Hopefully this will mean fewer "We're rewriting $WORKING_SOFTWARE in Rust!!!" posts
Why so? It is not Mozilla going around rewriting random projects in Rust.
"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
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
On IOS. On a Mac you can run any browser engine you want.
i wonder when the other shoe will drop. maybe as part of the ARM and iOS/macOS consolidation. things are much more likely to go the iOS route given it's already ARM.
i wonder when the other shoe will drop. maybe as part of the ARM and iOS/macOS consolidation.
There’s no other shoe. There's no known technical reason why all the major browsers shouldn't be available natively when ARM Macs start shipping in a few months.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple, Microsoft, and Google: * Forbid alternative browser engines on their platform. * Bundle their browser in a leading operating system. * Use their massive Web properties to drive downloads of their own browser.
> Bundle their browser in a leading operating system. What’s the alternative here? I can’t imagine opening up a new computer and not having some kind of web browser pre-installed.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#214Mozilla'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…
>They got rid of projects requiring lots of engineering effort with negligible benefits for [...] the internet or for our privacy. what? https://twitter.com/MichalPurzynski/status/12932205708850626...
Within the framework proposed by the parent comment, these guys would be unnecessary because Mozilla would switch to Chromium.
(Please don't downvote me, I'm just trying to flesh out the exact meaning of that statement.)
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox has had development tools from way before Chrome even existed. They started as an (awesome!) Firebug extension, which they later included in the browser itself (not that it matters, but it was Chrome that basically copied them at the time).
Was looking for this comment! This is key here, because the story is extra sad given Mozilla/FF's initial strong surge in leader front-end developer tools. Before the Firebug extension I think I just did like View Source still from the menu? Yikes! Chrome copied it and at first IMO it wasn't nearly as good inside Chrome as in FF. But that did eventually change and for some years now I (sadly) agree I also prefer Chro…
Before Firebug Mozilla had Venkman and the DOM Inspector.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#216From many of the comments in this thread, one might think that FAANG companies invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outside the context of a "profit model." Whatever is going on at Mozilla right now, the notion that a piece of open source software even needs to be profitable (let alone supported by a single large company) in order to continue existing is ridiculous. I'll concede…
> but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? Have you any examples of any large OSS projects that don't have this problem? > As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? gcc [0] has a list of maintainers, which features a lot of redhat email addresses. The ruby…
PostgreSQL is probably the best example. It's maintained by many people from many different companies.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#217> The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too. Two days ago, the CEO said that focusing on technologies like Wasmtime was one of their plans for the future[1]. Now we find out that they're actually getting rid of the team. The…
Firefox is open source and it doesn't need to be tied to Mozilla. Maybe a fork is necessary.
There are already many forks of Firefox with separate development. See Waterfox, Palemoon, etc. None seem to get the kind of development needed to compete with Chrome/Safari/Edge.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#218> The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too. Two days ago, the CEO said that focusing on technologies like Wasmtime was one of their plans for the future[1]. Now we find out that they're actually getting rid of the team. The…
Why call it corporate speak, when it's plain old lying?
It's at least a different, interesting kind of lying, worth naming separately.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#219> The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too. Two days ago, the CEO said that focusing on technologies like Wasmtime was one of their plans for the future[1]. Now we find out that they're actually getting rid of the team. The…
Firefox is open source and it doesn't need to be tied to Mozilla. Maybe a fork is necessary.
"Open source" doesn't necessarily mean "practical to maintain." Can an open source organization maintaining a fork of Firefox in their free time in addition to the obligations of their regular job keep up with the hundreds of webcompat issues being filed and over 3,000 open issues on the preview version of Firefox on Android alone?
And there also is a fork of XUL-era Firefox already, called Pale Moon, which various people have declared will soon be unusable with the modern web because there aren't enough people that care about it enough to implement Web Components, to the point where the Pale Moon developers were asking websites to not implement Web Components[1]. Are the developers of those websites going to pay attention to a couple of developers maintaining their own Firefox fork that much less people use than standard Firefox? (And we're talking about Firefox, which itself has a single-digit market share.) That on top of the implications of security exploits being found in such a massive codebase faster than the development team can patch them, given how many features are being added to web standards so quickly, probably with the expectation that companies like Google or Mozilla already have the developer capacity to implement them on a set timeline. There's simply so much source code to maintain, and adding the new features that the modern web is going to require to be usable in a few years on top of maintenance takes a significant amount of effort.
The only way that a program as complicated as Firefox can continue to be improved and used by enough people to be viable is if it gets worked on by people with enough time, and I believe that's only practical if people are spending that time working on Firefox because they're salaried. Yes, that's partially because web standards are constantly expanding in scope and complexity, and I'm not really sure what we can do about the complexity creating a hard dependency on Mozilla continuing to exist because, unlike the source code of Firefox, the forces driving those standards are out of the reach of the average OSS developer.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think SV's theory is that if you make something that potentially a billion people will use, that's worth doing even if you don't know the business model yet because when the fog of war clears you might be FAAMG