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Comment by sa-code | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't servo's purpose to essentially be a testing ground for features that would eventually be pushed to Firefox?

That's what happened, but if I remember correctly, it was supposed to be an entirely new engine. I had a lot of hope for it, as the demo looked really promising at the time. It really was what Mozilla needed to get back on track, because to be honest, Firefox was pretty sucky when compared to Chrome at that time. I also liked the idea of inventing a whole programming language for that purpose (Rust), it reminded me of C/UNIX.

In the end, Firefox got better, and we have Rust, a great language on its own, but I think it could have been even better. And I was particularly disappointed when Mozilla laid off the Servo team, I feel they let go of the most important thing they had.

> And I was particularly disappointed when Mozilla laid off the Servo team, I feel they let go of the most important thing they had.

Gotta pay out those CEO bonuses somehow.

In a sick plot twist Mozilla gets shocked back to its senses, re-hires the team, restarts the effort to replace Gecko with Servo, and Firefox finally lives up to its potential. (I wish.)

And fires the executive?

... beep beep beep ... wakeup!

We can dream, lol.

Servo didn't need to be dropped, rust could have been handled oh so much better. Mozilla is not being run very well, they need to cut their "social" activities and focus on the browser and promoting free software through example rather than preaching, just throw some of that Google money at EFF/ACLU instead. I am kind of neutral on pocket and their other activities. I don't see how they could go wrong with partnerships like with Mullvad though. focus focus focus is what they need as well as a new CEO

Not really no, it was more to explore a greenfield web engine design, and also to use rust to do that. Not for user facing features as all, for one thing servo barely has a UI

It was a supposedly replacement for Firefox that's written in Rust.

no it was to eventually be replacement for gecko engine. It was used as a testbed for a while before mozilla killed it, and it was forked for open source. Huge difference.

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