With the caveat that the source is a Twitter thread, if this turns out to be true it is increasingly looking like the end of Firefox and Mozilla. Earlier today, a separate Twitter thread was posted that claimed the whole Servo team had been let go.
This is a massive blow to Internet as we know it. It will mean that WebKit / Blink will now be the de facto Internet standard. In about 5 years Blink-based browsers will be the only relevant target for web development and all remaining users will be urged to switch to Chrome/Edge/Safari or have to suffer broken sites.
With Google pushing Chromium to make life for ad blockers difficult, I would really hope an open source project for a new Blink-based privacy-respecting browser to emerge. (As far as I know the Brave Browser is financed by ads that are hard-coded in the browser.)
> With the caveat that the source is a Twitter thread, if this turns out to be true it is increasingly looking like the end of Firefox and Mozilla. Earlier today, a separate Twitter thread was posted that claimed the whole Servo team had been let go.
It's pretty clear Mozilla was never planning to have Servo completely supplant Gecko. Their approach has been to treat Servo as a research project and then fold technologies (like Rust and Quantum) into Gecko as appropriate.
Through that lens, you should ask yourself if it makes sense for Mozilla to fund an R&D effort like that given they're operating on a shoestring (especially with at least 75% of their revenues about to evaporate thanks to the Google deal not getting renewed).
I think you could argue either way, and I don't think I have a strong opinion. But I think your framing is overly hyperbolic and doesn't reflect what Servo actually was and how it fit with Mozilla's overall strategy.
Safari isn't Blink-based (though I suppose modern WebKit and Blink do share a common ancestor). I agree with the sentiment though; we're getting dangerously close to a browser engine monoculture. Not to mention Firefox is unique in that it's the only independent browser developed and controlled by a non-profit.
Because of their shared ancestry, I would assume replacing WebKit with Blink in Safari is quite easy. Once we start reaching Blink monoculture, expect Blink-only feature use on the web to sharply increase. This could mean Apple switching to use Blink for Safari as well, just like Microsoft did with IE Edge.
If we can learn anything from when IE6 reached monoculture in early 2000s (e.g. 96% market share in 2002), its development velocity sharply increased and the web site developers adopted the resulting IE-only features in abadon (stuff like XMLHttpRequest date from this era.) Some of these features were later standardized, but large swaths of the web remained IE-only for the next decade and more, even as competing browsers surpassed IE in performance and features.
I am afraid Blink development will likewise accelerate and web site developers will adopt these Blink-only features as if they were web standards. Only this time, building a competing web engine looks unlikely due to the sheer complexity to ever achieve feature parity with Blink.
This is a massive blow to Internet as we know it. It will mean that WebKit / Blink will now be the de facto Internet standard. In about 5 years Blink-based browsers will be the only relevant target for web development and all remaining users will be urged to switch to Chrome/Edge/Safari or have to suffer broken sites.
With Google pushing Chromium to make life for ad blockers difficult, I would really hope an open source project for a new Blink-based privacy-respecting browser to emerge. (As far as I know the Brave Browser is financed by ads that are hard-coded in the browser.)