[HN Gopher] Servo Engine contributions this year
___________________________________________________________________
Servo Engine contributions this year
Author : maverick74
Score : 220 points
Date : 2021-07-01 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| draw_down wrote:
| What are its dependents? Or is it mostly used as a reference
| implementation still?
| thrower123 wrote:
| The key dates here to look at would be August 10, 2020 to now
|
| https://twitter.com/directhex/status/1293352458308198401
| kunagi7 wrote:
| There's a really sharp drop after August 2020. It looks like
| the former devs increased their activity a bit in February-
| March of 2021 but after that is almost flat.
|
| A browser engine is something way too big to sustain by
| hobbyists or as a side job. Most of small user base browsers
| are Chromium derivatives, WebKit wrappers (iOS). There's forks
| of Firefox like Waterfox or Palemoon which end up slowly
| getting behind in features or security implementations.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Set up a foundation. Set up a patreon or create another funding
| source. Hire developers. Congrats you saved servo
|
| (Ps this is how Mozilla started)
|
| Edit: lol how is this possibly downvoted? This is both a
| constructive and informational post. Absolute state
| slver wrote:
| If Mozilla no longer plans to move forward with it and use it,
| it's dead. Nothing can save it. So what does it mean "don't let
| it die". I mean are bunch of people supposed to develop a modern
| browser engine on the side as a hobby or something? That's
| hilarious considering even MICROSOFT couldn't keep up, and
| switched to Chromium.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| It's not that MS couldn't. I am sure they have the resources,
| had they really wanted to. But they just didn't see the
| incentive since their own browser, IE, was well and truly dead.
| Capturing the market again starting from level zero just wasn't
| attractive enough. Instead Chromium offered them the best of
| both worlds. No need to do the grunt work, but they can now
| still bundle their browser with their OS and try to grab usage
| share from Chrome and Firefox, by offering the added
| attractions of deep OS integration and installed by default. If
| Edge ever become a serious competitor to Chrome then MS's
| influence within the Chromium project and web standards will
| become bigger and bigger, serving as a soft obstacle against
| absolute Google monopoly. They also always have the option to
| maintain more and more parts of the Chromium code base
| independently.
| tester756 wrote:
| What do you mean by "couldn't keep up"?
|
| Edge (old) felt totally usable and some say that outperformed
| at 4K watching its competitors
|
| I don't think they couldn't keep up from tech standpoint
| slver wrote:
| By keep up I mean in terms of standards.
|
| Edge was always usable, but you'll always get second-grade
| experience if apps switch to the "fallback mode" on your
| browser.
|
| Google is playing this game of quickly introducing standards
| they're already implementing in Chrome, and choking out the
| competition. And it worked with Microsoft. Worked with Opera.
|
| Firefox is last man standing.
| jsnell wrote:
| The usage of Safari is 3-5x that of Firefox.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Safari and Firefox are increasingly on the same page and
| flat out refuse to implement Chrome's non-standards (see,
| e.g. https://webapicontroversy.com).
|
| It's Safari and Firefox as the last competing browsers
| standing, and Firefox is increasingly irrelevant.
| Whatever your opinion of Safari is, soon it will be the
| only browser trying to resist Chrome. And judging by the
| amount of new "standards" Chrome ships enabled by default
| with each release, Google couldn't care less about Safari
| either.
| [deleted]
| CameronNemo wrote:
| 1. Why? Firefox is good and polished for my use cases. What does
| Servo offer that Firefox does not?
|
| 2. How? Browsers are complicated, and I'm not sure I would be a
| help as a contributor. What can I do?
| pohl wrote:
| In a way, #2 answers #1. Even if the only benefit of oxidizing
| subsystems in Firefox was to lower the barrier to entry for
| contributors, it would still be worth it.
|
| To answer #2, though, a good way is to search through the
| issues by the GitHub labels that mark easier issues to tackle:
|
| https://github.com/servo/servo/labels?q=E-
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Some history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)
|
| Mozilla implemented some of the stable parts of Servo in Gecko,
| but abandoned the project in 2020 and handed its governance over
| to the Linux Foundation. It's been in maintenance mode since.
| liminal wrote:
| It was never clear to me if Servo was delivering on its promises.
| Does it deliver significantly better performance than Gecko or
| Blink? Is the benefit from a cleaner architecture and easier
| developer experience? Despite that, I was very hopeful that Servo
| would come through and be all that and more. But then they
| started focusing on weird tangential stuff like VR rendering and
| it felt like it had been managed into irrelevance in that way
| Mozilla seems to do for so many projects (e.g. FirefoxOS). I was
| also sad when MS chose Chrome over FF. I probably care too much,
| but these tools are our interface to a lot of the world's
| information.
| FreeFull wrote:
| A bunch of code originally developed for Servo has ended up in
| Gecko, so it at least has definitely been useful as a testing
| ground.
| Darmody wrote:
| I don't think Mozilla cares anymore.
|
| To me, all they do is look busy and try to milk the cow until it
| dies.
|
| I still use Firefox on all my devices and I don't plan to change
| but I don't see them even wanting to offer something good.
| [deleted]
| The_rationalist wrote:
| See also this prescient issue
| https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026
| sandstrom wrote:
| Continuing an open source project that used to be sponsored (paid
| developers) as a non-sponsored project is always very hard. The
| code base, project structure, automated tests, etc. is all sized
| for a certain number of developers. When 90% of them are gone
| it'll be hard to keep up.
|
| Feels somewhat similar to the faith of RethinkDB, which was an
| awesome database in many regards, but it was difficult to keep
| the steam up after the sponsoring company shut down.
|
| https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/graphs/contributors
|
| One thing that may work, is if Servo tries to carve out a very
| narrow niche, much smaller than just "general browser", where
| they are unique and useful.
|
| Take embedding as an example. If Servo became a great choice for
| embedding (similar to WebViews, Electron or maybe as an "engine"
| to Electron), where there is usually a single set of CSS and
| Javascript that it's expected to run (basically a bundled app),
| the downsides of Servo not supporting all Web APIs, or not
| handling all edge cases, is reduced. Basically, if it runs your
| code, that's enough.
|
| So it'll become "useful" (regardless of where you put the bar for
| useful) earlier in an embedding context, compared to it becoming
| useful as a general browser.
|
| Should it catch on as a tool for embedding, that would drive more
| usage and more contributions, which would be a beneficial circle.
|
| But this niche could also be something entirely different, of
| course, I'm not sure embedding is the one.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > Take embedding as an example. If Servo became a great choice
| for embedding (similar to WebViews, Electron or maybe as an
| "engine" to Electron), where there is usually a single set of
| CSS and Javascript that it's expected to run (basically a
| bundled app), the downsides of Servo not supporting all Web
| APIs, or not handling all edge cases, is reduced. Basically, if
| it runs your code, that's enough.
|
| Could also become a way to do proof of concept new DOM ideas if
| the API allows for custom tags, JS features, etc.
|
| I would love to see a company backing Servo that isn't Mozilla
| considering all the downfalls of Mozilla with funding their
| amazing projects. Their biggest legacy is Rust atm and they're
| missing out lots of opportunities: paid for IDE with RAD
| capabilities, certificates for Rust, and many more that could
| more than fund: Mozilla Firefox, Servo, and Rust itself.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > I would love to see a company backing Servo that isn't
| Mozilla considering all the downfalls of Mozilla with funding
| their amazing projects. Their biggest legacy is Rust atm and
| they're missing out lots of opportunities: paid for IDE with
| RAD capabilities, certificates for Rust, and many more that
| could more than fund: Mozilla Firefox, Servo, and Rust
| itself.
|
| At the moment I can't really say if Mozilla management
|
| - considers themselves paid by Google to run Firefox into the
| ground and give it an honest attempt
|
| - or if they are just clueless
|
| - or if I am clueless.
|
| Sad to say all the three above seems realistic at the monent.
| arp242 wrote:
| At the very least it needs a better plan than "don't let it
| die".
|
| An exception to what you're saying is Blender by the way, the
| early (open source) history is a bit sketchy beyond the
| EUR100,000 they raised to get the rights (in 2002, well before
| Kickstarter "crowdfunding"), but I always had the impression
| what they did right was focus on funding for full-time devs
| right from the start.
|
| Blender in general is a great open source success story
| probably not told often enough, probably because 3D is
| something most of us never really do. It's probably worth
| examining what they did right in some more detail.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I've always felt like a big part of Blender was having an
| interface that's awesome for power-users, but that's unusable
| without training. Then have a foundation that offers said
| training (some free, some paid), and from that money pay
| development, outreach and showcases (Blender Open Movies).
|
| It's a somewhat unique (and likely unintentional) model that
| worked because the competition was very expensive, but it has
| also prevents Blender from being more than a niche product.
| dantondwa wrote:
| That changed with Blender 2.80, which was an incredibly
| successful achievement. I'd say the interface is one of the
| most beautiful and pleasant I've ever used for a pro tool.
| It really ticks every usability box and it looks damn good
| too. That's not by chance that after 2.80 Blender has been
| getting more and more momentum. The amount of features that
| are packed into each point release would constitute a major
| release in other paid suites. So, yeah, the Blender future
| is bright and I wish more opensource software managed to
| replicate their success. I know Krita is following in their
| footsteps, and also successfully.
|
| Perhaps a Patreon-style funding for Servo could work?
| Something similar to what the guy behind Serenity OS
| managed.
| arp242 wrote:
| I used some Blender back in the day, over 10 years ago. At
| the time, I didn't find it _too_ hard to learn and use, but
| I don 't know how much it changed since. Of course it takes
| time, but I'm not sure if it's harder than similar 3D
| modelling tools? I also tried some 3D max and Lightroom in
| those days and they weren't exactly easy to use either. I
| mean, these are tools aimed at 3D artists (professional or
| amateur) and very much expert tools never designed to be
| used by "the average Joe".
| ichik wrote:
| UI that's incomprehensible even to the people of closely
| related professions is more or less the norm for
| 3D-modelling software. Blender is not even the worst, there
| are lots of pretty expensive commercial editors out there
| that are worse (take a look at ZBrush for example).
| [deleted]
| ianbicking wrote:
| FWIW this is exactly the reasoning behind shifting Servo to VR
| (where it lived until the VR program was also cancelled), with
| the idea it could target somewhat bespoke environments where
| developers could design around any missing functionality.
|
| It's very possible that if they picked a niche besides VR that
| it could have worked, or could work still, but it doesn't feel
| like good odds...
| andybak wrote:
| We still really need a good cross-platform VR browser.
| Firefox Reality is still the only decent browser for some
| headsets.
|
| Another niche would be a browser that can embed nicely in
| Unity apps. I need one right now and there's no decent open
| source option other than a poorly maintained and fiddly servo
| distribution/port (I can't remember which). A bit of polish
| there would go a long way.
| devit wrote:
| I think it should be used to make a pure-Rust Tor Browser,
| since Rust memory safety is essential to preserve anonymity and
| there are already expectations that full web functionality
| isn't be available.
| phkahler wrote:
| Completely agree. Be 100 percent of what some small set of
| users needs and you will have a small happy user base which may
| lead to some new contributors. Do 95 percent of what a lot of
| people need and you will have zero users that are completely
| satisfied and they will all use something else.
|
| Then look for use cases that are 95 percent complete and work
| on that last 5 percent. Then you've got a second set of happy
| users.
|
| Taking this same approach with an intern at work. He's there
| for 9-10 weeks. We have an ancient piece of software that
| requires ancient hardware to run. I told him to make a
| replacement good enough for one specific guy to use full time.
| If we can eliminate one users dependence on the old junk it
| will still save hardware costs, and after the intern is gone,
| I'll be able to do incremental improvements for the other users
| until it gets done. Without that one user, there will be zero
| incentive to maintain it after my intern is gone.
|
| What minimal use-cases does servo handle well today?
| krmboya wrote:
| I guess it goes back to 'scratching an itch' when it comes to
| hobby contributions to open source. It's easy to contribute to
| something that solves one's own problems - and if the
| maintainer abandons it, someone else can fork and maintain it
| to fulfill their need.
|
| But for projects set up by corporations, geared towards large
| scale problems, it would be difficult to keep them alive by
| random drive-by contributions from individual contributors.
|
| Maybe what might save Servo is a company seeing a business
| opportunity by using it, like what happened with Firefox OS, or
| perhaps being adopted as something like a research project at a
| University department.
| stuaxo wrote:
| This is true, and could keep it going while it builds momentum.
|
| I was thinking the same thing about an embedded browser.
|
| Embedding in places where speed is needed but accommodations
| could be made where things are incomplete could work too, i.e.
| in games or rendering UX for video or music programs.
| jakearmitage wrote:
| The problem is that embedding servo is not that easy. This is
| the only info I found on it:
|
| https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example
|
| And it is a 4-year old example.
|
| This, from the same author, is also abandoned:
| https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-api
|
| https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/18479
|
| I don't think that embedding is their focus at all, although it
| does sound like a killer feature to keep the project alive.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Embedding really could help - there is really not much choice
| now for reasonably modern embedded engine.
|
| Most of the website forks are AFAIK not very maintained,
| chromium/blink is hard to build and massive and Gecko basically
| has no embedding interface whatsoever.
|
| So a reasonably complete modern web engine that is reasonably
| easy to compile and has a stable embedding API could be very
| welcome.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > So a reasonably complete modern web engine that is
| reasonably easy to compile and has a stable embedding API
| could be very welcome.
|
| Depends on what you mean by "reasonably modern". Sciter could
| be just what you need: https://sciter.com
| jakearmitage wrote:
| I still have nightmares from when I had to integrate CEF with
| a game engine.
| dman wrote:
| Excellent take!
| juancampa wrote:
| I hope someone picks up Servo for some sort of "Web Lite"
| project. A hypothetical subset of the web that is saner than what
| we have today.
| _hl_ wrote:
| Aren't parts of servo still part of Firefox, and hence those
| parts will continue to be maintained within the context of
| Firefox?
| dralley wrote:
| Yes, Stylo and WebRender are still maintained by Firefox team.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Mozilla seems to be having their plate full just keeping Firefox
| in running with Chromium and Safari, at least as a distant, but
| still alive, third. And slowly falling further behind. I'm coming
| across more than a few sites which are subtly broken in Firefox,
| something that virtually never happened all these years.
|
| It is sad that they have not managed to become the Linux of web
| browsers, though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to
| Firefox, getting less relevant by the year.
|
| There was a window of several years during which you could almost
| believe free/open source software would really dominate the
| world, but instead it has been co-opted into providing the
| infrastructure layer while consumer facing software and devices
| have become more locked down, black boxes than ever before.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > I'm coming across more than a few sites which are subtly
| broken in Firefox, something that virtually never happened all
| these years.
|
| At a prior organization, I was there when they dropped support
| for Firefox. Basically got one bug report too many that was
| Firefox only and at that point the few users were just told to
| switch to Chrome. The small market share is accelerating its
| demise.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Having Mozilla structured so that the money coming in doesn't
| go to developing the browser seems like a massive mistake.
| wyager wrote:
| While I have not done substantive research myself, I have heard
| a number of personal complaints from (current and former)
| Mozilla people that very little of their funding actually goes
| to working on the core projects (like Firefox or Servo). They
| seem to have the same problem as Wikimedia where as they got
| more money, they spent an increasingly large fraction of it on
| bullshit outside the scope of their original purpose, hiring
| non-technical people (who are basically impossible to get rid
| of later on), etc. It's much easier to downsize R&D than to
| downsize HR.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > as they got more money, they spent an increasingly large
| fraction of it on bullshit outside the scope of their
| original purpose
|
| Is Rust bullshit? This organization beat Microsoft to create
| the modern open web, then developed Rust. That's pretty good
| so far.
| ianbicking wrote:
| Rust is cool, but it didn't advance Mozilla's mission.
| eitland wrote:
| Mozilla thinks their mission is something else than the
| worlds only true free modern browser.
|
| For them Firefox is only an income stream to fund their
| distractions^H actual mission.
| ajot wrote:
| > They seem to have the same problem as Wikimedia where as
| they got more money, they spent an increasingly large
| fraction of it on bullshit outside the scope of their
| original purpose
|
| Maybe it's time to ditch the traditional donations system to
| a per-feature donation. You could even make a policy that,
| say, 10% of the money of every donation goes to the
| foundation to use as they please, but the other 90% goes to
| the development of the specific product/feature.
|
| We need to fins other governance+funding ways for our IT non-
| profits, or we will keep having this same problem.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > Mozilla seems to be having their plate full just keeping
| Firefox in running with Chromium and Safari, at least as a
| distant, but still alive, third. And slowly falling further
| behind.
|
| If we're talking about the dwindling user base then yes, but if
| it's about falling behind technologically then it's Safari that
| is a distant third.
|
| Safari is the new Internet Explorer. Everyone has to support it
| due to its user base (which is most likely why you don't see
| many sites breaking under it), but at least from my own
| experience it's the most feature incomplete, buggy browser out
| there, and it takes the most amount of work to support.
|
| It's now a regular occurrence for me that I test something in
| Chromium and Firefox, and it works on both, but it's broken on
| Safari.
| arp242 wrote:
| It's never been clear to me what "web standards" actually
| cause all these difficulties in the first place. A lot of the
| foundational stuff hasn't actually changed all _that_ much.
|
| As an experiment, I downloaded Opera 12.16 from 2013 (the
| last Presto-based version), and it works better than you'd
| might expect. The biggest issue is that lots of https
| requests fail because it only supports outdated versions (it
| does support TLS 1.1 and 1.2 in the settings, disabled by
| default, but enabling that doesn't seem to have much effect).
|
| There are a few things that don't render correct: cnn.com
| because of incomplete flexbox support, as well as some stuff
| their CSS minimizer does that Opera doesn't seem to like.
| GitHub doesn't really work correct mostly because CSS
| variables aren't recognized (it does render mostly okay, just
| without colours and such), and the JS doesn't work as Opera
| doesn't support const.
|
| I couldn't test stuff like gmail, fastmail, slack, etc. due
| to the TLS issues, and various other sites I tested all run
| in to JS problems because of const, arrow functions, and
| similar small issues. It's certainly not usable, but overall,
| it's not bad for an 8 year old browser with a long-dead
| rendering engine.
|
| Maybe I'll run a proxy to fix the TLS issues and filter out
| some of the basic JS issues and see what happens then.
|
| I will say, it's _slow_. This is also an issue with fairly
| simple sites, like HN, old.reddit.com, lobste.rs, etc. Not
| sure what 's up with that, I think it's related to network
| requests, as it significantly speeds up when stuff's cached.
|
| Clearly it needs significant work to be useful, but from the
| look of things I expect that actually, it would be an
| entirely doable project by a not-too-large dev team to bring
| Presto up to at least Safari-level in a reasonable amount of
| time.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Safari is the new Internet Explorer.
|
| It's not.
|
| > but if it's about falling behind technologically then it's
| Safari that is a distant third.
|
| You mean, Safari and FF are very close to each other, and
| Chrome is running away with chrome-only non-standards:
| https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
| wongarsu wrote:
| And just like Internet Explorer, you need a specific
| operating system to even test against Safari. Just that it's
| even worse, considering the relative market shares of Windows
| vs Mac (outside of Silicon Valley startups)
| CameronNemo wrote:
| You can test on other WebKit browsers, but yeah that is not
| a perfect replacement.
| bwindels wrote:
| Gnome web has proven a great replacement for me, to
| reproduce safari specific bugs.
| gosukiwi wrote:
| Or use BrowserStack, but it's really slow and not free
| eitland wrote:
| > And just like Internet Explorer, you need a specific
| operating system to even test against Safari.
|
| That's actually the only good reason I've seen for why
| Safari is the new IE.
|
| Chrome however is the new IE. I'll explain:
|
| - IE was technologically somewhat superior at its time,
| just like Chrome is now.
|
| - Only that when the competition was truly crushed,
| Microsoft couldn't justify spending money on it anymore.
|
| - The same will happen with Chrome as well only this time
| they will manage to find resources to kill adblocking
| first. _... for our safety, of course_
| imbnwa wrote:
| Manifest v3 is a year away currently, so not much time
| left
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| >though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to Firefox,
| getting less relevant by the year.
|
| It seems like Linux on desktop has never been more popular
| according to these sites:
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
|
| https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
|
| It's not surprising either, considering all of the ads and
| metrics collection Microsoft has added into windows recently.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Whether Linux on the desktop is relevant in general also
| depends on the relevance of the desktop itself.
|
| If you conclude that desktop is getting less relevant (as I
| think parent alluded to in the last paragraph), then its
| improvement within the segment doesn't need to be sufficient.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yeah, desktop Linux isn't losing any (or gaining much)
| marketshare. Firefox went from having more than half the
| market to being a rounding error.
| akie wrote:
| And we're all worse off because of it.
| danpattn wrote:
| I've been using Linux for 7 years. It has never been better
| than it is now and every year the alternatives look worse and
| worse. I honestly get sick every time I try to use Windows.
| The ads and dark patterns are glaringly apparent once you are
| used to Linux desktops.
| gosukiwi wrote:
| > though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to Firefox,
| getting less relevant by the year.
|
| Well... If you count WSL as Linux in the desktop, then I think
| it's doing quite well, but yeah.
| heidar wrote:
| Maybe modern web is the real problem here?
|
| The fact you need a large team of paid engineers just to keep up
| with whatever features big-tech is adding to their spyware
| browsers is probably not a great situation to be in.
| wyager wrote:
| Of course the modern web is the real problem. It's one of the
| worst application platforms ever invented, despite also being
| the single most popular.
| vinkelhake wrote:
| It's also one of the best. I'm working on a little game in my
| spare time. It's built on this platform that you consider to
| be one of the worst ever invented. If I want people to try it
| out, I just give them a link and they're in the game in
| _seconds_.
|
| There's no other application platform that comes even
| remotely close to that.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I was already doing that with Flash 15 years ago.
| wongarsu wrote:
| If I was a cynic then I would say that Google is very happy
| with adding more features to keep the circle of viable browser
| engines as small as possible, while simultaneously
| "accidentally" adding more and more ways to track users.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Josh is still doing amazing work. What does he need to hit -10
| million?
| kzrdude wrote:
| Servo was good and contributed a lot to firefox and Rust
| dathinab wrote:
| Its still alive?
|
| I'm surprised as as far as I can tell it's "to big" in relation
| to it's benefits to (likely) be fully hobby maintained and
| currently not supported directly or indirectly by any company.
| zack6849 wrote:
| isn't Mozilla involved in this still? I know they WERE
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Mozilla either reassigned or laid off all engineers working
| on Servo, you can see when they did it in the graph.
| erk__ wrote:
| I think it is a Linux Foundation project now and Mozilla does
| not have any formal involvement
| postalrat wrote:
| Too big for rust?
| Y_Y wrote:
| So what's a good way to contribute money or code or time?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| You can checkout servo.org for details: For money visit
| https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo
|
| For time and code: https://github.com/servo/servo
| brundolf wrote:
| I think it's dead unless Mozilla changes its mind or some other
| company decides to take up the mantle. I doubt an open-source
| project this ambitious can survive without paid maintainers. And
| then on top of that, a whole lot of institutional knowledge has
| been suddenly scattered to the winds.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Software is never alive nor dead. The question is if it can
| keep up with the moving target of modern web standards, or if
| it can even provide limited compatibility.
| johnjj257 wrote:
| Yea and if it can't it's essentially dead...
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Again, it was never alive and it cannot be dead. It is
| software.
|
| It will probably always pass ACID 3.
| vfclists wrote:
| Mozilla management have never been honest about their desires
| and motives for Firefox.
|
| How can an organization created by venture capitalists which
| depends on Google for most of its income commit itself to
| challenging Google?
| vfclists wrote:
| How do these downvotes arrive so fast?
|
| HN is clearly a forum where big companies have their guys
| monitoring to downvote an adverse opinions.
|
| I ought to join lobster.
| ianbicking wrote:
| I worked at Mozilla for a long time and this interpretation
| is simply not true.
|
| Servo does not, even if finished, turn into a self-supporting
| product. Keeping Gecko going already is a huge challenge for
| Mozilla.
|
| I don't have a lot of faith in Mozilla leadership's ability
| to compete, but it's certainly not that they don't want to
| try to compete.
| rank0 wrote:
| What is your honest opinion of the management there? And
| what do you make of OPs statement about reliance on funding
| from google?
|
| I'm genuinely curious
| ianbicking wrote:
| Everyone has to walk on eggshells around anything that
| might affect the Google search deal, but that's mostly
| it. If anything the Google money is resented, even though
| it also funds everything.
|
| IMHO leadership always lacked imagination around Firefox,
| and never had the fortitude to back any alternate
| investment enough for it to succeed.
|
| More generally I wrote a blog post with my
| interpretation:
| https://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2020/11/firefox-was-
| always-e...
| IshKebab wrote:
| You're being downvoted because you're airing an uncomfortable
| truth. Deep down they know you are right but they don't want
| to admit it so they downvote you.
|
| It's a natural human trait; I doubt Lobster is any better.
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