Re:Firefox Hello – Browse the Web with Friends
by the8472 on Friday April 22, 2016 @01:54PM
(#11551051)
And considering onging projects (webextensions, e10s) it should be fairly obvious that even if they started today it would still be a multi-year project just to get to a point where pain-tolerant users might be willing to use it.
Re:Firefox Hello – Browse the Web with Friends
by sp332 on Friday April 22, 2016 @02:50PM
(#11551627)
It wasn't just secret, they explicitly denied it. A few years ago they had a big disclaimer that they weren't aiming to replace Gecko. http://paulrouget.com/e/servo/ I guess that's been changing though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295698
Re:Firefox Hello – Browse the Web with Friends
by pcwalton on Friday April 22, 2016 @02:58PM
(#11551713)
Nothing has changed. The singular goal of Servo is to make a great browser engine. There are lots of things that can be done with a great browser engine. Let's talk about what we can do with a great browser engine once it exists.
The reason why you can't find an answer as to whether Servo will replace Gecko is, in fact, that there is no answer to that right now. Any sort of wild speculation as to whether Servo is going to replace Gecko is extremely premature at this point.
If you do a risky project that might fail or not pay off, and you don't want to get bad PR, you can do only two things: Keep it entirely secret, or develop it in the open but make no promises whatsoever. For an open source company, the choice is pretty easy.
I always thought it was a public secret that of course they're going to put it in the browser, but they don't dare promising that before they know it's going to work out. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if nextgen Firefox is just going to be Servo + browser.html.