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Comment by zesterer | Hacker News Reader

> They want it to (not or less) stay the same and not move forward

I don't think this is true at all. Anecdotally, a lot of Firefox users have been very receptive towards recent changes. Quantum was a huge success and I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank.

> Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own

This is precisely what Servo is: https://servo.org/. Mozilla know what they're doing.

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> This is precisely what Servo is

Great example - because Mozilla binned Servo!

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1295771633320448001

As the Reddit thread quoted in that Twitter thread explains, Servo was not originally intended meant to replace Gecko. It was a research platform to explore new techniques which could be used in Gecko, and it successfully did that. Indeed, i think it was a pleasant surprise when it turned out WebRender could be ported, rather than rewritten in Gecko.

It is a shame that Servo was shut down, because now there isn't a codebase focused on developing new technology; innovation has to happen in Gecko, alongside being a production system.

Yes, that was when they seemed to give up, it seems.

I believe they laid off the Servo development team?

Also they moved way to slowly with Servo, starting it as a research project was correct. But they should have gone all in on it years ago.

I know they have taken parts of it and folded them into Firefox, but it should have been the the other way round. Take the bits of Firefox they could and combine them into something new with Servo.

I think it’s probably easier said than done. Servo did work somewhat for some hardware but there is a very long tail of web and hardware compatibility issues that needs to be chased down.

The problem is that Servo required a lot of things, including Rust, to be mature.

That being said, Servo resulted in the creation of all sorts of technologies.

Wasn't lot of servo team fired? Or was that some other team? I remember reading about lot of rust people being let go.

> I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank.

one vote for the old FF because tabKitv2 is unsurpassed

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