[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 [2] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/ [3] 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.

[oscargrouch]

I tend to be more on your side of the fence and remain skeptical.

And something that may be used as evidence for my skepticism, is why instead of firing those people, where we know a lot of them are pretty good ones, they did not relocate them instead?

Even if we suppose, they decided to not invest in things that are not considered pragmatic, more to the core of Mozilla... Even if some of them were working coding in Rust for instance.. why dont they just shut down the projects that they considered 'fancy' and relocate those amazing engineers to work into core parts?

For me it smells like something is rot on the top level, and that in turn, will lead to more bad decisions in the coming years, unless something really radical happens (Microsoft did it, so theres hope).

Edit: one more evidence that the things are somehow rot, is that money going to pay for ads (and this is exactly the path taken by Yahoo)

[staticassertion]

I feel very similarly. This isn't just boneheaded project management, that would be simply killing great projects. Firing huge amounts of top tier talent is absolutely another story altogether.

[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.

[fabrice_d]

2 of the people working on Layout 2020 (out of 3 afaik) are French employees, so haven't been fired yet. They may or may not be depending on how the negotiations between the management and employee representatives go.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> we're still building lots of innovative technology (and writing lots of Rust code) directly in Firefox

If those are really long term high priority goals of Mozilla, it seems that keeping the team around that has probably the most experience doing this anywhere on the planet (building innovative browser functionality in Rust) would be a good idea, even if the Servo project as an incubator was no longer a priority.

Surely, their talent and team cohesion and the team’s collective expertise could have been put to use writing Rust features directly for Firefox.

[LockAndLol]

> Gecko is alive and well, and there are no plans to switch to Blink.

Gecko seems to be tightly bound to Firefox. Are there any plans on decoupling that and making it easily embeddable for other projects? Even MDN doesn't seem to have up to date documentation on that [0].

I purport that allowing easy embedding will allow more people to play around with Gecko, discover wildly different classes of bugs, contribute code in order to add improvements and fix bugs that they discover while embedding the project.

Given a more visible and active community around Gecko, Microsoft might've even switched to Gecko, but that's just a wild guess.

0: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Gecko...

[untog]

GeckoView is pretty up to date:

https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/

It’s also pretty huge though. And Apple won’t let you embed it in an iOS app. So there are limits.

[LockAndLol]

Yep, I'm talking about the equivalent for non-mobile / the original Gecko. The "embedding Gecko" documentation I posted before says "original last update 2002". That's pretty bad.

[The_rationalist]

Looking at the stylo integration on bugzilla was beautiful, I looked at it on my free time and it was always a pleasure

[aleksjess]

> These changes are tough for everyone within Mozilla, but are not indicative of any change in strategy for Firefox.

Seems to me the strategy is now to survive, more than anything else. So it did change, didn't it?

[_8j50]

I remember the goal was to replace gecko. A good webkit alternative is desparately needed on the web, a shame mozilla didn't see it through.

[kibwen]

As someone who has been following Servo since 2011, the stakeholders have always emphatically reiterated that the goal was not to outright replace Gecko.

[_8j50]

Don't know how I missed that then. I remember building the early alpha versions and using servo to visit sites and I was surprised it worked that well for a fairly new rust project.

[bholley]

We made the decision several years ago to integrate Servo components individually rather than trying to replace the entire engine (for the reasons outpost in the blog post linked above).

We invest a lot in Gecko though, precisely because it's important to have a world-class independent engine.

[_8j50]

It performs very poorly when there is a lot of DOM content and js manipulation (think a kibana search+visual) and FF is notorious about memory exploitation. I was hoping replacing everything with rust code would be a start. A rewritr of gecko in rust at least. I don't have any workload at all that works better on FF and many of the ones I need to work smoothly don't.

But I completely understand why you wouldn't want to "boil the ocean". That said, I hope you appreciate how much support FF has from users. Anyone of us left using are doing so by paying a price for it. Everything else mozilla does appears like distracting side-quests. I would not care much about donating for wikipedia but if Mozilla focused on their flagship product more I would be happy to contribute both financially and through bug reports and grunt work PR's.

We live on the ocean and browsers are our ship.