My understanding is that everyone who knew how Layout 2020 worked was fired, and therefore the project to integrate it into Firefox is effectively dead, meaning Firefox has no plausible way to compete with LayoutNG. I am not trying to be provocative, but that is pretty hard to reconcile with your statement.
I tend to be more on your side of the fence and remain skeptical.
And something that may be used as evidence for my skepticism, is why instead of firing those people, where we know a lot of them are pretty good ones, they did not relocate them instead?
Even if we suppose, they decided to not invest in things that are not considered pragmatic, more to the core of Mozilla... Even if some of them were working coding in Rust for instance.. why dont they just shut down the projects that they considered 'fancy' and relocate those amazing engineers to work into core parts?
For me it smells like something is rot on the top level, and that in turn, will lead to more bad decisions in the coming years, unless something really radical happens (Microsoft did it, so theres hope).
Edit: one more evidence that the things are somehow rot, is that money going to pay for ads (and this is exactly the path taken by Yahoo)
I feel very similarly. This isn't just boneheaded project management, that would be simply killing great projects. Firing huge amounts of top tier talent is absolutely another story altogether.
Respectfully: The Firefox layout team did not have a plan to integrate Layout 2020 (we hadn't yet found a way to ship it incrementally), and doing so was never the basis of our strategy to compete with LayoutNG.
Then what is your strategy to compete with LayoutNG? A concrete roadmap would be a lot more useful than platitudes about how great the Servo team is, which everyone already knows. Nobody seems to know what the future of Firefox looks like, or at least I'm having a hard time finding that information. I don't know about other people, but I would find such a thing much more reassuring.
2 of the people working on Layout 2020 (out of 3 afaik) are French employees, so haven't been fired yet. They may or may not be depending on how the negotiations between the management and employee representatives go.
