this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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worse? If this means that they refocus on things that matter then I consider this better.
What things that matter have insufficient engineering resources at the moment?
Firefox is understaffed, servo was canned, deepspeech was canned, firefox reality was canned, firefox for android TVs was canned, send was canned, the upstream project which the translate feature is based on (bergamot) has been extremely inactive and many more.
each one of these projects was/is "important" in some way, and while there are alternatives now or have been picked up by various third parties, each one had a lot of untapped potential, and lets take a look at the projects alternatives or forks current state.
servo: was picked up by igalia, and is massively far behind, It still has a lot of potential, and progress is quick for what it is, but this is a real embeddable alternative to chrome. Not viable yet, and likely wont be for another year or two.
Deepspeech: Coqui is dead, existing speech to text stuff is all either proprietary or extremely low quality. Only recently have we seen some progress due to speech to speech AI (AI voice replication). Still largely unusable. Some promising projects have cropped up but none are viable yet.
Firefox reality: Wolvic took over, it's in the process of being ported to chromium.
Firefox for android TV: No alternatives even exist, you have TVBro and Vitabrowser are all just barely usable. and they rely on webview, a geckoview browser https://github.com/threethan/LightningBrowser which isn't really usable.
Send: This is the one fork that is actually flourishing. This is really a nifty service at least.
That depends on management, however it definitely could benefit the company.
I think the biggest issue is that a bunch of people are, probably unexpectedly, out of a job.