Those don't sound like incompatible approaches. The monolith Gecko would be difficult to replace whole hog, a modular surgical approach seems more realistic.
They had detected the most profitable improvements and moved them over to Firefox.
So I'm not really surprised about them not continuing servo, even though it had been grate.
I'm more worried about some of the other layoff.
Further it feels a bit like they got in a place where they financially couldn't go on like before and fanned out to get more revenue streams but if that fails we might be down to chrome + safari, which would be horrible, tbh.
If it really comes to that we might even want to try to push the EU to get financially involved or something.
Safari isn't available on Windows, and Google doesn't want a situation where they are the only significant browser on the most popular desktop operating system. Google is scared of antitrust action, getting another monopoly is the last thing they want.
In the end you are 80% of the way to the goal and the last 20% is politically insurmountable. This is, IME, a primary driver for the Lava Flow Antipattern.
If they don't invest in a new engine, and given that the old engine is not much to compare with Blink or even Webkit, what's left for them? Pocket and some BS VPN service?
Do you have a citation supporting that? The old engine compares quite favorably with Chrome and Mobile Safari.
https://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+79,chrome+84,safari+13....
The provided links only compare API coverage, while other domains (performance, security...) are important. Even so, Firefox is clearly trailing Chrome, its main desktop competitor. It's not surprising since I've heard that the latter has much more man-power. And the gap will increase.
I've looked at CanIUse, ignoring the features which are implemented but disabled by default. Chromes lacks 5 features the Firefox has. The biggest two are MathML and VirtualReality, which were both available as experimental features in past Chrome versions but were removed for lack of interest in publishing or maintaining them.
On the other side, Firefox lacks 25-30 features that Chrome has. A few of them are minor, but most of them seem complex.
"our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year."
[1]https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...
What the hell are they doing with the rest of the money? It should be "paid back" to the shareholder (the foundation) as tax free dividends that are kept in a fund for the purposes of that foundation.