I'm not/wasn't a member of the Servo team, but have collaborated with them, and if you get the opportunity to work with them I cannot recommend it highly enough.
They have the kind of deep technical knowledge and ability to solve challenging problems you'd expect from a research group, coupled with the skills to make pragmatic tradeoffs and fix the complex real world problems needed to ship software. More than that, they are one of the most welcoming and friendly teams I ever worked with. The culture they created allowed them to take inexperienced new contributors and quickly ramp them up to a place where they were confident to solve challenging problems. Working in that environment and seeing what's possible has really raised my bar for workplace culture and mentorship.
What absolute nonsense, Servo was the most important thing Mozilla was doing. If Mozilla isn’t making the most promising and competitive investments in its browser (e.g. parallel layout) what is it for? The Quantum project, which is tied to Servo, is the only reason Firefox is still competitive.
No it really wasn't. Nobody except tech geeks care about Servo. What Mozilla needs to do is to provide a privacy aware browser that doesn't inform Google (and everyone else) about everything we do online. They can easily go the path Microsoft took and use Chromium as engine. Had they focused on that, I think they would be in a much better position than they are now (wasting millions on projects like Servo and Rust). Don't get me wrong... I love Servo and Rust, but from a business perspective it's suicide.
This is short sighted. Browsers live and die on their performance benchmarks and security track records. Like it or don’t, “nobody but tech geeks” actually care about privacy.
The problem is that of understanding, and of finding cause and effect.
I know a few people who have been victims of identity theft. After hearing their stories, it was clear to me that it would not have happened if companies weren't tracking them and selling their personal data left and right.
But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to accept identity theft as "something that just happens sometimes", even though it makes them very angry, frustrated, anxious, and eats up a lot of time and sometimes money. I think they do this because it's hard to point to one culprit as the cause, and so it feels like an intractable problem.
If people could actually understand that their lack of privacy protections on the internet (and elsewhere) is one of the main factors in enabling things like identity theft, there would be more people who would affirmatively care about privacy.
I'm not sure how to get people to make that intuitive leap on a large enough scale for it to matter, though. You're very right that people mainly care about browser performance (I'd even argue they don't care about security that much, though certainly more than they care about privacy); I know several people who definitely know better and understand privacy issues on the internet, but still use Chrome because "Firefox is slow on macOS" or something.
> But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to accept identity theft as "something that just happens sometimes"
A little like the way people talk about "cyber warfare".
In real warfare, the enemy can attack your forces no matter what you do.
In cyber warfare, you can build impenetrable defences. The only way the enemy can attack you successfully is if you make a mistake.
This kind of thinking IMO is perpetuated by absurd tv shows where e.g McGee can hack into any computer system by tapping on his keyboard for a few seconds.
It's harmless on TV, but in the real world it leads to complacency about security. People saying"poor Equifax, they were attacked" instead of "Equifax's security was a joke, and they left their system wide open for anyone to plunder".
It's quite usable as-is. Not sure why it hasn't gotten much attention. It's more privacy oriented than Firefox and is faster than Firefox. I have been using it on desktop Linux for years. I tried Brave and Firefox, but they both have bloat and phone home to someone by default, unlike UG. For all the time it takes to argue back and forth about which browser should take over next, you could have installed UG and moved on with life.
Firefox has a lot of telemetry built into the default install. It has Pocket, everything you type into the search bar gets sent to Google by default, phones home to Mozilla by default, I could go on. Ungoogled Chromium doesn't do any of that. Firefox is also less secure than Chromium. If an actual malicious attacker can access my browser, that's a million times worse than any kind of concern about Google bulk collecting my data as far as I'm concerned.
This is terrible advice. It would mean that Google, by controlling Chromium, has complete and unchallenged ownership of the Web. You are suggesting one of Google's last remaining competitors in the space just fold and go home. At that point, we might as well literally just unplug everything and call the Internet experiment over.
The internals of Chrome and Safari have diverged dramatically since the fork (which was 7 years ago).
Chrome has done multiple huge projects that changed how things work at a fundamental level like Oilpan (using a C++ garbage collector), LayoutNG (a full rewrite of the layout part of the engine from the ground up), Slimming Paint (a full rewrite of the compositing and painting system), and Site Isolation.
Blink and WebKit are pretty different engines with very different behavior, bugs, and performance characteristics.
>No it really wasn't. Nobody except tech geeks care about Servo. What Mozilla needs to do is to provide a privacy aware browser that doesn't inform Google
Nobody except geeks and politically minded people care about privacy that much (if they didn't they'd already use Firefox with DDG, or Brave or at least Safari).
People do care for faster, more conventient browser -- that's why we switched from Netscape to IE (when Mozilla bloated and a for a little while IE6 was faster/better), then to Firefox, and then to Chrome.
Lots of people care about privacy if the intrusions are bad enough to notice. People really don’t like it if they search for and buy a bicycle and keep getting ads for bicycles for weeks.
>Lots of people care about privacy if the intrusions are bad enough to notice.
Well, lots but still insignifcant to make a browser market share raise. Which is not "lots" in the sense that matters. Most People value speed, convenience, features, and security over privacy.
>People really don’t like it if they search for and buy a bicycle and keep getting ads for bicycles for weeks.
Most (as in over 80% of the people) don't even use an ad blocker and could not care less. Even if they are annoyed but keeping getting those ads, they don't care enough to do anything about it, much less switch broswers.
At first I, like everyone else, downvoted this comment, because "how dare you insult my Servo!", but then immediately took my vote back and then finally was forced to upvote that, because actually I agree. In fact, it's all somehow paradoxically backwards: I liked (I guess I can safely use the past tense now) Mozilla (the company) because of Servo, and Quantum, and Rust, and amazing technical people who made it all happen, not some PR-bullshitters and lawyer-CEO. But I use Firefox (the product), simply because it's only feasible non-Google alternative out there I know, not because it's cooler or even better from the technical perspective. I don't give a fuck what engine they use, Blink and V8 are as fast as it gets. In fact, there was a time before Quantum when Firefox was actually slower than Chromium (and I'm not even sure it's different now, I just don't use it), and I used Firefox anyway. Worse than that, the only place where I actually care about engine performance is mobile, and Chrome just destroys Firefox there. And even then, I opt to use Firefox half of the time (i.e. when I don't need to google smth quickly in the middle of the conversation while moving in the crowd). I guess it's hard to imagine how somebody could use Firefox because of engine at all. It's definitely not the main selling point, by a long shot.
Edit, to summarize: it's not that performance doesn't matter, it's just that currently it's hard enough to compete with Blink & V8. And, of course, Blink becomes better precisely because there is a competition they have to fight. (It will probably become worse when Gecko/Servo/Firefox dies.) But to be that competition without having shitload of money Google has is not fun right now. It's hardly a fight you can win. Easier just to ride on Google's back and to use Blink yourself.
Eich was CEO from March 24 to April 3 of the same year. I highly doubt that was much of the problem.
Certainly losing his technical talent is likely to have contributed to the problems, but I suspect it's 100x more of Chrome's dominance and Mozilla's reliance on Google's search engine contracts for revenue.
After leaving Mozilla, he went to Brave, where they launched a privacy-focused browser which inserts affiliate codes when users visit certain websites, and which collects donations "on behalf of" content creators without actually giving the money to those content creators.
Brave does (did?) not allow creators to opt-out of donation collection and by default opts them in. This means you as a user may think you are donating to your favorite creator but in fact Brave is just holding on to the money.
> Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators.
Surely immediately after a layoff is one of the better times to get a glowing recommendation? Some recruiters (and certainly plenty of hiring managers) read HN :)
I don't want to detract from anyone's pain but I have been looking for a tech stack change, and if my main plan doesn't work out, my backup plan was to segue back into browser work via Rust. So I guess in addition to getting comfortable with the idea of having to change default browsers sometime in the next couple of years, I also need a plan C.
They have the kind of deep technical knowledge and ability to solve challenging problems you'd expect from a research group, coupled with the skills to make pragmatic tradeoffs and fix the complex real world problems needed to ship software. More than that, they are one of the most welcoming and friendly teams I ever worked with. The culture they created allowed them to take inexperienced new contributors and quickly ramp them up to a place where they were confident to solve challenging problems. Working in that environment and seeing what's possible has really raised my bar for workplace culture and mentorship.
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