This includes the entire Servo team which was working on its next generation web engine that was supposed to be Firefox’s ticket to staying afloat in the future. Servo also popularized the Rust language afaik
Aside from Servo, they also axed the entire threat management team, because why would a browser need threat detection and incident response, amirite?
Relevant links:
https://nitter.snopyta.org/directhex/status/1293352458308198401
https://nitter.snopyta.org/MichalPurzynski/status/1293220570885062657
It will still be a long time before anything becomes comparably as good an option as Firefox, even with the engines stalled and the project adrift. A lot of responsibility for the future of the a Internet just fell in the laps of thankless volunteers though.
I’m not sure how things can be changed, but I think it is essential for us to stop building web browsers (and web services) as if they were space elevators. For all intents and purposes, browsers have grown to levels of complexity rivaling operating systems. I mean, it legitimately takes longer to compile Firefox than it does to compile the Linux Kernel with nearly all the modules enabled.
Obviously we can’t go back to gopher, but we have to do something to bring the standards of the web within reach of being implemented by mortals.
