Mozilla is nothing like Xerox, if anything Google is the new Xerox: they have way too much money so they throw it at R&D side projects without a business plan.

The big one for Google is transformer models, they basically invented LLMs only to play catchup with OpenAI later.

Mozilla successes have always been focused on the web browser, from the very beginning. Even the name reflects that: "Mozilla" stands for "Mosaic killer", Mosaic was the leading web browser at the time. They beat Mosaic with Netscape, they beat IE with Firefox, beating Chrome was their mission, and Rust and Servo were their weapons. It is sad that they dropped the ball.

Like Xerox (and Google), Mozilla tried doing some side projects, but unlike Xerox, they didn't have money to burn from their quasi-monopolies, and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect.

> It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then...decided it wasn't worth pursuing any further.

Google has been Mozilla's main source of revenue since around 2006. For Mozilla to exist, all they have to do is keep Google happy.

It's kind of a nice deal for Mozilla, despite being a huge conflict of interest.

Mozilla is over. They put all their eggs in the Google basket, and soon they’ll lose that. They have no viable path forward.

Servo and Ladybird are the future. I’m astounded by how quickly Ladybird is proceeding, with far fewer people than Mozilla. It’s been inspiring to see what that project is doing.

If Mozilla decides to dump Gecko, then it's time for a hard fork and an abandonment of Mozilla. Maybe it's time now.

edit: I mean dumping Gecko for Chromium, not Servo.

It is difficult to get people to pay for it. People happily pay for 10€ beer but asked ”friends” about how to bypass WhatsApp’s 0,99 lifetime licenses.

Servo would not have been some dramatic revolution in browser technology. It would have done the same thing browser engines currently do, but maybe a little faster and with a couple less security issues per year.

It's dishonest to compare that to "the technology of the future", especially when nobody chooses their browser based on whether a page loads in 82ms or 70ms. They mostly choose browsers based on familiarity and marketing and what's preinstalled. Chrome is fast enough for most people that they're not gonna switch just because their dweeb nephew mentioned some other browser might be marginally faster.

And they didn't toss Rust aside either. New bits of Firefox continue to be written in Rust to this day. That was actually the primary reason Servo was dropped - the bits of the browser engine that could be replaced with Servo bits easily had already been replaced. Rewriting Gecko slowly was deemed more practical than committing to 5+ years of parallel development and hoping that by the end it would be possible to replace millions of lines of Gecko code in one fell swoop.

This is only fair.

Mozilla doesn't deserve to survive. New players deserve our support, like servo and ladybird.

Even with an enormous budget from Google (500M, I think per year) they managed to ruin everything, including Firefox, the thing bringing them those 500M.

To me it looks as if Baker is an undercover person put there to sabotage Mozilla. Tldr: funded by Google, made absolutely everything in her power to run it into the ground