of Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors. It's like the leeches that hang on to NGOs for a salaried office career, and don't do activism themselves... For all his faults, at least Brendan Eich was an actual developer, and with important contributions to the web and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.
- nicoburns 6y ago> Nothing to do with development or FOSS Not exactly nothing to do with FOSS. She wrote the MPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker Having said that, I do think these recent layoffs reflect badly on her if she is indeed responsible for them.
- chronogram 6y agohttps://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960 https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960 Seems like it’s a community project now.
- xacky 6y agoHopefully the community can improve it and make an independent project that isn’t influenced by Google. I don’t trust Mozilla to do so anymore.
- umanwizard 6y agoWhere will “the community” get the money to do so?
- chenzhekl 6y agoI hope so too. But it's sad that, in practice, there're few successful big open-source projects without receiving support from commercial corporations.
- toweringgoat 6y agoWhen it comes to Mozilla, "community project" is often equivalent to dead project. There are exceptions - Thunderbird appears to be doing OK - but my experience with Mozilla is that community is an afterthought - a place to hopefully get some free labour. That said, Servo did seem to be one of the more lively places, so perhaps it will continue.
- pjmlp 6y agoNot only Mozilla, that is the outcome of pretty much most FOSS projects when one doesn't have a solid income, only a selected few get to live from donations and patreon.
- toweringgoat 6y agoHonestly, it varies. Rust seems to have a strong community of voluntary contributors, and could probably be run without company backing. Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects such as KDE and Gnome - primarily dependent on a wide base of volunteers. Then there are projects with a mix: plenty of volunteers, along with many commercial contributors - the commercial contributors tend to be more significant (certainly they add more code - but then they're the ones pushing new features for their customers) - but then there are enough volunteer contributions that the projects aren't dependent on the commercial entities. Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, Kubernetes, VSCode, come to mind. And with multiple commercial entities, it's not a tragedy if one drops out. Then there are those projects with a single commercial backer, and fewer volunteers. Those are the ones that die off when the company drops out. The question is - is Servo in this category?
- MatekCopatek 6y agoWhat's the current outlook of Servo following recent events at Mozilla? Did any significant contributions previously come from the OSS community or was it more or less just Mozillians?
- tarkin2 6y agoI thought it was only the dev tools and mdn people? Although looking at twitter it appears it may be more?
- zucker42 6y agoThe U.S. based Servo team got laid off. There's another team I think, and they were unsure last I heard.
- robotmay 6y agoAre there any existing projects looking to build a new browser based around Servo? Assuming that it's partially dead at Mozilla it would be interesting to see alternatives to the current big browsers cropping up that use it.
- dethos 6y agoindeed
- darksaints 6y agoHow long before there is a major commercially-backed fork of Firefox? As a huge Firefox fan, I'm incredibly dismayed at the priorities expressed in these layoffs, and I know it is gonna bleed through to browser performance and security sooner or later. I don't want to stick around and find out the hard way when it happens.
- kchoudhu 6y agoWhere's the money in that?
- darksaints 6y agoThe same place that Mozilla finds it: by making deals with search providers.
- est31 6y agoWhy would you fork Firefox instead of Chromium which has better website compatibility?
- yepthatsreality 6y agoEcosystem diversity, interest in servo, refusal to let “chrome win”, privacy support baked in, etc. Why would you fork Chromium if you’re interested in Firefox?
- est31 6y agoThe large number of Chromium forks vs the comparatively tiny number of Firefox forks shows that there is barely interest in forking Firefox. Especially when you look at which forks have users you'll see that it's almost exclusively Chromium forks. Sure, ecosystem diversity and so on is great but the current forkers don't see a way to make money from that, otherwise they'd have done it.
- 6y ago
- EwanToo 6y agoI think a more meaningful link is: https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/27575 https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/27575 It's a very sad situation, I hope Samsung or another organisation steps in to hire the team.
- dang 6y agoOk, we've changed to that URL from https://github.com/servo/servo https://github.com/servo/servo. Thanks! +title changed from "Servo Parallel Browser Engine Project"
- stingraycharles 6y agoNLnet was suggested in the discussion, and it would be a good fit culturally, but I wonder whether they have the resources to fund a project like Servo in any meaningful way.
- iforgotpassword 6y agoI'd really like to financially support continued development of servo, so I hope something gets decided on quickly to centralize and organize funding of the servo devs. The longer this takes the more likely it is they just get another job. Sure you can find new talent but it will take them time to get up to speed with the project.
- guerrilla 6y agoMy first post on HN using Servo. GitHub seems to work too. Pretty fast. Build was fast and easy too but huge (6GB including the .git) I sure hope this project surives.
- jacquesm 6y agoThat's the spirit.
- slezyr 6y agoThat's a lightweight build for a browser. Chromium's folder with build and .git takes 40GB.
- vbezhenar 6y agoWhat about other websites? Are they usable (even if slightly broken)?
- guerrilla 6y agoActually a lot of things are usable even if they are askew. Like the Google logo on search is way to the left rather than center. On the other hand, Facebook is complete chaos and totally unusable, for example.
- mst 6y agoI'm torn between "so, same as on any browser" and "surely that's a feature" as a response to this :D
- malkia 6y agoTrying to build it on Windows, not so successful so far.
- paulrouget 6y agoI recommend that you build (or download) the UWP version of Servo: https://download.servo.org https://download.servo.org
- jgraham 6y agoI'm not/wasn't a member of the Servo team, but have collaborated with them, and if you get the opportunity to work with them I cannot recommend it highly enough. They have the kind of deep technical knowledge and ability to solve challenging problems you'd expect from a research group, coupled with the skills to make pragmatic tradeoffs and fix the complex real world problems needed to ship software. More than that, they are one of the most welcoming and friendly teams I ever worked with. The culture they created allowed them to take inexperienced new contributors and quickly ramp them up to a place where they were confident to solve challenging problems. Working in that environment and seeing what's possible has really raised my bar for workplace culture and mentorship.
- onion2k 6y agoThat's a great recommendation but isn't it a bit late? The team were laid off. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865
- garmaine 6y agoHence the recommendation. They’re presumably looking for work now.
- Brakenshire 6y agoWhat absolute nonsense, Servo was the most important thing Mozilla was doing. If Mozilla isn’t making the most promising and competitive investments in its browser (e.g. parallel layout) what is it for? The Quantum project, which is tied to Servo, is the only reason Firefox is still competitive.
- marta_morena_25 6y agoNo it really wasn't. Nobody except tech geeks care about Servo. What Mozilla needs to do is to provide a privacy aware browser that doesn't inform Google (and everyone else) about everything we do online. They can easily go the path Microsoft took and use Chromium as engine. Had they focused on that, I think they would be in a much better position than they are now (wasting millions on projects like Servo and Rust). Don't get me wrong... I love Servo and Rust, but from a business perspective it's suicide.
- danilocesar 6y agoI remember when Nokia decided to kill meego, or when Canonical stopped pushing DEs (and firing a bunch of people with it). The exactly same reaction happened back then: people tried to save things, push public projects more in the open, move ideas to other companies or create a community repo to sell the idea of an independent project. None of them really lasted or got traction. It's sad, but the reality is that the fate of a project with only one major stakeholder is tied to that stakeholder's fate. I'm pretty sure they will all get other jobs, but we have to face the fact that the project itself will probably die.
- slim 6y agomeego had two stakeholders (intel), but you make me wonder if Kaios could use servo
- fabrice_d 6y agoI would love to, but it's far from being mature enough.
- padraic7a 6y agoUbuntu Touch is still going, fairly strong too, though I think it's aim is to fill a niche rather than challenge Android and iOS anytime soon. https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/
- WoodenChair 6y ago> Ubuntu Touch is still going, fairly strong too, though I think it's aim is to fill a niche rather than challenge Android and iOS anytime soon. Do you consider getting no major OEM adoption in 5 years “fairly strong?” Mobile OSes depend on network effects of both users and developers. It’s no surprise it’s a duopoly.
- blihp 6y agoIn the world of Linux, 'no major OEM adoption' is the norm for most distros especially with no substantial corporate backing. UBports is definitely in the top 5, if not top 3, of (free/libre) mobile Linux distros. So yes, for people who are into the non-corporate Linux distros, UBports is going strong. But all that really means is actively maintained and has a reasonable (by open source standards) number of users.
- lykahb 6y agoIn a few weeks most of the developers on the Servo team will get another job. The project could be picked up by other people later but only with a significant loss of knowledge and momentum. Now is the critical time for a another company to step in. Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or Google. This could be a chance for them to get a competitive independent browser again.
- anaganisk 6y agoDidn't they just revamp Edge with Chromium? Why would they want to revamp it again with an engine that barely has a market share.
- haakon 6y agoServo is a research project. Microsoft spends a ton on research.
- NegativeLatency 6y agoWould they spend it on a project that was written in Rust rather than one of their own languages though?
- steveklabnik 6y agoMicrosoft is already supporting the Rust project, so, yes, I would not expect that to be a disqualifying reason.
- mhh__ 6y agoAre any of their langauges a good fit for something like Servo? I haven't used C# a huge amount but everytime I do I find myself being more productive than writing C++ but ultimately slightly worried about performance and correctness (the biggest thing that stood out is the absolutely awful immutability in C#)
- 6y ago
- monadic2 6y agoWelp there goes like 90% of the optimism about the future of the web.
- Ygg2 6y agoDamn, I want to support Servo. Where do I throw my allowance on them?
- tanilama 6y agoThere is a push to this project since like 4 days ago...pretty telling itself.
- masklinn 6y agoServo being gone is sad, SRT being gone is terrifying.
- oscargrouch 6y agoI wonder how much of this, has too do with social justice going to far in the harassment of Brendan Eich. I mean, maybe someone with his background in charge would know why its important for Mozilla to keep this kind of projects even if it looks they are not going anywhere, because this is what gives Mozilla meaning in the end. Im not a mozillian, so i might be totally wrong, but maybe this is a case of the MBA's taking over and trying to focus into what they have learned to do.. look at the profit margins and think they are spending too much in research projects. There are a lot of examples of other companies losing their engineering culture, starting to think more in terms of cash and profit, and finally vanishing its purpose and meaning. IBM(lost in the 80's), Microsoft almost loosing it in the Ballmer era, Sun, and the most proeminent case: Yahoo. Just to make it clear: Tech companies as any other company must have a good financial health and this is very important, but they cannot afford to loose their soul. Once their engineering and innovation culture is gone, they become void and suffer from a slow bleeding til the death. We must face it, our economical systems of incentives, the economical game generally speaking, its broken. And tech and arts are proeminent endeavors that tend to get trojan horsed by this yuppie mentality turning things that once had meaning, into meaningful cash cows that work for the few people that cash out from the corrupted source. (Apparently, it works a little better for industrial-level enterprises). My hope is that, with time, this will become more evident, and research find innovative ways to make a better economical game so that creative, art and engineering culture kind of companies can have a much larger life span. By the way, they had a pretty good leverage on Rust (and Rust was a really risk bet that ended doing great). The fact that they fired the people with this background just shows that they have no clue of what they are really doing. * Edit: just being clear about people with conservative views.. I dont like and even despise what he did politically speaking, but as long as he were a good fit for the job, and never forced his political and social views into the company, i dont agree with the outcome.. and the reason is starting to show up now.. Much more important things are starting to fall out, and in the end even people with progressive views and good engineering background ended fired in the long term.
- Brakenshire 6y agoIt’s not even a question of losing their soul, this is their core product.
- MR4D 6y agoI don't understand something about many of the comments I've seen on HN regarding Firefox, Edge, Chrome, etc.... Why does it matter if there is one source tree for all browsers? [0] Is it really a bad thing if Chromium is the base, and then Google, Microsoft, etc push out forks of it? Isn't that what we do in the linux world already with the kernel? Redhat, Ubuntu, Mint, etc all take a stock kernel from the git tree and then tweak it for their uses, yet we don't complain about that. [0] - Yes, I know people lost their jobs, and that sucks, especially in this economy. But my question isn't about the jobs, it's about having multiple browsers and why some people vehemently believe that multiple browsers without shared source code is critical to our future. THAT is what I don't understand.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe difference is that the Linux Foundation doesn't have a side business getting a cut from every install of Apache Server or something. They do not have a strong stake in how people end up using Linux. Google has a strong interest in how people end up using the web and they have a particular vision for it, a vision that many on here disagree with. Imagine if IBM ran the Linux kernel. We would be hearing many of the same concerns.
- MR4D 6y agoBut chromium has submitters from Linux, Google, Microsoft, & Opera. Why is that a bad thing? And why would Firefox being a contributor make it worse? It’s open source. That should be a good thing.
- mplewis 6y agoLinux have shown themselves to be trustworthy maintainers of an open project. Google have not.
- MR4D 6y agoChromium is open source. Contributors include more than just googlers. Why is adding more people into the list of source contributors bad?
- mojomark 6y agoWhy do software engineers feel the need to name abstract software after tangeable things, conflating search results? E.g., "Servo", "Containers", etc. Can we not find a simple naming convention that is less ambiguous and confusing to the rest of the world that uses both software and hardware? E.g. ServoSW, ContainerSW, or stick with names that have no hardware corollary?
- qwerty456127 6y agoRight at the moment when Firefox have regained reasonable performance, added and polished more things (including the new ecosystem of extensions matured) and became the best browser again, on all the platforms. I've just switched back to it (after using Chrome for years because of Firefox's slowness) and feel like I'm going to use it for quite a long anyway. I just hope somebody is going to keep making vulnerability patches.
- brundolf 6y agoOne blocker to picking up Firefox as a community project is that Mozilla still holds all relevant trademarks. So we may need a singular, well-branded, well-communicated fork to rally around. If everyone makes their own fork, all of them will fade off into obscurity.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoIf Servo is dead, what could possibly be the future of Firefox? I don't want to browse the web with a Blink-based browser. Total browser homogeneity is the end of the free and open web. I don't want to use a non-free non-open web. Is the web dead to me?
- sergiotapia 6y agoIt sounds like it's dead my friend. Microsoft with it's considerable resources could have pushed an open browser engine, now it's all google
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoCan't believe it.
- bholley 6y agoI led the Stylo project to integrate Servo's CSS engine into Firefox as part of project Quantum [1]. I have the utmost respect for the engineers on the Servo team, and am sad to see them go (though I am certain they will have no shortage of opportunities as to what to work on next). Servo had two major roles within Mozilla - as an incubator for novel browser technology we wanted to ship in Firefox, and more recently, as a lighter-weight vehicle for Mixed Reality products. The latter has been the focus for the last three years, and those products now appear to be winding down. But the former was a huge success - both Servo's parallel CSS engine and its GPU-based graphics layer are now shipping in Firefox. While it seems unlikely that Mozilla will continue to prototype things in Servo, we're still building lots of innovative technology (and writing lots of Rust code) directly in Firefox. A few of the teams have blogged recently about the work they're doing [2] [3], and I'd encourage anyone interested to check it out. The Servo team accomplished a ton and left its ongoing mark on the Web. These changes are tough for everyone within Mozilla, but are not indicative of any change in strategy for Firefox. Gecko is alive and well, and there are no plans to switch to Blink. [1] https://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html https://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html [2] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/ https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/ [3] https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/ https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoMy understanding is that everyone who knew how Layout 2020 worked was fired, and therefore the project to integrate it into Firefox is effectively dead, meaning Firefox has no plausible way to compete with LayoutNG. I am not trying to be provocative, but that is pretty hard to reconcile with your statement.
- bholley 6y agoRespectfully: The Firefox layout team did not have a plan to integrate Layout 2020 (we hadn't yet found a way to ship it incrementally), and doing so was never the basis of our strategy to compete with LayoutNG.
- 6y ago
- krick 6y agoA follow-up question. Does it affect the future of Rust as well? What about it?
- kunfuu 6y agoHow hard is it to turn Servo into a project funded by mass small donations?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoSeems like a lot of people are conflating Gecko and Servo. Servo is not the engine used in Firefox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)#Relationship_to_Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)#Relationship_...
- The_rationalist 6y agoHere's how Servo could have been saved one year ago. https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026
- The_rationalist 6y agoI bet that spidermonkey cost more than Servo and yet manage to be a net negative utility to firefox the product. Servo has improved the state of the art of layout / css / rendering performance for gecko, even outperforming blink on some cases. Spidermonkey is consistently inferior to v8 and slow down ecmascript adoption. Therefore it would be much wiser for mozilla to switch to v8 like everybody else and to reallocate the money either towards resurrecting servo OR towards improving V8 and making it faster, which here would bring actual value to humans.
- nwah1 6y agoTheir announcement said that Mozilla is killing off a lot of development on "internal tools." I thought that meant things like Bugzilla or MDN. No reason to slave away on MDN when others have so much resources. But I had no idea they'd kill something so core to their future browser development. I strongly disagree with this decision. They might as well kill gecko too, if there's no exciting future anymore. Samsung had invested in the past, so hopefully they or someone else will pick up where Mozilla left off. I do think that Mozilla should slowly try to reduce the amount of unique processes that they have. Part of what made servo so successful is that they did all the development on GitHub. Mozilla should have a top level corporate policy to transition away from all their nonstandard internal tools. Get rid of Mach, Bugzilla, Mercurial, etc. They should use GitLab or GitHub, switch to cmake, and some standard third party build service, and be done with it. Their productivity would increase, their community contributions would increase, and their overhead would decrease. But they should not have cut their DevTools, and should have actually beefed up the developer-friendliness. Compete with Electron. Compete with PhantomJS. Improve the experience of Progressive Web Apps on mobile. The focus on new products makes sense. I think Lockwise, Monitor, and their VPN service were all good efforts. Firefox Sync should ideally expand more into a whole suite of integrated services stop their zero-knowledge privacy-first architecture. Storage, backups, OwnCloud integration, etc. Maybe they should even acquire OwnCloud or NextCloud.
- historyremade 6y agoGood luck Rust Retards. Rewrite gone wrong. Downvote as you wish. Propaganda Machine would die. Don't dare to replace C++ but you might well replace ugly C
- sirffuzzylogik 6y agoEveryone seems to be blaming the "bad" (relatively, I personally don't believe that) performance of FF on Gecko. But is that the case? Isn't it mostly because of many websites relying heavily on JS while V8 is much faster than SpiderMonkey? I have been following Phoronix benchmarks for years and where Chrome shines seems to always be on JS benchmarks. Given that Gecko is probably not the bottleneck, I would consider the decision of halting the project not a bad one. Servo delivered tons of amazing things already, it is a clear success. Maybe Mozilla should consider using V8? After all, losing SpiderMonkey might not be that bad, there is enough "competitors".
- melbourne_mat 6y agoIt's always been a dumb idea to make yet another rendering engine. For the same reason that Firefox is sliding slowly but surely into obscurity: the web works best in Chrome, like it or not. I'm sure the team working on it are talented but I can't imagine any commercial company picking this up for any reason.
- c-smile 6y agoBrowser (shall I say the browser?), from "thin client on top of OS" became "web client on top of thin OS that just needed to run the thing". And indeed, zipped Chromium sources are of 1.4 Gb and Linux kernel is of 0.2 Gb - 7 times less. Volume of features that "we" (or rather "they") want to see in browsers and so complexity of browsers reached point of no return I think. From now and on only state actors will be able to finance development of another new browser. I do not think that any private pure product company now is able to develop modern browser sustainably. Either we (users) shall pay to the company for it or the company shall sell telemetry, user's data, influence user choice, etc. to get money for that from FAANG & Co. And that is exactly what happens now with Mozilla. What to do? The solution could be in drastically limiting the scope of browser. Indeed, 95% of sites and users just need basic HTML/CSS/JS features. The only thing that needs to be added is what I name as WebVM - virtual machine a la JavaVM or .NET "VM" with DOM and CSSOM exposed in it as primitives. So if you want to add new CSS, HTML feature or to support new script language then you can provide corresponding loadable .class (bytecodes) file. I mean: compact base (bootstrap) implementation + VM/runtime to extend this thing. All other features can be developed independently by teams who need them for their users and cases. All those WebGL, WebAsm, rarely used CSS effects and HTML features ... 95% of us do not need them - why do we need to pay the price for these features? If someone will need them - fine, design and load them into WebVM. As an example, I (+ 3more devs) can transform my Sciter (https://sciter.com https://sciter.com, 0.02 Gb zipped sources) into such bootstrap browser in 6-9 months. And so can do other teams. Sigh. 10 years ago we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when we disabled ActiveX, Java, etc. Instead we should actually develop WebVM and so to move web tech development out of big companies and Central Comity of the Web.
- aleksjess 6y agoHello Hacker News, OP on GitHub here. I was absolutely gutted to hear about Mozilla's "reductions" (I hate such euphemisms), perhaps even worse for the Web is abandoning Servo... Which I wanted to find out whether that's the case.
- sjwmozilla 6y agoI hope a few people from firefox drop their technical roles and take up leadership in a new foundation whose sole goal is n oss firefox fork. If linux is there without any company, surely firefox can be too?
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoJust make a browser that supports the bare minimum. DRM, web USB, all that bullshit. Leave it to Google. Yes, people will use flock to Chrome for Netflix, but don't confuse Netflix with The (open) Internet.
- Farstuv 6y agoIntroduction to English Literature️https://alloldpepperspk.blogspot.com https://alloldpepperspk.blogspot.com