I feel like Mozilla is going to join the annals of history with the likes of Xerox in the category of "Companies that created the technology of the future and casually tossed it to the wayside for competitors to scoop up" with Rust and Servo.
It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then...decided it wasn't worth pursuing any further.
Mozilla is nothing like Xerox, if anything Google is the new Xerox: they have way too much money so they throw it at R&D side projects without a business plan.
The big one for Google is transformer models, they basically invented LLMs only to play catchup with OpenAI later.
Mozilla successes have always been focused on the web browser, from the very beginning. Even the name reflects that: "Mozilla" stands for "Mosaic killer", Mosaic was the leading web browser at the time. They beat Mosaic with Netscape, they beat IE with Firefox, beating Chrome was their mission, and Rust and Servo were their weapons. It is sad that they dropped the ball.
Like Xerox (and Google), Mozilla tried doing some side projects, but unlike Xerox, they didn't have money to burn from their quasi-monopolies, and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect.
> […] and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect.
I’m sure Rust started out as something intended to help with their browser work. But it became a general purpose programming language pretty early, right? I think it is… working pretty hard to find a reason to not include Rust as a innovative, non-browser piece of tech.
Anyway, I don’t really think it detracts from your broader point to count Rust as a separate thing from the browser.
> But it became a general purpose programming language pretty early, right?
IMO what we've seen learnt from ChromeOS and later their stab at firefox OS is the merit in treating the browser as the system. For that there was a lot of wisdom in making rust that capable. Seeing oxide make their stack is incredibly validating.
> It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then...decided it wasn't worth pursuing any further.
Google has been Mozilla's main source of revenue since around 2006. For Mozilla to exist, all they have to do is keep Google happy.
It's kind of a nice deal for Mozilla, despite being a huge conflict of interest.
And it's an even better deal for Google. "But look, Chrome is not a monopoly."
If I was Google, I'd do something to set Mozilla back on that track. But oh well, Google these days is even more dysfunctional. They're about to lose search.
Mozilla is over. They put all their eggs in the Google basket, and soon they’ll lose that. They have no viable path forward.
Servo and Ladybird are the future. I’m astounded by how quickly Ladybird is proceeding, with far fewer people than Mozilla. It’s been inspiring to see what that project is doing.
Honestly, dumping gecko would be a suicide for Firefox. Much of Firefox's minuscule userbase consists of knowledgeable nerds who are holdouts from the Blink monoculture.
Using WebKit (even JavaScriptCore) and working with Apple wouldn't be the worst thing to my eyes as a Firefox/FOSS user. Duopoly isn't great but it's better than a monopoly.
So start replacing bits of Blink with Rust, instead of bits of Gecko.
Maybe their primary addressable market is nerds, but I guarantee more people quit using Firefox because of websites not working correctly or Google's marketing than because of any of the things that HN loves to complain about.
It is difficult to get people to pay for it. People happily pay for 10€ beer but asked ”friends” about how to bypass WhatsApp’s 0,99 lifetime licenses.
I'm not tracking what's currently going on with the underwater portion of frontend iceberg. Are things still like it was in late '00s and early '10s, where browsers still had plenty of their unique implementation quirks and non-standard features, and plenty of sites were relying on those?
Back in the day, it was not entirely unheard of having two significantly different frontend implementations - one for IE, another for Netscape, with quite unhealthy amounts of parser hacks to hide code from the browsers.
Possibly naively, but I think it's not that bad nowadays? (At least it wasn't so in late '10s.) Some things are Chrome-only, or Apple-only, but I rarely see "not supported in your browser" - the majority of features is generally standards compliant, and all those newcomer engine problems (like in the article) are mostly because there's a lot to implement.
It is not about what is supported now, but what will be supported in the future? Google is pushing most of the web standards and has a huge influence. Other, less used browsers must support them if they want to have any chance.
You should ask that how many of the standard features are brought by someone else without huge influence of Google. If you cannot get anything new, when it is enough that Google says "no", then in reality there is only one browser.
They don’t. Most of the common web developers do what the managers and users require. Otherwise you are not providing value and using your time efficiently.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who will pay for it even though its being given away for free. Maybe not enough to replace the income from google but its worth a shot trying a fund raising drive.
> These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
Servo would not have been some dramatic revolution in browser technology. It would have done the same thing browser engines currently do, but maybe a little faster and with a couple less security issues per year.
It's dishonest to compare that to "the technology of the future", especially when nobody chooses their browser based on whether a page loads in 82ms or 70ms. They mostly choose browsers based on familiarity and marketing and what's preinstalled. Chrome is fast enough for most people that they're not gonna switch just because their dweeb nephew mentioned some other browser might be marginally faster.
And they didn't toss Rust aside either. New bits of Firefox continue to be written in Rust to this day. That was actually the primary reason Servo was dropped - the bits of the browser engine that could be replaced with Servo bits easily had already been replaced. Rewriting Gecko slowly was deemed more practical than committing to 5+ years of parallel development and hoping that by the end it would be possible to replace millions of lines of Gecko code in one fell swoop.
Mozilla doesn't deserve to survive. New players deserve our support, like servo and ladybird.
Even with an enormous budget from Google (500M, I think per year) they managed to ruin everything, including Firefox, the thing bringing them those 500M.
To me it looks as if Baker is an undercover person put there to sabotage Mozilla. Tldr: funded by Google, made absolutely everything in her power to run it into the ground
Unlike historical examples like Stephen Elop that moved from Microsoft to Nokia and buried their mobile division only to return to Microsoft, Mitchell Baker was with Mozilla since the start.
I'm not sure about that. Baker was one of the first Netscape employees, she literally helped found the Mozilla foundation, and she served as the first president of it.
I'm not saying she has done a good job, but a lot of the early Netscape people like Brendan Eich have done nothing but sing her praises.
If we take a look at the results, I'm not convinced she is a good guy just because she was there at the beginning. There is a chart with her salary going up and Firefox usage going down. Looks like an X.
If anything, how come she didn't make it a success on the very limited market?
Even if she wasn't a bad actor in the beginning, she could have changed her opinion and be seduced by the money.
Just for comparison: a few people made a completely new engine in a few years. Task often thought as impossible (they had 200k USD for the start). Mozilla started servo, then when they saw its going well, decided to abandon it?
So what was Mozilla spending the money on? Many have requested the ability to donate for Firefox development, but it was never allowed: they (she?) wanted to distribute the donation money on things they thought were important?
For years they made decisions that the uses hated. How else to explain this?
It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then...decided it wasn't worth pursuing any further.