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> that has no hope of replacing Gecko before it reaches 100% compatibility with a spec thousands (tens of thousands?) of lines long When Servo was still manage

> that has no hope of replacing Gecko before it reaches 100% compatibility with a spec thousands (tens of thousands?) of lines long When Servo was still managed by Mozilla, they were able to merge some components incrementally into the Firefox. Most famously, Stylo and WebRender were first developed in Servo. They could have kept Servo for experimentation and merge parts incrementally. It may also have enabled better embedding supporting which is a weak point of Firefox compared to Chrome; which is a long-term solution to remain relevant.

dralley 2y ago
I covered that. Sure, Stylo and WebRender were successful enough that they made it into Firefox, but the Layout component was very much not. Servo was in the middle of a clean-slate rewrite of the layout component because the initial architecture chosen in 2013 wasn't very good. The CSS engine and rendering engine are a lot easier to swap out than the remaining parts. Again, I get why people like Servo, but "in 10 years, maybe we'll be able to take on Electron" isn't that great of a value proposition for a huge R&D project by a company already struggling to remain relevant with their core projects.
- timschmidt 2y ago
  > "in 10 years, maybe we'll be able to take on Electron" isn't that great of a value proposition Perhaps not, but "in 10 years, we'll have a browser that's significantly faster and safer than the competition" is how you plan to still be relevant 10 years from now.
  - jokethrowaway 2y ago
    As much as I love servo and rust, you can't compete with Google and Chrome. Certainly not on performance. On safety you have a chance because bugs happen.
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      If you think Servo can't compete with Chrome on performance, please watch this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk
  - dralley 2y ago
    The browser engine is not what makes Firefox "relevant" or not. Their competitors are Apple, Google and Microsoft. The marketing budget for Chrome is larger than Mozilla's entire budget. "Google" is synonymous with the entire internet for a large fraction of the non-technical population. Every device you could buy on the market whether a PC, a tablet or a phone has one of their competitors browsers already pre-installed. Their primary leverage is unique features and functional adblockers, neither of which is impacted by the layout engine. And again, you're taking away resources from something that is already behind right now. The canonical example of massive long-term rewrites being a bad idea for the business is literally the precursor to Firefox. Gecko can be refactored in-place, including into Rust if they decided to do so.
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      > Their primary leverage is unique features and functional adblockers, neither of which is impacted by the layout engine. Yes, unique features like being written in a memory safe language and depending on memory safe implementations of image and video decode libraries are exactly what I care about in an all-knowing sandbox which touches network services and runs untrusted code on my computer. > And again, you're taking away resources from something that is already behind right now. Disagree. You're talking about every Mozilla project that's not Servo. Firefox/Servo development is Mozilla's core competency. One which they've abandoned.
      - dralley 2y ago
        >depending on memory safe implementations of image and video decode libraries are exactly what I care about in an all-knowing sandbox which touches network services and runs untrusted code on my computer. What does that have to do with Servo? Firefox has already been doing those things and continues to do them [0], they don't need to do them in Servo first. We are specifically talking about the utility of rewriting a layout engine from scratch, rather than putting more resources into evolving Gecko - including rewriting small parts of Gecko in Rust incrementally. >Disagree. You're talking about every Mozilla project that's not Servo. Firefox/Servo development is Mozilla's core competency. One which they've abandoned. They obviously haven't abandoned it. It's not like they cancelled Gecko development too and are rebasing on top of Blink. Again, this is all just a philosophical debate over whether rewrites or refactors are more effective when it comes to the most core component of the browser. [0] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064
- WD-42 2y ago
  I’m pretty sure if Firefox started beating chrome in speed benchmarks (because of a newer, more modern engine) they would be able to claw back some of their lost market share. Even normal people care about speed.
  - mook 2y ago
    That would be hard to do with Google intentionally sandbagging things like YouTube (I'm thinking about them using a nonstandard version of web components, plus a super slow shim for Firefox, instead of using the standardized version that Chrome also supported).

dralley 2y ago

I covered that. Sure, Stylo and WebRender were successful enough that they made it into Firefox, but the Layout component was very much not. Servo was in the middle of a clean-slate rewrite of the layout component because the initial architecture chosen in 2013 wasn't very good. The CSS engine and rendering engine are a lot easier to swap out than the remaining parts. Again, I get why people like Servo, but "in 10 years, maybe we'll be able to take on Electron" isn't that great of a value proposition for a huge R&D project by a company already struggling to remain relevant with their core projects.

timschmidt 2y ago
> "in 10 years, maybe we'll be able to take on Electron" isn't that great of a value proposition Perhaps not, but "in 10 years, we'll have a browser that's significantly faster and safer than the competition" is how you plan to still be relevant 10 years from now.
- jokethrowaway 2y ago
  As much as I love servo and rust, you can't compete with Google and Chrome. Certainly not on performance. On safety you have a chance because bugs happen.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    If you think Servo can't compete with Chrome on performance, please watch this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk
- dralley 2y ago
  The browser engine is not what makes Firefox "relevant" or not. Their competitors are Apple, Google and Microsoft. The marketing budget for Chrome is larger than Mozilla's entire budget. "Google" is synonymous with the entire internet for a large fraction of the non-technical population. Every device you could buy on the market whether a PC, a tablet or a phone has one of their competitors browsers already pre-installed. Their primary leverage is unique features and functional adblockers, neither of which is impacted by the layout engine. And again, you're taking away resources from something that is already behind right now. The canonical example of massive long-term rewrites being a bad idea for the business is literally the precursor to Firefox. Gecko can be refactored in-place, including into Rust if they decided to do so.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    > Their primary leverage is unique features and functional adblockers, neither of which is impacted by the layout engine. Yes, unique features like being written in a memory safe language and depending on memory safe implementations of image and video decode libraries are exactly what I care about in an all-knowing sandbox which touches network services and runs untrusted code on my computer. > And again, you're taking away resources from something that is already behind right now. Disagree. You're talking about every Mozilla project that's not Servo. Firefox/Servo development is Mozilla's core competency. One which they've abandoned.
    - dralley 2y ago
      >depending on memory safe implementations of image and video decode libraries are exactly what I care about in an all-knowing sandbox which touches network services and runs untrusted code on my computer. What does that have to do with Servo? Firefox has already been doing those things and continues to do them [0], they don't need to do them in Servo first. We are specifically talking about the utility of rewriting a layout engine from scratch, rather than putting more resources into evolving Gecko - including rewriting small parts of Gecko in Rust incrementally. >Disagree. You're talking about every Mozilla project that's not Servo. Firefox/Servo development is Mozilla's core competency. One which they've abandoned. They obviously haven't abandoned it. It's not like they cancelled Gecko development too and are rebasing on top of Blink. Again, this is all just a philosophical debate over whether rewrites or refactors are more effective when it comes to the most core component of the browser. [0] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064
WD-42 2y ago
I’m pretty sure if Firefox started beating chrome in speed benchmarks (because of a newer, more modern engine) they would be able to claw back some of their lost market share. Even normal people care about speed.
- mook 2y ago
  That would be hard to do with Google intentionally sandbagging things like YouTube (I'm thinking about them using a nonstandard version of web components, plus a super slow shim for Firefox, instead of using the standardized version that Chrome also supported).