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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

#261

Post by AsyncAwait »

say_it_as_it_is wrote: post #249
capableweb wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any Rustaceans who have been working at Mozilla, have probably done so for the mission that Mozilla work on (publicly), not too earn a ton of money. Amazon/AWS, who's main goal is closed down infrastructure, is the opposite of that mission. Worth keeping in mind when trying to recruit people from the opposite spectrum of yourself.

The Mozilla layoffs indicate that the mission you speak of has ended. It's over. It was at best a business experiment with a socially progressive slant, capturing the hearts and minds of employees in exchange for their commitment to company objectives. Unfortunately, those responsible for the plan are not held as accountable for it failing to achieve their business objectives.

> It was at best a business experiment with a socially progressive slant

I appreciate you specifically pointing out "socially progressive", rather than just "progressive", because corporations often use social progressiveness, (relatively cheap), as a mask for economic conservatism.

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

#263

Post by Crespyl »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #242
yarrel wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. The partnership with, acquisition of, and integration of Pocket was an embarrassment. It was also an indication of just how bad Mozilla's management are at trying to make money. We'll see a lot more business theater like this before the team are replaces with people who know what they're doing.

The implementation may have been bad, but I thought it was a unique way to add some revenue. Pocket seemed like a useful product that would appeal to the technical focused userbase Firefox has. It's sad that it didn't work out for Mozilla. I feel disappointed with the failure of companies like Mozilla and canonical to thrive. They have the right values, the talent, and good products. They just don't seem to be able t…

If they'd ever got around to actually open-sourcing the thing like they kept promising they would, I expect people would've been more on-board with it.

I would've been happy to pay a modest subscription for a fully open-source Pocket stack with better archive management.

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

#264

Post by alwillis »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #222
alwillis wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no technical reason for iOS to not support alternative browsers from the start. It's not about technical reasons.

There's no technical reason for iOS to not support alternative browsers from the start.

Why would Apple allow other browser engines that are slower, less power efficient and don't respect user’s privacy at least as much as Webkit to run natively on iOS?

Apple continues to add features to block ads from tracking users across the web and to lessen the impact of fingerprinting by trackers.

Certainly Google has no interest in adhering to these principles if it were able to run natively on iOS—they're the only major browser on macOS that allows unchecked fingerprinting and ad tracking.

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

#265

Post by blub »

stonogo wrote: post #184
blub wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They fired the Servo team. Servo's CSS engine is shipping in Firefox. Servo's rendering engine was supposed to become the primary Firefox graphics engine. It's weird to call that a side project when it's clearly development aimed at becoming the basis of their primary product.

Their primary product is the Mozilla brand and the browser, not a CSS or rendering engine. The innards can be swapped out and even the entire browser could and probably will be.

Always follow the money. If they got rid of these people it likely means that:

a) Rust is not part of Mozilla's future any more

b) Gecko's future doesn't look too bright either

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

#266

Post by joepie91_ »

jlokier wrote: post #258
shawxe wrote: post #123

From 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…

> invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outside the context of a "profit model." To be fair, the existence of open source software that is very expensive to develop has always dependend on big companies paying for it. Firefox could be funded by several companies in collaboration, but as of right now, do you know any collection of companies with deep pockets that aren't happy enou…

> To be fair, the existence of open source software that is very expensive to develop has always dependend on big companies paying for it.

I think you're getting the causality wrong there. A lot of the "open-source" (often barely) software built and funded by large corporations has a tendency of accumulating endless technical debt and complexity, and being inaccessible to outside developers. Not dissimilar to much proprietary software.

Does that mean that serious open-source software requires big companies paying for it, to maintain? No, it just means that big companies produce expensive-to-maintain software. And to top it off, often when they do so in open-source, it's actually an unnecessary reinvented wheel!

And quite often simpler, just as serious software exists that isn't so damn to expensive to maintain and that does just fine without big-corporate funding, because it hasn't suffered from the same organizational bloat and office politics.

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

#267

Post by vosper »

andruby wrote: post #133
hinkley wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When Firebug came out it was such a big deal that it was the sole reason our IE-only product (which was not a simple application, it was fully-fledged fleet management, tracking, mapping, and reporting platform, entirely web-based) got cross-browser compatibility (we made it work with Firefox).

Being able to use Firebug was such a huge boon to development back in the day, though it probably looks primitive today.

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

#268

Post by hinkley »

irrational wrote: post #180
andruby wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Firebug is what got me to use Firefox in the beginning. I continued to use Firefox out of habit after firebug went away, though the replacement was inferior (it still is). Now... I might have to switch to Chrome, but I really don’t want to due to privacy issues. I suppose I could use it just for development.

I think Firebug got most of us to use Firefox, and then we got other people to use Firefox, directly or indirectly.

I worked on two teams back to back. Everyone was using Firebug. Management was telling us NOT to support Firefox, but tough shit, you want this work done yesterday and the only way that's going to happen is by engineering on Firefox/Firebug and then going back to black magic for the 10% that didn't work on IE (and soon, Safari).

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

#269

Post by joepie91_ »

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…

> I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other products.

> I can't imagine that from a standpoint of time investment and technical improvement Rust ever made sense for Firefox to be honest.

To put it bluntly: without Rust, Firefox would have very likely not existed anymore. It was severely behind in terms of performance, and no good tooling was available to fix that without incurring a huge ongoing maintenance cost, due to lacking parallelism safety in other languages. So they built the tooling themselves.

The whole Firefox Quantum thing very likely just couldn't have happened if it weren't for Rust. Rust wasn't some pointless experimental plaything; it was a large frontloaded engineering cost, with significant long-term benefits.

(Note: I'm not a Mozilla employee, so it's always possible that I'm wrong here. But I have followed the whole Rust-and-Firefox thing pretty closely from the outside.)

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