Servo Folk. It’s one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That’s where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn’t be Mozilla’s problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla’s market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.

Have you heard of Electron? It’s the use of Chromium’s Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn’t there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko’s way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It’s a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink’s based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.