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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

#131

Post by harrygeez »

thayne wrote: post #43
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.

In the long run, these changes will hurt the user experience of firefox. If you ignore developer tools and similar, then developers will be less will be less willing to develop for and test on your browser, especially if your browser already only has a minority of user share. And it doesn't matter how cool your chrome is, if websites don't work in a browser, user's aren't going to use it.

This has been said many times outside of the tech circle: 2020 is all about survival. Orgs need to stay lean so they can navigate through this pandemic and the resultant economic crisis. Just because Mozilla is pausing these efforts now doesn't mean they're stopping for good.

Maybe these are all short term necessities for Mozilla, and when things get back to normal they'll pick up where they left off. One can at least hope.

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

#132

Post by toastal »

Recursing wrote: post #94
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…

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.

And in the case of Apple, who killed Flash to help the open web, have knee-capped PWA support on their mobile platforms to force developers to leave their cut of sales through the App Store. It's pretty anti-competitive.

I believe Valve's been a bit on edge (no pun intended), about Microsoft forcing games through their store as well.

Mozilla was helping us out of these walled gardens. There's even the SSB support they've been working for PWAs on desktop. Instead of bundling Electron, you could likely just target ESR Firefox and your app icon just launches this URL (this is what Peppermint OS does). Instead now you have Chrome and all of these Electron apps all competing for who can chew up the most RAM.

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

#133

Post by andruby »

hinkley wrote: post #113
thomascgalvin wrote: post #34

Earlier 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…

The tool was firebug. It was a big difference when browsers didn’t offer built in tools.

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

#134

Post by cataphract »

GeekyBear wrote: post #108
lostapathy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is open source a loss leader for Apple, really? Or is it something they mostly get for free, but have to contribute a little back to shape it how they want? The point I read from GP, at least, was that open source is cheap for these big corps because they get a ton of benefit for it, but non-profit (either orgs or individuals) are bearing the brunt of the cost.

> contribute a little back Clang was certainly an in-house Apple project from the start, and it would be hard to claim that it hasn't been a project that has seen huge uptake outside of Apple.

This is not entirely accurate. LLVM was started by Chris Lattner before he was hired by Apple, which were probably spooked by gcc going GPLv3 by then.

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

#135

Post by hu3 »

blub wrote: post #112
mvn9 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

tis but a scratch

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

#136

Post by Jasper_ »

lostapathy wrote: post #88
thomascgalvin wrote: post #34

Earlier 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)…

Is open source a loss leader for Apple, really? Or is it something they mostly get for free, but have to contribute a little back to shape it how they want? The point I read from GP, at least, was that open source is cheap for these big corps because they get a ton of benefit for it, but non-profit (either orgs or individuals) are bearing the brunt of the cost.

Apple is the primary contributor and maintainer of WebKit at this point since Google forked Blink off of it.

There are consulting firms like Igalia that work on all three engines, and they're funded mostly from big clients like Bloomberg and banks so developers there can use flexbox and CSS grid everywhere.

Google sometimes works on WebKit as well if they want to try to improve compatibility of websites, but the project is mostly Apple employees now.

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

#137

Post by StevePerkins »

acheron wrote: post #122
StevePerkins wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> @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"?"…

You in 2005: "The web targets IE6! Firefox should acknowledge reality!"

In 2005, Mozilla was more innovative than Microsoft. And more dedicated to implementing specifications that Microsoft was ignoring.

Today, the argument for Mozilla is that it's "almost as good" as other browsers. That it "doesn't have as many compatibility problems as you might have heard!", etc.

And they're not ahead of Google at implementing standards. They lag slightly behind. https://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+81,chrome+87

If the Chromium team starts resting on its laurels like the IE team did in the early-2000's, then I hope they'll meet the same fate. But right now these situations are not remotely comparable.

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

#138

Post by steveklabnik »

qppo wrote: post #7

I wonder if someone is going to pick up the mantle that Mozilla dropped. One of the FAANGs, maybe Oxide?

As a pre-revenue startup... Oxide can't do that, though they do employ me, and we are still using Rust for all the things, and don't plan on changing that.

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

#140

Post by leeoniya »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #125
gamblor956 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft and Google allow alternative browser engines. Apple does not.

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.

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