Downloaded from: justpaste.it/mozilla-rust-layoffs-gecko-servo Mozilla rust layoffs and the insider fight between servo and gecko First let's talk about how Servo fit into MoCo. Servo was part of the Emerging Technologies (ET) group, formerly known as "Mozilla Research." Think of places like Xerox PARC, or Microsoft Research, or one of the less-crazy Google moonshots. Their job was to try to look off into the horizon, not a year or two from now, but five to ten years from now, try to envision where the internet will be going, and experiment with new ideas that could potentially be used by MoCo once that future arrives. When MoCo seemed to be more flush with cash, it made sense to be doing this. Rust was incubated out of Mozilla Research, and we're damn happy that it did. But a research arm with a 5-10 year horizon only makes sense to continue funding if: You have gobs of extra cash to throw around; and You expect those gobs of cash to last long enough to actually be able to benefit from that investment in 5 to 10 years. At MoCo, the former is not true anymore, and the certainty of the latter is in doubt by the public. I doubt that any execs felt good about cutting ET, but if you are short on resources and forced to choose between allocating them either to the short-term or to the long-term, you only have once choice you can make. The Hype Train Servo became a high-profile project in tech circles. Their flashy demos showing all of this wonderful parallelized rendering at insane FPS made them a darling. Before I write what I am about to say, I want to emphasize that I think that the Servo project is great, was worth funding, and that most Servo developers are awesome and I would happily work with them again. HOWEVER: There are a very small number of Servo developers who kind of became social media darlings in tech circles. Not necessarily "blue checkmark" level, but they were granted this thought leadership role by tech social media. These individuals act like they're pretty hot shit compared to the rest of Mozilla and they want the world to know what Very Important People they are to the future of the Mozilla technology stack and to the web in general. I don't recall where the "Mozilla is going to replace Gecko with Servo" meme came from, but these devs certainly did nothing to debunk it, and I think that those individuals very much fantasized about making it happen. What is a Production Web Engine? My first run-in with these specific Servo devs came while trying to debunk the "we're replacing Gecko with Servo" meme in a reply on Hacker News. I was commenting that I didn't believe that Servo in its current state was capable of being a production web engine, and one of these Servo people replied to me with a "Don't you know who I am" rant about how Servo is very much being written as production code. Here's the thing though: What this Servo dev thought of as "production ready" and what the Gecko team thinks is "production ready" are very different things. In Gecko-land, it's not enough to do best-practice things like continuous integration, regression tests, error handling, etc. For Gecko, it's also about compatibility -- both with 25+ years of web content (much of it malformed) and a wide range of supported combinations of operating systems and hardware. If you're working on Servo, you can be much more strict about what hardware combinations you support and what kind of content renders well. Look, there's a reason that the lineage of all widespread web engines go back 20+ years: it's much easier to incrementally improve that engine while ensuring that you're not breaking anything than it is to start over from scratch. I would also like to point out that you don't have to take my word for it: It has taken at least 3 years (probably closer to 4 years) to get WebRender ported over to Gecko from Servo and get it running well enough to the point that we can start saying that it will likely reach 100% deployment within months instead of years. My point is that, while Servo was great for demonstrating new ideas and producing eye-popping demos, it was not going to replace Gecko anytime soon, regardless of what those few Servo developers thought. In all the time I've worked at Mozilla, I have never once heard anybody in charge of Firefox say that we were going to do a wholesale swap out of Gecko with Servo. Hype Crashes with Reality Unfortunately a narrative kind of built up around all this stuff that Gecko developers were a bunch of bumbling idiots who were just maintaining a bunch of outdated bloatware, while the Servo project was where all the action was. The developers I mentioned above didn't really do much to debunk that; after all, they had already bid themselves and their project up so high that now, to maintain their credibility, they need to continue that narrative even though it's bad for Mozilla, Firefox, and ultimately the Web itself. Then the layoffs hit, and the Servo team is let go. Where does the narrative go, now? Well, since, according to those individuals, Servo was the only source of innovation at Mozilla, and since the Servo team has been let go, there must no longer be any more innovation left at Mozilla. Who appointed them the arbiters of what is innovative and what is not? They didn't even work in the Firefox group, how the hell would they even know what we were working on, beyond the broad strokes? One of them tried to dig out of that hole by trying to clarify that they think that ET was more innovative by definition, but I don't think that holds. ET never had a monopoly on innovation at Mozilla, and it is ridiculously self-serving to claim that it did. TL;DR I am never happy with people losing their jobs, but Mozilla just couldn't support ET at the same time that it tries to make Firefox's last stand. Unfortunately the hype around Servo makes the situation look far worse than it actually is.