"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by steveklabnik » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

Hi everyone, the Rust core team has been talking about making a statement on this, but I left this comment in a personal capacity yesterday:

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Mozilla employs a small number of people to work on Rust fulltime, and many of the Servo people contributed to Rust too, even if it wasn't their job. They also pay for the hosting bill for crates.io. They also own a trademark on Rust, Cargo, and the logos of both. Two people from the Rust team have posted about their situation, one was laid off and one was not. Unsure about the others. Many of the Servo folks (and possibly all, it's not 100% clear yet but it doesn't look good) have been laid off.

The vast majority of contributors and team members are non-Mozilla, though the Mozilla folk are very important. Rust will survive. This situation is very painful, and it has the possibility of being more so, but (thanks to a lot of work from people (not speaking of myself here) who used to be at Mozilla!) Rust is bigger than Mozilla, and has been on a long road towards diversification. Some other companies have stepped up to pay a bunch of the bills that Mozilla used to pay, namely Amazon and Microsoft. Here's hoping that we get even more involvement in the future.

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

#112

Post by blub » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

mvn9 wrote: post #86

portmanteaufu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deal was renewed today[1], which makes the layoffs that much more baffling. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla...

Then it was a negotiation tactic. Mozilla showed that they don't desperately need the money because they are willing to cut all expenses. Thus, Google can't play the 'take whatever we offer or you will be bankrupt in 2021'-card. Firing the developers should have led to a better deal and they can now silently rehire them back.

The old negotiation tactic of I'll chop my arm off to show you that I don't need your money.

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

#113

Post by hinkley » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

thomascgalvin wrote: post #34

rvz wrote: post #15

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…

For Apple, Microsoft, and Google, their open source activities are all loss leaders for their profitable ventures. Apple sells hardware, and most of their software offerings, like MacOS, their office suite, and Safari, and given away to convince people to buy that hardware. Also, it's not like they're spending a whole lot of time making Sarafi the best browser around. Microsoft's web browser was created (and bundled)…

This 'broken' goes all the way back to Marc Andreesen.

He leaves a publicly funded team building a web browser, starts a commercial entity, and for whatever reason they don't feel they can charge for their browser funded by private equity. You could in fact buy it in a box at the local electronics store, but with the pricing I suspect most of that money went to distribution, not NCC. So they try to find other ways to make money, like their web server and overpriced consulting (for their notoriously awful web server).

The entire dotcom era then emulated this pattern. There were certainly other logistical reasons for it (like the state of credit card billing at the time), but I can't help but feel like this was the rock that started the avalanche of adware and commercial cyberstalking.

And so here we are 25 years later, and the last remnant of Netscape is trying to build the free browser and not much to fund it. I'm kinda surprised it lasted this long.

To be fair to them though, and particularly on the topic of this story, if they were going to build a free browser, it always should have been on the community to contribute to the dev tools. It's the part of the browser that we have a vested interest in.

And in fact, it used to be that way. Firefox had no dev tools at the beginning. They copied a very popular add-on, which I now recall made absolutely no sense to me at the time. I felt like their attempt was less effective in several ways, and why are they shouldering out this tool that made them in the first place (as GP asserts, nobody develops first-class support on a browser they can't debug in, or at least not when there is an alternative.)

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

#114

Post by dgb23 » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

darthrupert wrote: post #52

artursapek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect a bigger corp with a sustainable business model will scoop it up. Rust is too promising to die at this point.

Is it though? Most of it seems to be hype. It’s great that programming languages get researched and improved, but do they actually improve? How is improvement measured?

> How is improvement measured?

This is a good question that like to get answered too.

It is reasonable to assume[0] that the language can keep its promises. However I look forward to seeing data on this in the future.

[0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe...

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

#115

Post by dmix » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

lol768 wrote: post #63

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/…

I’ve always believed that Firefox dev tools probably had most of the things I need but the interface is always...uglier and less familiar, so I don’t bother. It’s a low threshold to just use Chrome for development and FF for everything else.

Also I believe the OP was talking about more development tooling than just the front-end browser dev tools. Chromium always seems to have the most advanced debugging tools for browser development at the systems level. At least from what I’ve read...

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

#116

Post by StevePerkins » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

StevePerkins wrote: post #73

jtxx wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love to have a browser that is both built on a Chromium core, AND built for privacy by a trustworthy open-source company. what about Brave?

I tried them for a little while. Unfortunately, Brave's sync service just flat-out doesn't work. To the point where they have it disabled by default, and you have to crack open advanced settings to see if it will actually work reliably for you (SPOILER ALERT: It won't). I think they were too focused on making it "blockchain-based" and "crypto-trendy", and just can't build something sensible that works. THIS is the va…

> @blub: "There's no way that a closed source browser owned by a Chinese company is least bad"

You're speed-reading my comment, and getting it wrong. Vivaldi is NOT Chinese-owned. It is a group of European former-Opera developers, who were unhappy about the Chinese acquisition of Opera.

> @outsomnia: "Ffox is super up to date with latest and next-gen web technologies... what do you even mean by "get with the times"?"

A similar argument pops up on Java developer forums, in discussions about the old "Java EE" specifications versus Spring Boot. The devs who have hitched their career wagons to Java EE just cannot process the reality that it died 5-10 years ago.

"But it's a specification! A standard!"

"But Spring implements a lot of those standards! And the other bits are all proprietary API's, that don't have any alternative non-Spring implementations!"

It doesn't matter. The spec is not the standard anymore. For the vast majority of Java shops, Spring has become the standard. Like it or not, that's the reality.

This analogy is even more extreme when it comes to browser engines. More and more of the web targets Chromium, and is glitchy or non-functional with Gecko. 99% of people could care less which specs Gecko has implemented, or how well they implemented the spec. CHROMIUM IS THE SPEC.

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

#117

Post by abeyer » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

ldng wrote: post #56

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.

> They're refocussing on the user experience of the browser. What does that even mean concretely ? Isn't Wasm supposed to be the cornerstone to give user faster (and ultimately better) experience in the browser ?

If recent history is any indicator, it means they will be even faster to rip out the parts of ff that made it unique, and copy changes that happen in the Chrome UI.

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

#118

Post by blub » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

dx87 wrote: post #106

blub wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they work on the projects you or HN care about? This is why they got in trouble in the first place - spending money and engineering on projects with zero impact on their bottom line or on the metrics that matter around privacy and an open internet.

Those things had zero impact on their bottom line because there's no way to give them money for those things. All anyone can do is donate to the Mozilla Foundation where the money can get spent on whatever non-technical things the foundations wants.

Even if there were, that hypothetical income wouldn't even cover the salary of two developers. Who pays for programming languages or runtimes nowadays? Only very specialized users which don't have a choice.

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

#119

Post by ehaughee » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

lol768 wrote: post #63

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/…

I consistently have to switch to Chrome devtools as FF (my default browser) devtools crash or hang on large (1.29MB gzipped) bundles like one of the apps I regularly maintain. While we want to do some code splitting, module lazy loading, and refactor to make tree shaking more effective, the fact that Chrome just works when FF does not is very frustrating.

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

#120

Post by GeekyBear » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #82

I always wondered how Rust at Mozilla was sustainable. Maintaining an ecosystem like that and bringing it into an already complex project like a browser is a huge undertaking that probably has eaten up significant amount of manhours. At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing but I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other…

Microsoft (and Amazon) have already started paying some of the infrastructure costs to support Rust. Rust will get by with a little (financial) help from it's friends.