Firefox OS sucked up almost all the resources Mozilla had, pulling them not just from mobile, but from desktop and web platform. No one at Mozilla was exempted from being called on to stop what they were doing to work on something for OS. It was our "mobile investment".
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 hear ya. What more do you want from Servo in the near term? It gave us an entirely new styling and rendering engine as well as a new memory safe language. Seems like we got a couple more years at least to integrate all of that into products and see it pay off.
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@pcwalton's Pathfinder seems promising, but more generally, the work towards web-compat completion is what made WebRender and Stylo close enough to consider integrating. Keeping projects warm and resourced is cheaper than rebooting them later. - 11 more replies
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It may not be underfunding so much as under-resourced. I think it's hard in this market to find great platform hackers. We certainly don't win against the other guys in a bidding war.
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Talking to platform devs, it feels like morale issues, not money issues, are the main reason for losing people. If people felt great about the product and leadership, they'd leave less. As a microcosm: FF57 helped, but Mr. Robot hurt.
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"As a microcosm: FF57 helped, but Mr. Robot hurt." Agreed 100%
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