[__s]

Nicholas Nethercote didn't just speed up Rust. He went in & did the dirty work of dredging through Firefox profiling

> It’s rare that a single micro-optimization is a big deal, but dozens and dozens of them are. Persistence is key

Persistence is work. Mozilla is cutting the people who put in the work of staving off bitrot

[nnethercote]

Thank you for the kind words.

To clarify: I am still at Mozilla! But I will be working fully on Firefox for the foreseeable future. I have edited the opening paragraph of the post to make this clearer.

[qzw]

Rust's loss is Firefox's gain. I'm sorry to see you leave your Rust work, but I think Mozilla is right to have their best engineers focus on their core product. If we hope to see Firefox survive and remain relevant, then Mozilla really needed to refocus their energies onto it. Also, I assume someone of Nicholas's caliber has a great deal of agency over their own career path, so perhaps a return to Firefox is not entirely unwelcomed by him.

[Ygg2]

I'd honestly rather see Rust survive, than Mozilla. Mozilla is few years away from going Blink, and on deathbed.

Rust is up and coming language.

[pedrocr]

While I'd begrudgingly agree the two are not independent. I moved back to Firefox from Chrome exactly because Firefox became once again performance competitive thanks to Quantum. Most (all?) the big Firefox improvements were integrations of Rust code pioneered in servo. The only chance I see for Firefox is doubling down on that and replacing more and more components with those Rust rewrites. If not for that I don't see Firefox remaining competitive with Chrome for long.

[Ygg2]

Didn't Mozilla like fire all of their Rust devs? There is no plans for supporting Rust in Firefox AFAIK.

[steveklabnik]

There already is Rust in Firefox and has been for years.

[dividedbyzero]

I'd like to see Mozilla focus on Firefox, so that there it remains a viable alternative to Blink-based browsers for as long as possible. I think that may yet become really important as the effects of the incredible dominance of Google in the WWW become more apparent.

I'd also like to see the Rust ecosystem prosper, but I guess others can take up the slack, it is gaining considerable momentum and quite a few places are looking into it, or using it already. If that isn't possible, is there much hope for it anyway?

[exmozilla]

Glad you're still there. I had 10 years of time with Mozilla but was let go with the layoffs. First contribution was 20 years ago. From the folks I still stay in touch with morale is at an all time low but I hope Firefox recovers.

[__s]

Glad to hear, as someone who continues to use Firefox it's reassuring to know we'll continue to benefit from your skills

[agumonkey]

I still remember your blog entries about chasing memory use in firefox before quantum :)