
What's the future of Servo? - theBashShell
https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/27575
======
jgraham
I'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
That'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)

~~~
Brakenshire
What 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
No 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.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is terrible advice. It would mean that Google, by controlling Chromium,
has complete and unchallenged ownership of the Web. You are suggesting one of
Google's last remaining competitors in the space just fold and go home. At
that point, we might as well literally just unplug everything and call the
Internet experiment over.

Do. Not. Use. Chromium.

~~~
stingraycharles
Well there’s still Safari, but I agree, it’s looking terrible for the open
internet right now.

~~~
hvis
Safari is still more or less the same engine as Chrome. Even after the fork.

~~~
esprehn
The internals of Chrome and Safari have diverged dramatically since the fork
(which was 7 years ago).

Chrome has done multiple huge projects that changed how things work at a
fundamental level like Oilpan (using a C++ garbage collector), LayoutNG (a
full rewrite of the layout part of the engine from the ground up), Slimming
Paint (a full rewrite of the compositing and painting system), and Site
Isolation.

Blink and WebKit are pretty different engines with very different behavior,
bugs, and performance characteristics.

------
bholley
I 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
My 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
Respectfully: 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.

~~~
Jweb_Guru
Then what _is_ your strategy to compete with LayoutNG? A concrete roadmap
would be a lot more useful than platitudes about how great the Servo team is,
which everyone already knows. Nobody seems to know what the future of Firefox
looks like, or at least I'm having a hard time finding that information. I
don't know about other people, but I would find such a thing much more
reassuring.

~~~
wwright
I think it’s worth noting that no engineer at Mozilla owes anything to us as
the public, especially not this week.

------
danilocesar
I 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.

~~~
padraic7a
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.

[https://ubports.com/](https://ubports.com/)

~~~
WoodenChair
> 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.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
>Do you consider getting no major OEM adoption in 5 years “fairly strong?”

'No major OEM adoption' is partly the USP for manufacturers like Pine
Phone[1], if they are able to build sustainable business then they would be
fine(From the looks of it, it seem they know what they are doing).

[1][https://store.pine64.org/](https://store.pine64.org/)

~~~
efreak
Pine is not a major OEM. Even if they build a sustainable business, that won't
make them one.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
I said 'Not being a major OEM' is one of their USP.

------
EwanToo
I 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.

~~~
stingraycharles
NLnet 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
I'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.

------
lykahb
In 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
Didn't they just revamp Edge with Chromium? Why would they want to revamp it
again with an engine that barely has a market share.

~~~
staticassertion
Sure. At the same time, is it really smart for them to just completely abandon
the idea of independence?

There's a _lot_ that a browser can do for a company. Google has built GSuite
and ChromeOS around Chrome - the integration with the browser is absurd and
_right up Microsoft 's alley_.

Microsoft could build Azure Active Directory, O365, Windows, etc, around a
next gen browser and I think they'd be smart to do so.

~~~
treis
> Sure. At the same time, is it really smart for them to just completely
> abandon the idea of independence?

It is. Chrome is so dominant at this point they're the de facto web standard.
Other browsers have to put in significant effort just to play catch up and
can't really offer any new renderer/js feature without Chrome's blessing.

Plus, we have a decade's worth of evidence that Chromium is just flat out
better than the competition. Even if we set aside the problems with market
share the Chromium team has consistently put out a faster engine than Firefox
or IE.

Adopting Chromium allows you to (mostly) avoid putting effort into the
rendering engine allowing you to focus on other features to differentiate
yourself.

~~~
staticassertion
> Other browsers have to put in significant effort just to play catch up and
> can't really offer any new renderer/js feature without Chrome's blessing.

Microsoft still runs the dominant operating system! They have a huge
opportunity here to complete. The same way Chrome advertises on Google.com,
Microsoft can provide _the default fucking browser_ that is HUGE.

> Plus, we have a decade's worth of evidence that Chromium

Chrome is 12 years old. It's been super popular for less than a decade.

Its multiprocess architecture, by far its most long term scalable feature, was
behind Internet Explorer's (they started multiproc trend with, iirc, IE8).

> Even if we set aside the problems with market share the Chromium team has
> consistently put out a faster engine than Firefox or IE.

Acquire Servo, do better? That's my entire point.

~~~
treis
>Microsoft still runs the dominant operating system! They have a huge
opportunity here to complete. The same way Chrome advertises on Google.com,
Microsoft can provide the default fucking browser that is HUGE.

They've had that advantage since Chrome came out. Didn't stop them from losing
almost all their market share.

>Its multiprocess architecture, by far its most long term scalable feature,
was behind Internet Explorer's (they started multiproc trend with, iirc, IE8).

Chrome has been technologically ahead of IE since it came out.

>Acquire Servo, do better? That's my entire point.

Why do we think Servo will be better?

~~~
staticassertion
> They've had that advantage since Chrome came out. Didn't stop them from
> losing almost all their market share.

Absolutely. But it certainly is a huge benefit to them.

> Chrome has been technologically ahead of IE since it came out.

No doubt, in a number of ways that's certainly true. IE needs to compete on
tech.

> Why do we think Servo will be better?

Because it solves real problems for browsers - security and performance, in a
more than incremental way.

~~~
fomine3
So they developed Edge (pre-chromium) but still losing shares for some reason.
IMO previous Edge's engine(EdgeHTML) wasn't bad but GUI is bad. I remembered
that D&D support was added to Edge after a few years from release.

------
MatekCopatek
What'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?

~~~
aquova
To jump on this, what is the scope of Servo anymore? It was originally
supposed to eventually replace Gecko, but last I heard they had shifted to
simply moving the more stable parts into Firefox with Quantum. What is the end
goal of the project now, even before the recent layoffs?

~~~
dathinab
I think it kinda didn't had an end goal anymore.

They had detected the most profitable improvements and moved them over to
Firefox.

So I'm not really surprised about them not continuing servo, even though it
had been grate.

I'm more worried about some of the other layoff.

Further it feels a bit like they got in a place where they financially
couldn't go on like before and fanned out to get more revenue streams but if
that fails we might be down to chrome + safari, which would be horrible, tbh.

If it really comes to that we might even want to try to push the EU to get
financially involved or something.

~~~
dthul
Someone on Twitter mentioned Servo's "Layout 2020" project which would have
ensured that Firefox's layout engine stays competitive:
[https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020](https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020)

~~~
Brakenshire
A parallel layout engine would be a hugely important change for the web. Would
mean the possibility of changing or animating layout relevant properties
(which is almost all of them) without recalculating the entire page. This is
the most important limitation for web UIs.

------
guerrilla
My 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.

~~~
vbezhenar
What about other websites? Are they usable (even if slightly broken)?

~~~
guerrilla
Actually 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
I'm torn between "so, same as on any browser" and "surely that's a feature" as
a response to this :D

------
robotmay
Are 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
indeed

------
MR4D
I 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
The 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
But 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.

------
chronogram
[https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960](https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960)

Seems like it’s a community project now.

~~~
toweringgoat
When 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
Not 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
Honestly, 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?

~~~
est31
Note that some of the Rust volunteers still get temporary contracts with
Mozilla to realize big features. So not everything that was contributed by
non-Mozilla employees was done so without Mozilla money.

------
nwah1
Their 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.

------
qwerty456127
Right 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.

------
dmitryminkovsky
If 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
It 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
Can't believe it.

------
umanwizard
The servo team has been (either mostly or entirely, I’m not sure) laid off, so
presumably the project is dead.

~~~
coldtea
Mozilla 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)?

~~~
toweringgoat
Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary.
You need a CEO, and Bay Area salaries are high.

Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no experience will
easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla, who IME pay a bit less). A plain
manager of a 10-person team at a big bay area company will be earning close to
500k (and most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k range).
Then you get your principal and distinguished engineers who can easily make 1M
per year. 2.5M for someone leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and
you do need _someone_ to lead that company - to make tose strategic decisions.

You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made the right
decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're also in a tough environment
- maybe their CEO could be making better decisions that would boost usage - or
maybe usage is entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person
leading the company. And you need to retain them.

And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.

~~~
coldtea
> _Oh come on, let 's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he
> salary. You need a CEO_

Citation needed.

> _But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain
> them._

I don't even need / want a company. I want the non-profit organization I was
promised, with community leading, and perhaps 1-2 BDFLs to make the final
decisions.

Linux did well without a CEO...

~~~
the_why_of_y
AFAIK a non-profit can't make the kind of search engine deal that generates
the vast majority of Mozilla's income, and currently funds Gecko development.

------
monadic2
Welp there goes like 90% of the optimism about the future of the web.

------
tanilama
There is a push to this project since like 4 days ago...pretty telling itself.

------
melbourne_mat
It'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.

------
X6S1x6Okd1st
Seems 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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_\(software\)#Relationship_to_Firefox)

------
brundolf
One 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.

~~~
zozbot234
Iceweasel is a thing already, isn't it?

~~~
brundolf
There are several well-known forks already. But what we need is a community
focal-point, where everyone who thinks to themselves, "it's a shame what
Mozilla did, I want to help", ends up directing that energy into the same
place.

------
masklinn
Servo being gone is sad, SRT being gone is terrifying.

------
mpsq
Everyone 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".

------
c-smile
Browser (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.

------
Ygg2
Damn, I want to support Servo. Where do I throw my allowance on them?

------
darksaints
How 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
Where's the money in that?

~~~
darksaints
The same place that Mozilla finds it: by making deals with search providers.

~~~
est31
Why would you fork Firefox instead of Chromium which has better website
compatibility?

~~~
yepthatsreality
Ecosystem 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
The 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.

~~~
yepthatsreality
And they make money from a Chromium based browser how?

------
aleksjess
Hello 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.

------
krick
A follow-up question. Does it affect the future of Rust as well? What about
it?

------
The_rationalist
I 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.

------
kunfuu
How hard is it to turn Servo into a project funded by mass small donations?

------
The_rationalist
Here's how Servo could have been saved one year ago.
[https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026](https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026)

------
dindresto
How will Servo be affected by the Mozilla layoffs?

~~~
dang
This 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.

------
mojomark
Why 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?

------
oscargrouch
I 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. _

~~~
cherrycherry98
I think there's some truth to this. Mozilla has become less of a technology
organization and more of a political one.

There have been quite a few instances over the past few years of Mozilla
demonstrating its left leaning politics:

* The Brendan Eich situation where his private contribution to a conservative cause impacted his employment

* Baker calling a former conservative employee's views "traumatic and damaging" in their obituary - [https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...](https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-markham/)

* The removal of "meritocracy" from the governance document in the name of D&I - [https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-meritocracy/)

* Promoting BLM and anti-racism content via Pocket and their homepage

* Replacing "master password" with "primary password" \- [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replacing-master-password)

Agree with their positions or not, they are definitely alienating to some.
Even if just delivering a great browser and getting people to use it is not
their primary mission (and it's not directly if you've ever read the Mozilla
Manifesto), it is the means by which they retain the ability pursue those
goals.

Recall Michael Jordan's reason for staying away from politics, "Republicans
buy sneakers too".

~~~
burnte
> * Baker calling a former conservative employee's views "traumatic and
> damaging" in their obituary -
> [https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-
> gerva...](https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva..).

She went a little far in what she said publically, but she wasn't wrong. I
knew Gerv from very early on. He was a convert to christianity and as most
converts, was vehement in it's absolute correctness to the detriment of his
relationships. But, when you think you have an absolute truth of life after
death on your side, people become a secondary concern.

> * Promoting BLM and anti-racism content via Pocket and their homepage

So, I will admit that I don't see there being any valid stance besides being
against racism, and for treating all human life with value.

~~~
reitzensteinm
If somebody is toxic enough that you'd criticize them in an obituary, you
should not allow them to keep working for your organization. It's really that
simple.

~~~
burnte
I don't disagree.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Sorry, I was reading defensiveness into your comment that apparently wasn't
there.

