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

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

#61

Post by blub »

Mozilla's decision makes a lot of economic sense. They got rid of projects requiring lots of engineering effort with negligible benefits for the company or for the internet or for our privacy.

I'm not sure at this point if it makes sense for them to keep the Firefox code base or give up, switch to Chromium and focus on what they do best - spy less on us than Google. When Microsoft gave up anyone paying attention knew this was coming.

The only company that can still afford to develop a Chromium competitor is Apple. I hope they're not forced by the masses of web developers to switch to Chromium too.

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

#62

Post by terrortrain »

dclusin wrote: post #53
protomyth wrote: post #32

Firefox doesn't have the developer tools that Chrome does so developers use Chrome to develop with meaning their websites work better in Chrome so Firefox is playing catch-up or just plain looks worse keeping adoption of Firefox lower. Mozilla solves the problem by killing development of developer tools insuring Firefox is an afterthought. Is there anyone in Mozilla management that has a technical bone in their body?

Firefox has development tools? Is there certain features that are missing? Because you can bring up a dev console and inspect elements and such. Genuine question from a not full-time frontend developer, not being snarky.

Firefox has dev tools, and they are very similar for basic things.

There are some differences with some of the more advanced dev tools.

I like both

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

#63

Post by lol768 »

protomyth wrote: post #32

Firefox doesn't have the developer tools that Chrome does so developers use Chrome to develop with meaning their websites work better in Chrome so Firefox is playing catch-up or just plain looks worse keeping adoption of Firefox lower. Mozilla solves the problem by killing development of developer tools insuring Firefox is an afterthought. Is there anyone in Mozilla management that has a technical bone in their body?

Not saying I agree with the lay-offs here, but it's incredibly rare I find myself wishing I was using Chrome's developer tools whilst doing web development.

I have missed functionality when I've had to use Chrome though - like Edit & Re-send for network requests, copy as cURL (which arrived a few years later to Chrome), the accessibility inspector (which is not Lighthouse), services like https://profiler.firefox.com/ etc

I think the only thing I have found that Chrome sometimes performs better on is source maps and breakpoints in prettified code.

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

#64

Post by protomyth »

ce4 wrote: post #57
protomyth wrote: post #32

Firefox doesn't have the developer tools that Chrome does so developers use Chrome to develop with meaning their websites work better in Chrome so Firefox is playing catch-up or just plain looks worse keeping adoption of Firefox lower. Mozilla solves the problem by killing development of developer tools insuring Firefox is an afterthought. Is there anyone in Mozilla management that has a technical bone in their body?

Are you suggesting that they should eat cake instead? Honestly I don't know how dire Mozilla's situation is, but I would not assume it was unwarranted.

Are you suggesting that they should eat cake instead?

I'm not sure what you mean. I think capableweb had the best suggestion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24144625

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

#65

Post by ChrisSD »

yulaow wrote: post #23
ChrisSD wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understood the exact opposite, that they are moving out from the "focus on the firefox browser" mantra because it is not a competitive strategy anymore and they want instead to find and build new products.

They need to find a build new products to actually make a decent income. Firefox alone doesn't do that. They are still committed to the core browser.

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

#66

Post by benibela »

poletopole wrote: post #35
coreblocks wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to put your eggs in Swift! :)

I learned Swift several years back, but didn't see myself using it until SwiftUI came to be. I have my fingers crossed for RustUI.

I use Pascal

With Lazarus is has a cross platform Desktop GUI

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

#67

Post by liminal »

protomyth wrote: post #32

Firefox doesn't have the developer tools that Chrome does so developers use Chrome to develop with meaning their websites work better in Chrome so Firefox is playing catch-up or just plain looks worse keeping adoption of Firefox lower. Mozilla solves the problem by killing development of developer tools insuring Firefox is an afterthought. Is there anyone in Mozilla management that has a technical bone in their body?

And I had just started switching to FF for their dev tools. Call stacks would collapse unnecessary rows (looking at you, rxjs), and the changes view for CSS were both great

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

#69

Post by blub »

fs111 wrote: post #9

What is actually left of mozilla after this?

The projects which are essential for Mozilla. These were all side-projects which maybe a FAANG can afford, but not a normal company.

Mozilla was operating a long time under the mistaken assumption that they're a tech powerhouse when they're obviously not. You can lie to yourself only for so long before the market corrects your assumptions the hard way.

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

#70

Post by Someone »

est31 wrote: post #42
burtonator wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN community is going to hate on me for this but it's partially their own fault for spending money trying to differentiate in the browser. They should just focus on Chromium. It's going to win anyway. Mozilla has a small market share percentage and eventually the gap is going to be large enough they will have to abandon the FF code base anyway. It's looking like they're going to focus more on the consumer market…

> Google can do evil things with Chrome but Chromium is Open Source - it can always be forked. It takes more to maintain a Chromium competitor than its source code. You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web. If Google decided to close the source code in 2030, nobody would be able to do anything about it. Mozilla would have laid off its last engineers by 2025 and they'd have found n…

Because of its heritage (it’s a fork of WebKit, and thus started out as KHTML, which is LGPL licensed), I don’t think the Chromium code can be closed easily.

They probably can split it and gradually replace most real functionality into a separate closed source part, like they did with Android, but that will take time.

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