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I was really disappointed to see Mozilla drop Servo and I think it was the wrong decision for them to make, but seeing this take mere hours after seeing people

I was really disappointed to see Mozilla drop Servo and I think it was the wrong decision for them to make, but seeing this take mere hours after seeing people in a thread about Android Firefox bashing Mozilla for prioritizing a rewrite of their mobile browser is certainly some whiplash. And to a certain extent, I get it, I also think Servo was a more valuable project than Fenec. But let's not pretend that there's an obvious correct answer to "should Mozilla rewrite its browsers from scratch?" Again, I say this as someone who wanted Mozilla to stick with Servo. It was a bad decision for them to drop it, I think there was a lot more value that could have been extracted from the project. But if Mozilla had stuck with Servo, I guarantee there would be people on HN right now saying, "why are they rewriting their browser engine, the current one works fine, why aren't they doing X? Shows a lot about their priorities. This is the problem with Mozilla, they're too focused on theory and engineering projects instead of just shipping a good browser." There's no winning.

fabrice_d 3y ago
> I think there was a lot more value that could have been extracted from the project What exactly? They extracted the 2 pieces that worked better than the existing gecko stack (Stylo and WebRender). I'm a big fan (and small contributor) to Servo, but it's far behind on anything else (layout, networking, security, web api support...).
- danShumway 3y ago
  On a small level, I think that some of the areas it's behind on (security, layout) might have eventually turned out to be improvements. Stylo and WebRender were behind Firefox when they first began development as well, they were experiments to see if Rust could enable differing patterns. I personally think those experiments would have been useful to try and replicate for layout at the very least, although I don't know for sure if they would have yielded fruit. On a bigger level, I think having a more easily embeddedable Firefox could change the dynamics around V8 and Chromium could end up being pretty important for the health of the web overall, including the health of Firefox. There's an argument to be made here that none of that potential is gone because, hey, Servo is still being developed. But I think it could have gone faster with Mozilla's support behind it for longer, I think they would have served as an effective advertising/hype engine behind the technology. I think the dominance of Chromium for embedded applications does influence how developers approach the web in some minor ways. On a really out-there level, I would like to see HTML-like interfaces proliferate in more apps, and Servo in particular has a very modular approach that could make it more feasible to bring in the DOM without bringing in languages like Javascript (yes, manipulation and events and all that stuff would need to be accessible without JS, but... it's certainly easier than it would be with Chromium, Stylo already makes some interesting applications possible). If I had to pick a company to push that effort that I didn't thing would horribly mess it up, Mozilla would be high on my list. And I vaguely maybe suspect that pulling more browser technologies out of the web could open up more technical fields and niches for Mozilla to get its hands into. Right now what that area mostly looks like is Electron or embedded Chromium. At most you have embedded JS engines like V8. I'm hoping that there's some potential to do more interesting things, and I think it could have been valuable to Mozilla and it could have increased developer investment/mindshare if Mozilla was a bigger player in those areas. But that's just my instinct, maybe I'm wrong.

fabrice_d 3y ago

> I think there was a lot more value that could have been extracted from the project What exactly? They extracted the 2 pieces that worked better than the existing gecko stack (Stylo and WebRender). I'm a big fan (and small contributor) to Servo, but it's far behind on anything else (layout, networking, security, web api support...).

danShumway 3y ago
On a small level, I think that some of the areas it's behind on (security, layout) might have eventually turned out to be improvements. Stylo and WebRender were behind Firefox when they first began development as well, they were experiments to see if Rust could enable differing patterns. I personally think those experiments would have been useful to try and replicate for layout at the very least, although I don't know for sure if they would have yielded fruit. On a bigger level, I think having a more easily embeddedable Firefox could change the dynamics around V8 and Chromium could end up being pretty important for the health of the web overall, including the health of Firefox. There's an argument to be made here that none of that potential is gone because, hey, Servo is still being developed. But I think it could have gone faster with Mozilla's support behind it for longer, I think they would have served as an effective advertising/hype engine behind the technology. I think the dominance of Chromium for embedded applications does influence how developers approach the web in some minor ways. On a really out-there level, I would like to see HTML-like interfaces proliferate in more apps, and Servo in particular has a very modular approach that could make it more feasible to bring in the DOM without bringing in languages like Javascript (yes, manipulation and events and all that stuff would need to be accessible without JS, but... it's certainly easier than it would be with Chromium, Stylo already makes some interesting applications possible). If I had to pick a company to push that effort that I didn't thing would horribly mess it up, Mozilla would be high on my list. And I vaguely maybe suspect that pulling more browser technologies out of the web could open up more technical fields and niches for Mozilla to get its hands into. Right now what that area mostly looks like is Electron or embedded Chromium. At most you have embedded JS engines like V8. I'm hoping that there's some potential to do more interesting things, and I think it could have been valuable to Mozilla and it could have increased developer investment/mindshare if Mozilla was a bigger player in those areas. But that's just my instinct, maybe I'm wrong.