Frankly, we bet the farm on mobile with Firefox OS and it failed. That was orders of magnitude more expensive than what we're doing with mixed reality. We're refocused on mobile browsers now and they will be getting much better over the next year or two.
I'm well aware of that. More effort on those advancements was deprioritized in favor of turning Servo into an AR vehicle.
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I'm curious why you think Servo is such an important investment compared to say Gecko which is Mozilla's only viable implementation of the web. You seem bothered at Servo's deprioritization, and not at all concerned about the state of Gecko which is chronically underfunded, IMO.
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I am concerned about Gecko underfunding. What would you estimate the total budget of Gecko engineering (the old "Platform" team) to be?
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I'm more bothered by Servo being shifted from researching platform advancements to a speculative moonshot so soon after getting a payoff from earlier platform advancements. I don't think Servo needs drastically more Mozilla-funded resources.
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What is it that you want Servo to be?
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What it has been: a pipeline for risky web platform experiments that can make their web back into Gecko to make Gecko better. I don't particularly see any reason why good Gecko engineers couldn't take some time away from the grind to prototype ideas.
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If you want a way to keep great platform developers, giving them a chance to step away from the grind periodically to try out ideas they already have in a more prototype-friendly environment couldn't hurt.
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We agree. We've periodically had "R&D" that worked much like that, where core product engineers went off to try something revolutionary. On the app side you can see it with things like project Tofino. Before R&D we had "Labs" and before that, people just made time with no org.
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And of all of those things, Research and Servo have been the closest to consistently feeding new tech to Platform. I don't think Mozilla (or Gecko) is helped by moving back towards a Labs or "make time" model. Servo's success (as you described) means more like that, plz.
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I meant MR vehicle.
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