HN is incredibly inconsistent and two-faced about which Mozilla side projects are "frivolous" and which ought to be defended to the death.
Rust was a side project, asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM, IIRC LetsEncrypt was a side project (or at least a side project of Mozilla engineers, if not official), significant parts of the initial R&D for AV1 and Opus came out of Mozilla, Servo was largely a side project at the point that it got cancelled (the parts that had been largely successful had already been merged into Firefox, the rest was either nowhere near ready or being completely rewritten or both, and the main application for it at the time was some attempts to make a browser for running web apps in VR headsets at high framerates). Thunderbird was a side project.
But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money, like the branded VPN service. Or projects like FirefoxOS, which ultimately failed but still resulted in a lot of improvements to Firefox and web standards. And it wasn't a bad idea either, it just put the cart (mobile OS) before the horse (the web APIs that are needed to make a browser-based mobile OS successful, like access to GPS and IMU hardware, which didn't exist at the time) without the heft to really push through the barriers while competing directly with Apple and Google.
It seems like people define "frivolous side projects" as "anything Mozilla did that didn't end up being incredibly successful" and anything that did become incredibly successful gets taken for granted. "What did Rome ever do for us" rewritten as a tech parable.
(don't tell me that "we're going to create a whole new language to fix security issues in our web browser" didn't sound a bit frivolous in 2012)
Mozilla should've finished rewriting Firefox completely in Rust to give them an Unique Selling Point. They didn't because of management's hubris to build their own mobile operating system to take on Google (its largest financier). Google probably warned them that it would pull back its money if FirefoxOS managed to grab any significant market share. So it was destined to fail from day one.
I'm surprised they didn't integrate their own internet search engine into Firefox. But the contract with Google probably prohibits it and Google would immediately pull the plug on Firefox if it got wind of it anyway.
>Mozilla should've finished rewriting Firefox completely in Rust to give them an Unique Selling Point. They didn't because of management's hubris to build their own mobile operating system to take on Google (its largest financier).
Firefox is like 25 million lines of code. Incredibly complex code, much of it decades old and wrapped in layers of legacy architectural patterns (see XUL, XBL), with severe backwards compatibility considerations (if you break existing websites or people's extensions, they might switch and not come back).
You suggest that NOT rewriting all of that in a couple of years is "hubris"?!? Rust 1.0 didn't happen until 2015 mind you, and Firefox OS was canceled in 2016. The timeline doesn't even make sense.
This kind of nonsense is why I can't take HN seriously when it comes to discussions about Mozilla. Criticisms are perfectly fine (and there are plenty of legitimate criticism to make) but people just abandon all logic when it comes to them for some reason and upvote mindless drivel because Mozilla Bad.
FYI, there are more than 6 million lines of Rust in Firefox, so it's not like it hasn't been happening.
Porting code from one language to another is much faster than writing it from scratch. I'm currently porting my own code from Python to C++ and it's a snap.
Mozilla could've chosen to port the C++ code to Rust, but they didn't because they had other "frivolous" priorities.