"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

He just added another tweet to address this question: "Another thing to clarify: Rust, Wasmtime, and the Bytecode Alliance will all be more than fine! [...] They all have a bright future!"

Maybe Cloudflare to come to the rescue? as their Workers platform supports WASM and they use Rust in some projects.

This shows that open-source in general is expensive for Mozilla but cheap for the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google who own their own Web browsers and have other open-source programming languages maintained by some of their employees full time.

The actual reality of this is that they are still kept alive by a direct competitor for decades and haven't made anything to generate significant sources of revenue. Maybe they should turn into a Rust consultancy of some sort. I don't know.

If the mission statement is about 'privacy' then it doesn't make much sense to continue to bite the hand that feeds them as its up to Google if they want to re-new their contract with Mozilla; which unsuprisingly they had to.

They're refocussing on the user experience of the browser. They're stopping their more developer friendly endeavours and research projects such as servo.

The VPN client and Pocket are just ways to make money to fund browser development. Firefox itself does not and can not make money (and not from lack of trying). It turns out people don't want "ads", "nags" or "suggested content" in their browser.

If Mozilla can't maintain their own browser codebase that competes with Chrome now, what makes you think they'll be able to maintain a fork?

The moment they fork it and make their own changes, they are now back in the same position they were in -- a separate codebase under separate branding that needs to keep pace with Chrome.

There are two reasons forks work:

- They allow you to pull upstream changes. That's nice, but pulling upstream changes doesn't work once your codebase starts to heavily diverge from its source, so getting that benefit means you can't make changes that are too divergent from the upstream.

- They also allow you to get rid of upfront work and start from a solid base. That's also nice, but getting rid of the upfront work isn't valuable to Mozilla. Firefox is already basically on par with Chrome where most features are concerned. It's not the upfront work that's the problem, it's maintenance, advertising, and monetization.

A Mozilla fork of Chrome would be effectively the same thing as giving Google control over the entire web standards process.