[leeoniya]

> Filling that list out is not a higher priority for the Mozilla staff over getting the stuff done we need to experiment with delivering the web on VR & AR devices.

This is extremely disappointing.

I think the amount of users you can win back from Chrome with a Servo browser is much larger than any VR audience you can hope to gain in the near future. I simply don't understand how these things cannot be done in parallel. Mozilla has hundreds of millions in cashflow, right?

Looks like Servo will be another exciting Mozilla project that will be prematurely dropped after a ton of work and hype-up. RIP Firefox OS, Persona, Thunderbird, etc... :(

[Manishearth]

> I think the amount of users you can win back from Chrome with a Servo browser is much larger than any VR audience you can hope to gain in the near future.

A Servo browser product is not possible in the near future. That is very much a far future thing. Web compatibility is hard.

Servo has a lot more potential in platforms where you don't need to support the _entire_ set of browser features -- like as an electron replacement, or a platform for something like webVR, or Android embedding (which will probably come out of the VR work as well).

[leeoniya]

> A Servo browser product is not possible in the near future. That is very much a far future thing.

and an impossibly far future if the Servo team is now refocused on VR, no? how likely is it that these hard problems will be solved by fewer engineer-hours?

perhaps there's some external backer willing to bankroll VR and Servo is just an easy expense to curtail.

[Manishearth]

You still need webcompat for VR stuff.

Focusing on VR means that we may not be working on some kinds of webcompat things (the standard example is "IE6 table layout quirks") but there's plenty of webcompat work that needs to be done otherwise.

Yes, not everyone will be working on webcompat, but this has never been the case anyway.

[leeoniya]

> (the standard example is "IE6 table layout quirks")

if a new browser in 2019 could not properly render an archived 1996 Geocities webpage at time of launch, i don't think many users would care or even notice. there are almost certainly legacy bugs in Firefox that have been open for over a decade with little activity and yet it's in production.

[Manishearth]

It's not just old sites that depend on these quirks.

Seriously, web compat is very tricky.

[sitkack]

So it is about team velocity vs standards compliance? I know the Servo team isn't large enough to make a whole new browser from scratch.

[Manishearth]

I'm not sure what you mean by team velocity.

We're still working on standards compliance, but we may focus more on the bits that are actually useful within VR.

[sitkack]

> team velocity

Having folks spending months implementing the corner cases of standard might not researching and finding creative ways to use Rust to implement large systems.

Standards compliance probably follows some exponential curve wrt energy and results.

[woah]

Why do they keep doing this?