[WastingMyTime89]

It was far obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started. The decision to port WebRender came more or less at the same time when it was decided that Servo, which had a great velocity at that point, would focus on VR and AR usage.

It wasn't too hard to read between the lines for what was happening especially considering how political Mozilla is from the inside. The decision to stop the project some time later wasn't much of a surprise from then on.

[steveklabnik]

I don't mean to wade into the question if the strategy with Servo was good or bad or anything like that, but

> It was far obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started.

While many people believed that Servo would be a total re-write of the browser, a new clean slate project, everyone involved was very clear from the very beginning that it was not.

See slide 3 of the presentation that introduced Rust and Servo inside of Mozilla: http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf

> We are not “rewriting the browser”. That's impossible. Put down the gun.

[orra]

> It was far [from] obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started.

I don't know why you're so surprised. Creating a browser rendering engine with full feature parity is an absolutely gigantic project. Of course successful modules were merged into Gecko.

> Servo, which had a great velocity at that point, would focus on VR and AR usage.

Mozilla doesn't have the same financial clout as Google. Of course Mozilla wanted a way to monetise Servo. R&D is great but they can't spend on R&D indefinitely.

[WastingMyTime89]

> Creating a browser rendering engine with full feature parity is an absolutely gigantic project.

So? Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding. They could have bet on it rather than chose to die a slow death while their money trickles to their highly pay executive team.

> Of course Mozilla wanted a way to monetise Servo. R&D is great but they can't spend on R&D indefinitely.

If that’s what they were looking for, that’s retrospectively an extremely poor decision. There was no money in VR. The issue with Mozilla management is that they have been so consistently terrible you never know if they are genuinely malicious or just completely inept.

I generally feel little sympathy for Mozilla. They killed all their interesting projects, squandered money in dubious half-assed investments and managed to make themselves hard to deal with as a community member through a combination of weird rigidity and repeated communication mismanagement.

I would be very happy to see Servo find a new lease on life however. That’s what great R&D looks like.

[camgunz]

> I generally feel little sympathy for Mozilla.

I see this take a lot in Mozilla-ish threads, and at this point it just reads to me a lot like backseat driving. I think real critiques of Mozilla take the form of companies like Vivaldi, Opera, The Browser Company, Brave, Mighty, Synth, Sidekick, etc. I'm not doing a "put up or shut up" thing; I always think people have the right to critique and discuss. I'm just saying there's a difference between substantive and non-substantive critiques, and most of the anti-Mozilla stuff I see now seems like the former.

> Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding.

Honestly I'm not that excited by Servo. It's geek-cool that they're able to leverage Rust and build a browser engine that maybe doesn't have memory error vulns and can better take advantage of multiple CPU cores, but I'm yawning just typing that out. By the time they're done we'll have the metaverse.

[WastingMyTime89]

> like backseat driving

It’s not backseat driving to criticise the driver who just crashed their vehicle into the wall.

> most of the anti-Mozilla stuff I see now seems like the former.

Sadly I did have to interact with Mozilla in the past decade. I wish I didn’t honestly. It goes a long way to explain why they have no momentum anymore as far as I’m concerned.

[TuringTest]

Possibly. But thanks to Wolvic, there's a chance that the metaverse will be built on top of Servo ;-)

[camgunz]

Heh, I would be delighted to eat my words this way

[Calavar]

> So? Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding. They could have bet on it rather than chose to die a slow death while their money trickles to their highly pay executive team.

Mozilla/Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape, which failed precisely because they tried to do a complete rewrite of their browser engine. With that in mind, it's not too surprising that they would want to backport features to Gecko.

[WastingMyTime89]

Netscape was killed by AOL culture in the same way Firefox died of Mozilla culture. Who could have guessed? The same management team led to the same end result.