Had the same thought and it felt terrible. Couldn't they at least try what almost all other advanced open source organisations seem to do? Branch out a consultancy in their field of expertise that maintains an incredibly famous piece of open source code on the side to show off?
The Servo team, the Dev tools team and the security response team got cut. I hadn't put two and two together but this makes a lot of sense, if they are switching to Chromium, they would not need any of these.
As a gecko tester since the very first day Netscape was open sourced and Mozilla M1 was released, this hurts.
Why would it hurt? Those people will easily find well-paid jobs on Chrome's own security and devtools teams, where they can work on improving Chrome both in terms of security and developer-focused features, all the while bringing their own values and ideas. Win-win.
I'm sure as an insider you have a better and more realistic view of things.
Here on the outside, it's hard not to imagine the 2022 blog post that carefully explains that the huge cost and burden of maintaining a modern independent browser engine just isn't the most efficient way of furthering Mozilla's goal of an open internet.
Not an insider although I have some contacts at Mozilla who talk freely over beers.
Mozilla is definitely moving away from Firefox over the next few years, this is but one of the first steps to that end. They have decided to renew Google's partnership so Google will remain the default search engine for the foreseeable future (next 3+ years), once again talking the talk instead of walking the walk and switch to a privacy-first engine.
The security and devtools teams getting axed is not only a clear signal but also the physical implementation of de-emphasizing Firefox and pushing for new standalone subscription services that don't need to be integrated (as tightly) into any browser to be used by actual people.
A few years down the line of such a "strategy", all things remaining equal, I can't see the browser being even used by developers/FOSS advocates because even these kinds of people need to see at least some progress over time and get at least some increasing value over time from a piece of software they use as heavily as they are, every single day of their professional as well as personal lives.
Last but not least, with all due respect to Aaron, I can't see such strategic decisions to be taken with the assent of his team at all. In effect, the GeckoView team could get axed overnight and implementations would immediately turn to using Android's WebView instead. It's actually a bit ironic that GeckoView's own wiki lists itself as "not a dropin replacement of Android's WebView" in that regard, as most differences between the two are due to GeckoView's rejection of existing, native APIs, leading the team to do much rework. And teams that base themselves on doing unnecessary rework and following NIH instead of building on existing libraries and APIs often get canned first during such strategic shifts.
> What would "Foxium" offer that Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, Chromium, or Chrome don't already offer?
More ability, at any given cost, to innovate on candidate new web technologies maintaining Mozilla’s objectives to promote the open internet, acheived through lower cost to implement and maintain consensus technologies.
Which is similar to what other Chromium-descended third-party browsers offer their sponsoring entities, but each sponsoring entity has different objectives. Everyone benefits from the ability a common open-source core provided to distribute (or just outsource) the cost of maintaining the features that are shared, leaving more bang for engineering buck on each entity’s investment in not-yet shared features.
Which isn't to say that diversity in implementation of the shared features doesn't have its own benefits to the ecosystem, particularly in terms of preventing future development from being adversely constrained by what is practical to bolt on to one particular implementation without rewriting big parts of the core. But, for that to really bear fruit, you'd need more diversity than the existing Blink + WebKit + Firefox ecosystem provides anyway, and it's not like Mozilla can conjure that out of thin air.
Those are all fair points, but if Firefox has a hard time driving adoption now, I think being on Chromium they'll find it even harder, unless they have some real killer, must-have features lined up. But I doubt they have those features planned because if they would use them to drive adoption in Firefox now.
Gutting the Servo team makes me wonder if management is going to move the rendering engine from Gecko to Blink.
Perhaps the "Foxium" browser is "coming soon."