I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case.
I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10 years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.
Sounds like a pretty clueless layoff, I guess I expected better from Mozilla than usual corporate derp. If there was truly no dead weight, surely the management could have scaled back their own comp for misdirecting the company? Very few people understand what it means to be a leader in corporate world.
As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised.
At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again.
>Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.
Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser, But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few senior engineers with a decade of experience.
I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.
>I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla.
Even if it did, what can we do?
Giving Chrome more market share gives Google more power to shape the future of web technologies, controversial stuff like Manifest v3 and AMP that HN loves to hate.
Personally I'm rooting for Firefox and Mozilla, not out of being a fan of them, but because I'm afraid of the alternative.
I'm not sure what your question is, there's all sorts of uninteresting complications to the trademarks on the name "Firefox" and how Mozilla deals with it.
Interestingly this appears like the same misconception and misdirection that lets people be deluded by their idea of "science".
A field that should be an ideal, inherently good space for knowledge and humanity to expand is in fact a cesspool of greedy assholes chasing grants and prestige, reflected in the circumstances around journal publishing.
Egos first, then comes science. If your priorities are the other way around, then sincerely good luck to you.
But still beholden to the same rendering engine, and therefore Google's technical decisions about the future of the web. Which is exactly why I would strongly prefer for Mozilla to stay strong, even aside from the non-profit aspect of it.
Still 100% depending on Google, still supporting a near monopolistic position for the browser. Every Chromium fork is part of the problem, not the solution.
To stay in the martialistic metaphor: In this fight you merely wield the weapons your opponent forges for you. If Google decides to dull your edge in the fight for privacy, you have little influence to sharpen it again.
The only reason you are even able to fight this battle is because of the existance of Firefox. All of the Chrome based browsers are toothless tigers without Mozilla.
I am a for-real founder of Mozilla so spare me. I poured 16 years into it, including a bunch of coding as well as recruiting key talent, managing, and strategic decision making. We restarted the browser market when conventional wisdom said it could not be done. This enabled us to restart web standards (WHATWG => HTML5, ECMA-262 new editions). We did that (not you, unless I know you from old days).
But Google is a monopoly now and has tied its browser to its other products to take over adjacent markets, or buy other companies that pioneered such markets. Mozilla depends on Google for most of its revenue, and on a declining (traffic) basis. Reality requires acknowledging my and others work on Mozilla but not dying on that nostalgic hill. Especially not with such arrant mismanagement as is going on there now.
I left Mozilla (brief undistinguished tenure; briefer overlap with you) in part because I felt it simply refused to acknowledge that the Internet of 2005 (dominated by 500M people using web browsers in democracies) was not the Internet of 2015 (3B people, mostly apps on smartphones, tracked by their SIM cards and social networks). I was thrilled to start working on FirefoxOS, then soon experienced it as a kind of doubling-down of denial. Skimming Brave's About page, I don't see anything that addresses the existence of Verizon or Windows OS-level security, let alone WhatsApp. I have no idea the extent to which other people think this way, but to me the silence of Mozilla and Brave on the extent to which browsers on laptops have simply been overwhelmed by the rise of other tools and other layers makes it hard to take their pronouncements seriously.
PS, thanks for saving the Web when you did. It seems genuinely heroic to me.
Brave isn’t making an OS or network (yet), but the browser is still critical, to the degree that bigs spend billions on their own, and now privacy law and user blocking demand are reshaping the $330B+ online ad ecosystem. That is a good place to start fighting for the user, imho.
"User" is a perfect encapsulation of the mindset we need to leave behind. For the people who use web browsers, Google's ad tracking is the least of their worries. Here's Schneier:
On FirefoxOS, of course gal cjones shaver & I launched it (not quite with all the other execs on board) to address the next billion internet users. I’m glad it worked out but sorry the place and name are KaiOSTech — it was Mozilla’s to see through but they faded.
On engine futures, slow forking works, that is how chromium/Blink emerged from from WebKit. New engines taking lots of capital may happen, probably when there is a massive Bell’s Law device class shift. To argue for others without deep pockets dying on the last war’s hill is to wish those others ill (whether you mean it or not). Users deserve better browsers, and the big user value fight is truly a level up from the engine.
The more influence Google gets over the web standards, the more they will steer it in order to raise the barrier of entry for web engine makers. It will also get them more and more power over what can be commercially viable on the web. Making it easier for them to set the rules for everyone on the web seems directly detrimental to your business. As time passes by for Brave to became "big enough" (supposedly to develop a 2020 state of the art web engine), the complexity of starting a new engine from scratch would continue to grow.
It seems that keeping Gecko up to date with the web standards is the only way to have an concurrent implementation for mid-term. This will get more and more difficult to do the more marketshare Blink gets, since it gets easier for Google to shoehorn whatever they want in the web standards by first making it a "de-facto" standard by implementing it in Blink.
This happens already, e.g. AirBnB deploys new content that breaks in Firefox (perhaps not totally; could be cosmetic or a corner case). Webdevs do not test in low share browsers.
Find "slow forking" elsewhere to see my response to your concern that we would have to make an entirely new engine from scratch this year or next. That's not the threat. We strip out Google tracking already and work in W3C to keep them from jamming premature standards through -- if they try turning any such on without other browsers agreeing, we will disable.
You know better than anybody the size of the task of rolling a homemade engine. Is this some vaporware promise or does Brave already started something around this idea?
Not Brendan, but I don't think anyone doubts that Brave would break from the Chromium homogeneity if it were practical to do so.
Production-quality browser engines are not basement projects. Even Google waited until they were the big kid on the block to undertake the project. Per Wired at [0]:
> "The browser matters," CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. "When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, 'We should build our own browser,'" Schmidt says. "And I said no."
> It wasn't the right time, Schmidt told them. "I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war," he says.
Piggy-backing on Google's engine for the time being is effectively turning the Goliath's momentum against itself. If Brave gets a sustainable revenue model and good-enough market penetration, I'd have every expectation that they'd feel liberated to take more direct control over the platform.
My theory: browser of the future will need to support wasm and webgl (well, not webgl, but something similar, providing fast and safe interface for GPU). Of course along with smaller standards like fetch api, but that's manageable.
Most of the useful websites will utilize those tech to build their UI from scratch without using of HTML, CSS or JS.
And HTML, CSS and JS engines could be just another wasm blob. For example parts of chromium engine adapted and compiled for wasm. So it's like jQuery.
I would have given Brave a more serious try if it weren't for that.
(although I very much dislike the payment system, presented as an alternative to the tracking privacy nightmare the web has become. I'm not paying for the difference, that's ridiculous. I saw what they did to the web, I'm not paying to keep them away)
Your comment shows malice (ascribing motives to us), as that blunder was quickly corrected, and the tokens at stake came from our fund. Try Hanlon’s Razor.
Do a search on that handle in connection to Brave/me, notice patterns. Also I do not take ascribing motives to be a sign of low intelligence, per se.
Product and design people who were involved in our blunder had the best of intentions, and I'm not saying they were stupid either, but they missed the mark and we corrected within a month.
To say "fraud" is to accuse us of a crime, deceiving for gain, which we did not do. We were the source of funds, we did not take anything due to anyone. But the product design was on edge of infringing rights to publicity, even if by scraping, and the appearance of donation fraud was bad. Sorry again for this error. The team learned from it.
Both run the Chrome engine! That's not an alternative. You really want all available browsers run the same engine, and one that is developed by Google?? You realize they are at step two of "embrace extend extinguish", right? And you realize that by showing their cards with AMP, they totally aren't above actually doing it too?
What do you suppose will happen when the entire web runs on the Chrome engine? No good things.
There are no good alternatives. The corporations have hijacked the design-by-committee "open standards" by requiring DRM. Hobbyists are shut-out.
Mozilla's FF was once a viable alternative to FAANG privacy monetization, but they're flailing around like their leadership doesn't know what to do but fire engineers and re-organize the deck chairs (org chart) on the Titanic.
I would think the Peter Principle would be better represented if there was someone who was a star on the technical side, but messed up as the CEO in a role they couldn't handle. i.e. if Brendan Eich was CEO and this happened it would be a Peter Principle moment.
All these senior leadership people seem to be straight from the management track. Doesn't seem like they showed their excellence in another discipline and were then misplaced as CEO.
Through the bank my experience is that a technical background with someone growing into a leadership role ultimately creates better results. People whose only skill is "leadership" tend to perform pretty badly.
But the Peter principle, doubtful if it even can be taken seriously, doesn't say anything about this specifically.
I don't know anything about Eich, but I don't really see how he would have been bad for Mozilla as a CEO. He had some controversial views as some have reported, but I don't really think that would have been very relevant, especially if so many people disagree.
All that aside, that the execs at Mozilla get millions and they still lay off 70 people is bad leadership. Really, really bad leadership. And the recent focus seem to underline that failure in my opinion.
Mozilla has done incredible things for the net and technology. Sadly, I think this is subject to change.
> He had some controversial views as some have reported, but I don't really think that would have been very relevant, especially if so many people disagree.
As far as I know, he never expressed what his “views” were. People just found he donated $1000 (which was .002% of the total funds raised) towards a proposition opposing same-sex marriage. There didn’t seem to be anyone who had worked with him, regardless of orientation, who felt uncomfortable with him, or were even aware of it. His contributions having an effect were gated by a democratic vote, and his financial contribution was so small that I can’t imagine it having a substantial effect on the outcome.
To me the fact that he had the maturity to restrict his political discourse to the same means available to any other voter, to his private life, and was discreet enough that nobody knew about it for years, made him look better. Mozilla is supposed to be making the internet accessible to everybody, even people who hold conflicting views.
The quote comes to mind:
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
they do take millions.
the money they take is basically from Google's search deal (thought technically a few other sources too).
The money you donate only goes to the foundation, which does not pay the exec, so any donation does not actually go to exec. The donations are required for the foundation to function at all, regardless of how well the corporation does.
to be honest, the whole thing is a bit of a hack though, because really mozilla functions 100% like a corporation even if they had a real foundation inside. its just a way to ensure that the board is Mitchell Baker - not a bunch of people who want the company to profit. this has good and bad sides, and right now we're definitely seeing the bad sides: exec get paid 800k to 2500k (Mitchell), senior devs get fired for making - i bet, 100k to 300k.
foundations are made to be places where you make the world a better place without having the "i want to make money" motto and that's not what Mozilla does. Mozilla wants money to pay execs and keep on surviving. Many other foundations have similar hacks (or arguably, scams!). The other advantage is that the foundation side does not pay tax of course.
Yes, I'm just using tech as an example. It still requires them to be excellent in any one field and then move into another field on the basis of that excellence, but then fail to have the excellence carry over to the new and different discipline.
None of these people show some kind of original standout excellence in a different field that was lost in their transition to Mozilla leadership roles.
You are introducing a change of “field” where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle talks only of skills from lower level position being insufficient for competency at higher level. No change of field in the standard definition. I’ve read about, heard, and used the PP for decades without any change of field or tech vs mgmt being required to use the phrase correctly. It may be that higher level management requires training in a different field from lower, but in many firms it does not exclude promotion from below. Some of the best CEOs confound the PP to rise from the ranks.
I think your comment falls into the same trap that Mozillas leadership probably fell into: Middle manager and top management are different, even if they look superficially the same. Not every good team lead or even department lead is a good fit for being part of a companies leadership.
Mozilla has way too many VP and above employees that are useless (check what the once VP engineering, then interim CTO, then fellow is actually doing for instance). They should let go a few, but as far as I know, none has been fired. Gotta keep getting twice the bonus percentage as regular ICs...
Well a bit further down Mitchell Baker is being skewered for making $2,500,000 annually. I'd assume that the multiplier at Mozilla is much, much lower than 70x.
Hardly any executive is just getting paid 7m in cash. They are typically paid in financial instruments that are time locked for several years. The media however, will go bananas on reporting about how they are paid crazy amounts when these instruments are finally unlocked, ignoring the tax implications, the lack liquidity and massive risk involved, and also just how much the rest of the market has increased during the time period of those instruments being locked.
When you pay yours executives a modest amount using such a method, it's often very feasible for this to be a massive windfall at the time of maturity (e.g. $1 options becoming $6, etc.).
> I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode.
Just curious, but could Cranelift (or rustc_codegen_cranelift, I'm not sure which would be the closest) also acquire a C-transpiling backend, making it a viable replacement for mrustc? There might be quite a few people willing to fund that sort of work, since it could suffice to bring Rust to a whole lot of platforms that people care about.
Yes, it's plausible that were Rust to adopt Cranelift as a supported backend, you could use Cranelift as an intermediary to translate Rust MIR (via Cranelift CLIF) into C. Outputting functional-but-horrifying C would not be terribly difficult.
The CLIF format is low level but relatively architecture-independent.
I'm one of the founders. We are looking for senior compiler engineers (GraalVM) and senior WebGL developers (Rust ) in our team. We are doing a visual programming language for data science and we just got funding of $2.5M. We'd love to chat :)
Kraken is hiring Senior SW Engineers with extensive Rust experience for our backend services team. The team is remote. Check out the link below to apply or get in touch at leon at kraken dot com
Your experience seems like it would be great for embedded flight software development. Please email tyler.butler at lmco.com if you or others in your situation would be interested in working on NASA's Orion program.
Your experience may be invaluable to us -- we're building a homomorphic virtual machine for machine learning, all open source and in Rust. Send me an email to pascal.paillier@zama.ai.
Stupid question, but doesn't Mozilla make around $500MM revenue a year, and have a little over 1000 employees.
That seems like it should be profitable.
Well, it's been a truly amazing place to work, and I've enjoyed it so much, right up until being laid off today. Really the smartest and coolest engineers I've ever known and the best community! I have had my hand in shipping every version of Firefox since around version 30 and it's been great. Especially working in such an open environment. Onward to the next adventure.
As someone who jumped from chrome since quantum came out, I can't appreciate Mozilla enough, sadly things are not made to last...
I'm guilty too having used such great tool but haven't directly contributed anything.
But from what I hear, it seem the layoffs are directed not by technical reasons, and amazing people were let go. In this case, I fear for the future of firefox, which are not well protected or funded like the open sourced titan Linux.
actually I'm pretty sure that the money goes to the mozilla innovation fund and not directly to mozilla? not sure how easily they can withdraw money from there.
I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families - many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic culture, all around.
"I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures."
Mozilla was captured by career executives and people with an ageneda - and money for years was not spend on engineering but squandered. I've been using FF since Mosaic days on and off (lately on again as Brave doesn't block more and more ads) and I'm said there is no alternative (FF hangs Twitch for me for which I need to use Chrome, WHY?)
I doubt if this is just with Mozilla. Things like these are come as job perks when you enter management. And this one of the reasons why you must aspire to be a manager and not a programmer on the longer run.
>>The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures.
They will always come up with reasons why they need to do this. The most common one is they need to be fresh with brains in clouds so that they can to talk to clients etc well. And they are doing this for the employees good.
“Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”
- George Orwell.
>>This is not even included in comp.
Things like this generally go in some top level budget and the are approvals are not even audited at item level spending. Like no asks if you had a $100 dinner. It just goes into a group by statement in some dashboard. This is also why so many managers spend lavishly. It's almost anonymous spending. And money once given is never asked back.
If you think this is saying something. Wait till you discover how comp works in those roles. Pretty much anything given is never audited and its given fairly unchecked. Big bonuses and stock grants are just every day activities.
As in Indian who worked in the US for a while, I've even seen Green cards handed to manager's pets like candies. Again no asks questions, no audits done. Its just how awesome managerial jobs are.
>>The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last.
I doubt if military or any people structure works this way.
I used to work at Stanford, once upon a time.
Our boss got us training for a week around Hollywood with a Jag as a rental. Our boss'es boss seriously put in to have helicopter rides to work, and they definitely had $100+ per diem and expense accounts. What's interesting is when your boss has self-approval over their own budget and expenses. They're not really big on accountability so much as expanding prestige and pyramids on their sides of the org charts.
Similarly, Big 4 and MBB tend to have healthy expense accounts and fringe benefits.
PS: One of my coworkers kept a counter for all-hands meetings because previous said entitled boss'es boss tended to go full mission statement by overusing a particular "motivational" word during their carefully-choreographed, dog-and-pony PowerPoint. Dilbert and Dogbert would've both doubled hand/pawpalmed.
>>What's interesting is when your boss has self-approval over their own budget and expenses.
As you go up, its hard to say no to your friends. Because you might need a bailout from them someday, so you don't go cheap on them. Some one asks for money they don't say no.
>>They're not really big on accountability so much as expanding prestige and pyramids on their sides of the org charts.
There is also this thing that if you look rich and affluent you tend to command respect. That is from where the "Dress for the job" kind of saying comes from.
Since you said Stanford...I am more or less sure your 'boss' is your advisor or some Professor?
Well, in that case, he really doesn't need to show anyone what he is doing with his funds (well not true technically, but its still pretty flexible than any company)
$500/night for a hotel in NYC sounds relatively cheap. $400 is about the lowest you can find. If you find $350, I would really recommend you not stay there.
I think you're out of touch with pricing or have a very high bar for what you consider acceptable in a hotel. When I was in New York last month I paid $125 for a perfectly pleasant room with good online reviews (in the top 20% or so of NYC hotels on TripAdvisor). It was well located in Manhattan walking distance from most of what I wanted to do and I had no complaints.
Price and value have very little correlation, especially in such a narrow band. Airbnb NYC Manhattan ranges from $35 to $326 with a high confidence interval, peaking at $95. 5 stars with excellent reviews costs from $153 - 295 on Orbitz. In conclusion, you're talking out of your posterior without evidence or experience.
Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops large and small over the past 10 or so years.
In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop, and manage.
But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs, though usually with mixed results.
For Mozilla, axing quality and security first is a bad look when those are crucial aspects of a privacy-first company value.
It sounds organizational. The one reference to QA is that the leads were let go, which might mean that the teams were re-orged under a product aligned structure.
There is a lot of "shift-left" emphasis out there, but ultimate their is a conflict of interest problem. I think there's no need to go beyond the "we are losing money" explanation and QA is considered more of a cost center.
We see this at Raygun with our Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring products (measuring errors, and end user experience in general). Nearly all power users are more likely to be in product, or very senior/executive developers.
Very low engagement out of QA. I'm not sure if they just have a way they like to work, or they think that if they exist then no bugs make it to prod (don't laugh, plenty of our twitter adverts get comments from folks thinking you don't need any monitoring if you have a tester on the team or if a dev writes unit tests).
Understand how the end user experiences your software. That's the actual source of the truth.
I wonder if it's improvements in automation or if QA responsibilities are increasingly rolling up into standard developer roles or because the line between QA and dev is blurring (e.g., software testing now requires stronger dev/automation skills so the QA job looks more like standard software engineering)?
I agree with the concept that it is turning into something else, as I see DevOps/SRE/CI/PM people doing QA work through trying to just make the thing go. It just is leaving a lot of gaps in longevity, complex setup, and building tests either manual or automated to do that better. In the last dozen or so teams I've interfaced with this is just getting worse as I'm seeing lots of situations where things like backup/restore breaks from the last hotfix, upgrade a system a few sequential versions, and only covering X-1/X critical features in ordinary testing. These are things that a traditional QA team would cover after it burns the business/org in one way or another, but since it's not a core focus of some of these people covering parts of the same role it's leaving a lot of not-obvious gaps in a lot of groups.
I don't think automation or shift of testing responsibilities to developers is harming QA role in any way, it's just the first candidate for layoffs, because it does not have immediate impact on business. Independent SQA is still relevant, even it it becomes a developer specialization.
Developers are just turning into glorified hatracks at this point, and the results are discouraging. It's no wonder that people burn out when they are expected to do ever more and more with less.
I feel like we (the industry) have forfeited. I did a stint as a SQA manager. Coming from a dev background, I took it very seriously, totally immersed myself in the domain, transmuted from skeptical to true believer.
I honestly don't know what to make of today's state of affairs.
For example, today's business analysts often do many of the tasks we used to associate with the QA role. Testing, verification, liaison with customers. Did we just rename the role?
Did "Agile" smother QA? Until very recently, I've never heard an Agile explanation for how to do QA/Test. I mean really do it, not just wave your arms. The "Test Into Prod" thesis, strategy, whatever, is the first intellectually honest, actionable, constructive (criticizable) methodology I've seen which is tailored for our new market realties.
I've never understood Agile. My teams were way more "nimble" (to use a different adjective) using PMI, critical path, iterative, lightest weight decision making, front loading work, managing risk, and so forth. All the battle hardened time proven stuff people untrained in project management pejoratively call "waterfall".
One correct criticism of all failing methodologists, including Agile, is lack of feedback loops. The "throwing over the wall" of work downstream. We designed feedback loops into our processes, some of what today would be called CI/CD. We were definitely not waterfall. (Another is managing transaction costs, something Agile has manifestly failed to do.)
> For example, today's business analysts often do many of the tasks we used to associate with the QA role. Testing, verification, liaison with customers. Did we just rename the role?
The person asking for a features should absolutely be the one signing off on the feature.
Mozilla uses AFL, which is a genetic algorithm that tests code paths. They are also transitioning to Rust, which will give them a much bigger safety guarantee over most of their code and a much smaller audit surface for the rest.
They're transitioning quite slowly, a sibling comment mentions https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_Components this page. Even accounting for how they're obviously prioritizing their efforts to get the best bang for the buck, there will be a lot of critical C/C++ code in Mozilla products for a pretty long time.
American Fuzzy Lop? It's a fuzzer. I've never heard of a fuzzer described as a genetic algorithm that tests code paths, but that is technically correct.
A fuzzer is not going to replace unit tests or good SDLC, which often involves QA.
Mozilla is good at everything except making browsers. rr is the best debugger I've used. I wonder if there's a way for them to monetize Rust. It seems impossible to monetize a programming language without owning a platform e.g. Microsoft (*.NET), Apple (Swift), Borland (Delphi), JetBrains (Kotlin). FirefoxOS for mobile with Rust as the first-class citizen would have been huge for them. Maybe it's not too late. Take note Mozilla.
If there's anything they're going to be in the history books for, it's going to say Rust, not Firefox.
Mozilla is very good at making browsers. Making browsers is incredibly hard and it's amazing that Firefox is competitive with Chrome given a fraction of the development resources Chrome has.
Mozilla has made some big mistakes, but so have the other browser vendors. It's easier to brush over your mistakes when you have an ocean of resources and market power.
Could be, but it's awfully hard to say. What would have been cut to make room for embedding work, and what would the impact of cutting it have been? Did we know enough at that time to make a good decision about that?
Given that the embedding API would have had to change dramatically due to e10s pretty soon after 2010 (and maybe again due to Fission), I think 2010 was probably a bad time to promote a stable embedding API.
Embedding doesn't rank high on my list of Mozilla's mistakes.
I assume he meant "absolutely it really would be that underfunded", because that is true.
Elsewhere in these comments people have estimated that Google pays at least 1000 people to work on Chrome. That's about the size of all of Mozilla, and a lot of those Mozilla staff are necessarily not working directly on Firefox --- you need HR, accountants, marketing, etc. Also, Google pays its developers significantly more than Mozilla does, on average; Mozilla developers tend to get big raises when they move to Google.
And that's just direct spending. Historically Google has done a lot of Chrome marketing on its Web sites, which is prime advertising real estate that would cost astronomical amounts of money if it was for sale. And historically Google has paid hardware and software vendors to preinstall Chrome, which is also expensive, though I'm not sure how much that happens these days.
I've not seen any estimates that Google employs 1000 devs to work on Chrome. Only that in the more than decade long history of Chromium 1000 Google devs have worked on it in total.
I don't want to dig through hundreds of comments again --- but as someone who worked on Firefox for 15 years and knows a bunch of Chrome people, I believe those estimates.
One contribution we can always use is people writing and talking about rr. One of the biggest things holding rr back is so many people just don't know it exists (or they know it exists but they don't appreciate what it could do for them).
Mozilla is already in the history books for Firefox, any way you slice it. Firefox has been the only serious refuge from proprietary browsers and their vendors for nearly two decades, and has made history in many ways. It would only be omitted if the book was written by a competitor's PR department.
Quality and popularity are rarely correlated, but such metrics are even further confounded when you have monopolistic factions like Google and MS pumping huge money into user acquisition for their competing platforms. It's ridiculous to imply that Firefox is being rejected by users just because Google has been dumping millions into getting people switched to Chrome (and doing so not only with marketing dollars, but increasingly with bully tactics).
Indeed, and if you count the value of in-kind support for Chrome, such as constant "switch to Chrome" advertising on the most important Web real estate in the world, we're talking billions, not millions.
I would love someone to estimate an actual figure for total Chrome marketing spend including in-kind. I'm guessing it would be well over $10B.
If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$.
I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.
Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.
> If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$.
And further contribute to the browser monoculture?
> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.
And you've reported this, I assume?
> Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.
Really? I explicitly avoid Chrome on my computer because it can't handle the web without chewing through my RAM.
> Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.
I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.
This is a total non-response. They're not actually under an obligation to report a bug and use their time - Mozilla, however, is obliged to make their browser work properly, and to ensure the team that's working on it is properly staffed/resourced/competent.
Your response is downplaying someone's actual concern by acting like it's wrong that they don't spend their spare time participating in open source software development.
Furthermore, this "browser monoculture" argument is ridiculous. WebKit and Blink are both open source, and Mozilla is increasingly becoming what Opera was back with Presto: a lone engine with quirks that nobody wants to waste their time working around.
If Mozilla gave up Gecko tomorrow and forked WebKit (a la what Blink is) I don't think I'd bat an eye. This is like what junior programmers wind up learning at some point - nobody cares what the code looks like, just that it does what it's expected to.
I say this all as someone who's contributed to some Mozilla repos, has a massive personal investment in Rust (and has read a good chunk of Servo, and liked it), and has been a fan since the Mozilla Suite days.
> Your response is downplaying someone's actual concern by acting like it's wrong that they don't spend their spare time participating in open source software development.
Anything that broken would be fixed, almost instantly, had they reported it. I am not very amenable to people who discuss their very extreme personal anecdotes that they have failed to even put even the basic (some may even say courteous) amount of help and instead talk about their experience like it's typical.
> Furthermore, this "browser monoculture" argument is ridiculous. WebKit and Blink are both open source, and Mozilla is increasingly becoming what Opera was back with Presto: a lone engine with quirks that nobody wants to waste their time working around.
Open source does not ensure that a monoculture will not develop; both WebKit and Blink are financed by billion (trillion?) dollar corporations that have almost complete control over what will or will not be worked on or merged in. Every engine has its own quirks and slant on how it interprets the web standard: if WebKit was the dominant browser today we'd all be even more hesitant to roll out WebM or WebGL 2.
> If Mozilla gave up Gecko tomorrow and forked WebKit (a la what Blink is) I don't think I'd bat an eye. This is like what junior programmers wind up learning at some point - nobody cares what the code looks like, just that it does what it's expected to.
Who exactly are you likening to "junior programmers"?
> I say this all as someone who's contributed to some Mozilla repos, has a massive personal investment in Rust (and has read a good chunk of Servo, and liked it), and has been a fan since the Mozilla Suite days.
And you know my personal history on this pretty well too, but you'll notice I'm advocating for Mozilla in this case.
There already is a browser monoculture. Even Microsoft's default browser is now Chromium with a different logo on it. The way to get diversity in browsers is to have adoption. There are hundreds of alternative browsers out there, but they do not diversify the browser market because they are unusable. You want diversity of browser adoption, not diversity of implementation.
There just aren't enough users out there to stick to a bad browser for religious reasons. It has to actually be better.
The browser market is as free of a market as you can get. Chromium has won. It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE. It's basically too late to catch up. While trying to catch up, they will lose what little market share they have left, and the result will be an undisputable browser monoculture. What Mozilla can offer is a different frontend (or "userspace" if you will) to Chromium. That is the realistic approach.
> I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.
desktop user agents: 8% and dropping, about to be overtaken by Internet Explorer (lmao)
> The browser market is as free of a market as you can get.
Given all the UA-sniffing and purposefully sending broken or degraded sites to various browsers going on nowadays (including on Google properties), no, it's not.
> It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE
Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world, and incessantly being featured on the front page of the biggest (90%+) search machine in the world.
I'm skeptical of this argument. Advertising companies shill garbage to us all the time. If it were bad, people would have stopped using it. As strong as the Google brand is, I don't think people are using it just because they were told to. Consumers, even the least technical of them, are still savvy enough to notice "slow internet". Their friends tell them to switch to Chrome, then they stop complaining about it, done.
> Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world
Yes, this is the reason why it became the best. It had loads of talented developers deployed on it for years and years. You can either complain about it or be happy that it happened and you have access to the fruits of this labor for free.
> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.
Of course this is not the experience of the vast majority of Firefox users, so it's pointless to suggest that this means something about Firefox's overall quality. You can easily find people making the same sorts of complaints about Chrome.
Firefox gigantic leaks happen to me on Windows too. Depending on the mood, it ends with a crash or with Windows warning me that it will kill some processes if that keeps going on.
Some mornings I'm beachballing for my whole first coffee. Eventually I just wind up power cycling the mac if I can't open a shell prompt with which to `pkill -9 plugin-container`....
I'm on Mac too and I've never seen anything like this. The odd tab will crash (particularly after I started using containers extensively and more than one adblocker/anti-tracker), but that's it.
> pkill -9 plugin-container
Ahhh, ok - that's not FF, that's a crap plugin (likely Flash). It's the browser equivalent of blaming Windows when a crap taiwanese driver gets it stuck. You could try uninstalling all that crap.
It could be a genuine leak, but it sounds an awful lot like Firefox using 28 GiB of virtual memory.
Firefox often appears to use large amounts of memory in top / htop, but I believe that's just reported address space allocations. The RES column gives a more accurate depiction of memory usage.
It was real memory. I know the difference. I only noticed because I got an OOM error in my Java program and X11 froze, couldn't use my mouse. This happened multiple times with different heavy duty JS websites, particularly SPAs.
Could you clarify "recently" a bit more? Clearly it's after the release of uBlock Origin, but I'm pretty sure that there was a big effort to clean up memory use a few years ago.
Maybe it's poor Linux support, I have a distressingly high 4 digit number of tabs open on a Windows box and I don't think I've seen it go past 8gb with multiple weeks of runtime.
What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs? How can you even find what you are looking for? (Honest question, no attack)
I hardly ever have more than 10 tabs open, and aggressively close everything I am not working with. I also shut down my browser twice a day (2 working locations) and never restore the previous session. I do bookmark some pages, but as a matter of fact I notice that I hardly ever refer to my bookmarks. I don't have the feeling that I am missing out on anything.
Fail to go back and clear them out, mostly. Most were left open because of something relevant at the time, so I mostly need to spend a little time going through and nuking or nothing. There's been little friction due to leaving them open so it hasn't been a priority.
Pretty much the same thing that leaves some people with tens of thousands of messages in their inboxes (I deal with someone who does that and it makes my teeth itch, so my inbox isn't so bad).
Right, my private Gmail inbox has more than 70,000 conversations (no clue how many messages). Using search I typically find quickly what I want.
As a programmer who has spent significant time with performance work, having useless tabs in a browser would hurt me. But that Google has to search through a bit longer list of messages I can accept as the typical wastefulness of computing these days. (I am old enough to have done time-sharing on 4 MB with 11 other students on their VT100)
Type '%' (no quotes) followed by parts of the URL or title or both in the URL bar. Searches only your open tabs. I can usually find exactly what I want quite quickly.
Sadly, the sites out there have changed far more than any of the browsers have, and not for the better. They load a ton of crap that does not contribute to the value delivered to the user, but instead contribute value to the site owner and the dozen layers of intermediaries in between user and site owner.
If you have a limited number of sites that blow FF memory usage up like that within a limited time (and that you're willing to share in a bug report) then that might be something helpful to report. Failing that, there may be some telemetry available that might be able to identify problem areas, though I'm not sure what details would be.
Indeed. I keep Brave around just to handle the 5% of sites that are decidedly not FF friendly.
FF -- fix text sizing. As an example, old-style Reddit renders wonderfully on Brave and terribly terribly small on FF mobile. Another tester site is BOFH.
This is probably too late for anybody to notice but I got FF memory usage down significantly by:
1) Not using the recommended performance settings. Setting 'Content Process Limit' to 2 removed more than half the memory usage IIRC. There are other settings that you will need to go to about:config to change like what size images are cached to memory etc.
2) Use the 'Auto Tab Discard' extension. You will have to configure this to not discard tabs on certain sites or you may lose info you have typed into a webpage. Fortunately this is easily configured by right clicking a tab.
At the moment Firefox is using 700MB to display 5 tabs. 4 HN and on Reddit tab. Given that these sites are close to just text I find 700MB absurd, but that is just the web these days.
> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.
Not sure what was going on with your experience, but I use Firefox on x86_64 machines with far less than 28 GiB of RAM daily and several extensions (including uBlock Origin), and I've never had anything like that happen. I'm not sure how JS-heavy the sites I visit are though, as I don't have any issues, so I don't really pay attention to that.
Strangely after Quantum, Firefox worked worse for me. It is still the case, with Firefox regularly pausing all network activity for a few seconds or even a minute, so I am stuck with websites stuck loading or video stuck loading for a decent amount of time. The UI and everything functions, it is just the network communicating that is stuffed, so anything that requests something has to wait until Firefox's network part decides to respond. I am used to it now, but this happened when Quantum came out and has remained the same for me since.
You were probably not using a production-grade Mozilla build, or a recent one. All sorts of shenanigans go on in the Linux world when it comes to builds.
I used the official, automatically-updating build from getfirefox dot com. Package managers are always outdated, which you don't want for browsers (CVE madness).
> In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this decision
I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place.
I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product on the server component. As much as I hated Lotus Notes, something between Lotus Notes, Outlook and MS Teams could be something great and that the Mozilla org would be in a good position to create.
I know they may have good reach with the VPN service as well... I'm unsure how they can reduce security, qa and release management people when orchestration, automation and verification are such huge needs.
They get enough income from search (for now) that they could concentrate on best of breed tech, build mindshare from that, then re-introduce marketing for critical mass.
But this is a game they could never win, if they try to compete against google on marketing.
Where Mozilla could have the upper hand, is the idealistic community.
They would do the marketing, if FF would align with their goals ... which seems to be more and more a problem.
I was really alienated when FF tried to sell me advertisement as a feature some time ago. Those moves destroy trust. "Ah, so just another bullshit company. No thanks. Why should I support them?"
But the community and people who actually love open technology, privacy and the internet and don't want to hand it all over to google, facebook and co. are still there.
If you believe that Mozilla has no chance in the marketing game against Google, then maybe this is proof of Google's monopoly position and maybe this will convince you it is time for antitrust action against Google.
I think a lot of us came to that conclusion years ago, and that's why we want to like Firefox. Unfortunately I have not yet ascended to my rightful throne as emperor of earth, so I cannot simply snap my fingers and command the dismantling of Google.
If Mozilla were throwing resources at a legal battle against Google, I'd be skeptical but interested. But marketing? I've never seen a paid advertisement for Firefox. Where the hell is that money even going? They should have purged their entire marketing staff after that "Mr Robot" advertisement debacle, but instead there was little other than half-hearted apologies.
Mozilla's competition is default apps and chrome which I've only seen advertise on google and youtube, on the random day I use a computer without an ad blocker. Not like Safari is putting out any ads, or that Edge has any fans outside of geriatrics who don't know any better.
The competition (chrome) is just enjoying the runaway success of being the household name for over 10 years, simply by being a better product than firefox was 10 years ago when the market shares were much closer.
If firefox wants to enjoy this runaway success that chrome has, mozilla should steal the playbook of being the contrarian option for tech minded people just like how chrome was the foil to IE and Safari a decade ago before it became the dominant web browser. The focus should therefore be on dev tooling, not marketing, and the rest of the user base will follow the devs.
Firefox got where it was by being faster and less bloated than the current alternatives at the time. Then it lost its way completely and Chrome was that and took all the market share. There’s a theme here. People like fast browsers that just work and don’t do a lot of extra crap. If Firefox ever wants to take market share this is a great time to do that with how bloated Chrome is becoming and how much privacy it constantly encroaches on. If Mozilla is smart it will figure this out and go for the kill. Is Mozilla smart? I keep trying to use Firefox and every time I go back to Chrome (or Brave or Safari on my phone) because Firefox is too slow, it changes radically every version, and things just don’t work right in it that do work on other browsers. I don’t need marketing, I just need them to make the browser better. I’m the target audience; I want to switch!
I started using chrome originally 10ish years ago because the company tech person said it was good and fast (I was not in tech at the time). I think you’re right.
They pour a ton of money into events like SXSW. They had huge displays of their new branding up and down Congress Ave a couple of years ago, with several other "brand awareness" things going on throughout the conference.
Actually, given the current demographics of SXSW, that probably IS good marketing to potential customers. SXSW now costs quite a bit and is often a hipster corporate management perk. That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to.
Lone gone are the days where SXSW was a bunch of grubby hippies listening to a bunch of crappy bands. Now it's a bunch of hipster drones listening to a bunch of crappy mainstream pop artists.
I see a big gap in the market when it comes to self-hosted Office 365 or G Suite alternatives. Microsoft Exchange is a beast both in terms of complexity as well as licensing cost, and I think most small/medium orgs don't actually need the complexity which is why they're going towards G Suite which is a less complex product to manage.
I can see them succeeding with an open-core enterprise e-mail & calendar solution where the base features are free to use and an enterprise version with extra features, like the Gitlab model with self-hosting as the key selling point.
Which is partly why Mozilla is in a better position than most, being mainly tech and open-source at their heart. They are making enough off of search that they could create a product then sell/saas it themselves.
> I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place.
Which worked because IE 6 was a dumpster fire for both users and developers. Developers were looking for any excuse to jump ship off it.
The browser market in 2020 is 'good enough' for users and developers. It's like gasoline - nobody cares which refinery the gas in their tank comes from.
I kinda disagree, as a huge Mozilla fan. I think their technical development is fine, if not fantastic (especially for all they're doing with WebRender/Servo).
Personally I'd like to see them roll out paid privacy products. Like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. I currently pay for that, and if Mozilla rolled out a similar service across the Firefox ecosystem I'd gladly pay for that too.
I'm not saying their development isn't fine, but they're laying off the people that support development... which will make it worse, when they're spending far in excess of that cost in marketing and imho not even getting the best value out of that space.
> I'm not sure why they don't (...) concentrate on community outreach from the developer side.
Unless e.g. Lin Clark was among those who were laid off, they've been doing some excellent developer-side community outreach through the Mozilla Hacks blog in the past couple of years.
It's hard to say one way or another without the data. How big is the marketing team and budget/headcount/overhead? What's their ARR? How many QA people were laid off and at what salary ranges? How big was QA compared to other departments?
I seem to recall some article about their expenses a couple years ago, and that their marketing department and budget exceeded development and infrastructure combined.
I'm surprised they're laying off security and QA, considering how focused on privacy and security their marketing campaign seems to be. In the last 6 months, I think 90% of cases where I saw Mozilla mentioned were about how it's the 'hot new browser' for the privacy-concerned. Although, perhaps, that's more to do with a good marketing team and less with a sprawling security department? Would love to see some expert opinion on what this means for the company's current trajectory.
Unless they really were redundant, firing QA/Security/Release engineers strikes me as an act of desperation. Cutting back on those disciplines will really jack up the interest rate on your tech debt.
It was Microsoft (or other company I don't recall) that every 5 years would lay off 5% of its work force (the least capable or productive people) - this would cause those that remain to work harder next year.
Then, they would open positions. Rinse and repeat.
Microsoft used to do stack ranking which puts everyone on a curve and ranks them against each other but they got rid of it when the regime at the top changed.
This sort of ruthless management is a way to destabilise the workforce and disrupt the team. What I've often found is management might cull the worst performing people but the best people follow them voluntarily because of the toxic culture, and then there's the fact that the worst performing person in the best performing team might be better than the best performing person in the worst performing team.
I think they don't do that any more. For one thing, it was too easy to game the system by hiring lousy people as targets for the next year's firings. And if a group was all good people... you ended up firing someone anyway.
> Also people just game the system and only do what will get them a good review.
Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review? This reminds me of the xkcd comic about the bots starting to have constructive messages to avoid spam filters. Mission fucking accomplished.
You get what you measure, for better or for worse.
But what tends to happen with stack ranking is that people only do what their direct manager values and rewards in the short term, and avoid other work that really needs to be done, or what the actual customer wants. Your boss becomes your only customer. You invent redundant new shit because that's more impressive than fixing your existing shit that's broken. This can be incredibly damaging to the quality of the product, and also to the careers of anyone the boss just doesn't personally like for whatever reason. It creates a monoculture of like-minded, demographically similar people who suck up and shit down.
You even can see pathological behaviors like managers purposefully recruiting low performers as sacrificial lambs to offer up at the next review time.
Companies got rid of the rank-and-yank system in the last decade or so for a very good reason.
Nope, because incentives are not aligned to that extent. The whole point of a company is that it's not a pure market where incentives are everything by definition; it's a rather more complex organization and these often rely on "soft" constraints as better sources of drive, guidance, cooperation/coordination etc. If you're relying on "hard" incentives (like firing the 'worst' 5% no matter what) you'll invariably distort behaviors in ways that are hard to even predict, and are almost never what you really want.
Note, the fatal mistake in Microsoft’s case was not laying off the bottom 5%, it was laying off the bottom ranked people WITHIN small groups, even if said groups were doing very well.
If you’re going to lay off the bottom x% every n period of time, it might be fine. But you’d better be damn sure your metrics are good (sales comes to mind though even then there’s a lot of ambiguity). If you’re dropping the weakest performer in groups you’re not only going to create the most toxic environment ever, you’re going to lay off plenty who are probably middle of the bell curve.
Microsoft’s plan was, in addition to being unwise, just poorly reasoned statistically.
Look at the changes to the executive team at Mozilla in 2017 and 2018 if you want to see the root of the problem.
Look at the changes Chief People Office Michael D'Angelo introduced (after leaving Pinterest), especially the multi-tier bonus system that crystallized the executive hierarchy and made ironclad the gap between Mozilla leaders and the Mozilla proletariat. How much does he make?
Ask yourself- what value or improvement did Chris Lin, VP of Mozilla's horrid IT, hired from Facebook, bring to the company? And look at his overpaid group of Directors, who do not have a single win between them that improved Mozilla's bottom line. Why did they hire a leader from Facebook? Were they trying to sink the ship?
Ask yourself- with all of Mozilla's failed marketing initiatives, why has the CMO never been held to account?
There was great hope that Mitchell Baker would return and clean house where it was needed, starting with many of the execs. This layoff, with so far no indication of leaders being held to account, is a sign that things are not going to improve.
It's a shame, because the people of Mozilla are the finest people you could ever work with. They don't deserve this leadership. The rank and file at Mozilla are amazing, though some of the best were let go today.
As an outsider there are constantly small details that are off in product and marketing that hint to this. Its really sad to see, I keep using firefox and get a little sad every time I see these signs that this company does not know what it wants to do. In many ways it behaves like a public company without long term direction
They seem to be very dependent on search engine revenue: 91% and 93% for their revenue. Once again, I feel she is worried Mozilla will be cut off very soon.
Still feels like really bad news for Firefox. Microsoft cut their QA people for Windows. Windows 10 to this day still has update issues.
I do agree that Mozilla needs more products to stay competitive. Especially when the Google docs team doesn't fix issues that make Google sheets very frustrating to enter data into with Firefox. Just listen to Linus(TechTips) complain about Google Calendar issues when he pays for the commercial version of GSuite.
I wonder if Mozilla gets cut off from search engine revenue means they will start to develop products/fund OSS competitors to GSuite?
Still, when you introduce new products, that is when you need Q/A the most.
However, Pocket is not one these products. I disable the pocket button on every new Firefox install I do. They have an entire page on it in their financial statement.
And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m). Nintendo's management took a pay cut during their Wii U years before the Switch. And that is what management in general should be doing well before a layout.
The Mozilla steering committee certainly didn't consider this when "we plan to eliminate about 70 roles from across MoCo... ...(were) considered as part of our 2020 planning and budgeting exercise only after all other avenues were explored."
I don't understand Mozilla. How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends $450m annually and dedicates $43m just for future endeavors? Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?
> How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends
Well, I mean, they started off as a HTTP server company with a not lightweight browser, won an antitrust case but lost the war, and reformed as a non profit. Or, well, a for profit company wholly owned by a non profit. At which point they went about rebuilding Netscape suite, the one with mail clients and calendars (and IRC and nntp), as open source software. Then some rogue employees and interns thought 'nobody wants this shit' (https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...) and firefox was born. Well, phoenix, because engineers never do trademark searches when naming projects. So yea, I don't think anyone fully understands Mozilla, except maybe a few annoyed IRS auditors.
I don't know when Mozilla started taking money for search engine placement, but whoever invented the idea should get a few mil, because now that nobody buys HTTP servers, it's all Netscape/Mozilla has left.
From Google's perspective, it's quite easy to see why they fund chrome: each user that converts to chrome is money they dont have to pay Mozilla. Somehow, despite that depressing metric of user share, mozilla's been making more money every time search bar placement contracts are up for renewal. Some of that was likely competition in search engine space, with both Bing and Yahoo under Marissa chomping for some revenue. I guess the layoffs signal that isn't going to happen again?
Or maybe it signals that you don't need users if your main value anymore is to prove to the DOJ there is no monopoly?
Not accurate. Netscape was the browser company, with servers too (I worked with the McCool twins and Ari Luotonen in first month on board). I have no idea what "not lightweight" means but Netscape took over the market from Mosaic and pioneered SSL (now TLS) for secure e-commerce. This is all pretty well known and many still alive who saw it. Taher El Gamal among them. Why do people make up fables on HN?
From Twitter I was sad to be reminded of Netscape 4, a late and bloated mess that shipped first on Windows. Not Netscape 2 or 3, which were baseline here.
It also launched javascript, but I think we can agree that isn't bloat.
But you're right, I totally forgot about the time in which Navigator was sold, rather than given away[2]. Please forgive me, this was a time before the PC in my childhood home had TCP internet, so I was more reliant on libraries and school labs at the time.
Assuming that Chrome team have thousands of engineers, designers and PMs (which is a pretty reasonable number as a modern browser is comparable to OS), I expect them to spend more than a billion each year. Mozilla is really in short of resources.
Like who for instance? Basically only Blink, WebKit and Gecko are usable non-toy web engines these days, and they're all backed by big companies with deep pockets and many engineers.
Opera's long gone, now it's a chromium fork. Internet Explorer is gone, now MS uses a chromium fork. The hype new browsers like Brave and Vivaldi are just chromium under the hood.
It's like the difference between making a Linux distro and maintaining a full OS.
My reasoning is that Google's investment is massive and just because they're throwing money and people at a problem doesn't make it necessary for everyone else to do so as well.
Just writing a javascript runtime alone isn't just a "handful of engineers." WebGL stack? WebRTC? Layout engine/compositor? Notifications? You're kidding me, there is no small team in the world that could ship a browser stack end to end.
WebKit is a bad example, considering the KHTML history alone. These things don't just take devpower, but time - consider, for example, this: http://www.ekioh.com/flow
From what I understand, that team is relatively small in comparison, but actually does have this widely-ish deployed. So it theoretically could be done with less... but it's still insane to even consider. This isn't simple, and anyone who's trying to imply otherwise is wrong.
The other commentator you're responding with also never discloses they worked with Apple previously, while pretty much endlessly pumping up their work here. shrug
I was aware of Ekioh, but only tangentially; I had no idea of their progress so I didn't bring it up. I'd say it's great that they've managed to come this far. And to clarify if it wasn't plain from my other comments, I think that Chrome is the exception rather than the rule: it's an absolutely massive team. Possibly the largest of all the browser vendors that can make something close to compatible with the modern web. When pressed for an example I mentioned WebKit because just happened to be the by far the best example: it's the one that I could point to as competing with Gecko or Blink, plus it had a nice webpage I could link to instead of making people comb through Git commits.
> You're kidding me, there is no small team in the world that could ship a browser stack end to end.
https://webkit.org/team/, ⌘F "Apple". Balance the people on that list who have left or are assigned to work on something else with those who aren't listed there.
And almost all of them gave up developing their own engine except Apple and Mozilla?
FYI, WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple (which would be roughly similar to Blink). And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase. Thus Apple is investing a comparable amount of engineering resource into Safari. Where are "Other browsers"?
Please don't assert this so lightly unless you have any evidence to support it. A rendering engine is just a tiny fraction and you gotta take care of literally thousands of other components to build a modern browser. This applies to Chrome, Firefox and even old good IE. I don't expect any valid reasons why the same logic cannot apply to Safari.
The number above is probably pretty close, but there's a misconception that WebKit is only a tiny fraction of Safari: it's not. Most of the manpower and work goes into it; Safari is just chrome around it (albeit chrome that does take a reasonable amount of work to make…just not as much as it does to support JavaScript and WebAssembly VMs, page styling, rendering, WebGL and WebGPU, networking, tracking prevention, and maintaining support for the the ever-growing list of web standards WebKit supports and participating in discussions on shaping them). Safari is just one of the clients of WebKit.
Google employs thousands of engineers who spend a majority of their time thinking about Google Chrome. This gets slightly more complicated because of, e.g., the strategic impact of Chrome in other places like ChromeOS. The right comparison would be Apple's WebKit and Safari teams.
to get one year's worth of commits as of today (as of rev c43e247d6444 to be exact), I get 1250. If I repeat that with "google.com" instead of "chromium.org", I get 623. So figure ~1800-1900 there.
I get 15. If I repeat that with apple.com instead of webkit.org I get 70. If I just list all distinct authors, I get 128. Note that this is an underestimate of what it takes to build a browser, because a bunch of the parts of an actual browser are not in the webkit repo itself last I checked. Like the whole network stack.
I get 359. I am quite sure this last is is an underestimate: I am a Mozilla employee, but I use a non-mozilla.com address in my commits, because I started contributing before becoming an employee. I'm not the only one. The total number of distinct committers there is 1497 which is a serious overestimate: web platform test changesets come with their original author, who is often an engineer working on some other browser. If I filter out webkit.org, microsoft.com, google.com, chromium.org, webkit.org, that leaves me with 1265. This is almost certainly a significant over-estimate, since it's more than the total number of Mozilla employees.
Note that we may be undercounting QA here, since not all of them might commit to the main repository.
On the other hand, we might be counting one-off contributors who are not really on the "browser team" per se, especially for "apple.com" and "google.com". We're also overcounting somewhat depending on how much churn there was over the course of the year (people leaving, new ones joining).
But pallpark, I suspect an unrealistic lower bound is 100 and a reasonable lower bound is 150-500, depending on how much of the tech stack you want to delegate to other entities. The Chrome team is a lot bigger than any of those numbers, of course.
With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Not nearly a browser :(
> Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).
That sounds like a really, really vast underestimation. To the best of my recollection Chromium embedding teams inside Google that are 30+ developers (again, let's forget managers, UX researchers, etc.). I know that there are at least 4 such teams at Google.
I would be very surprised if Google didn't have at least 1000 developers working on Chromium.
>With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Not so sure. I remember the Webkit guys being a very small team (and they basically did the whole of Safari). There was some such mention on Dave Hyatt's blog at some point.
And, as far as the "chrome" part (UI, settings, etc) goes, wasn't Firefox at first the work of a couple of people, who forked their own UI version of Mozilla? And still it got to be the most popular browser at the time.
Not to mention how whole OSes and other challenging things have been done by smaller teams...
> With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Safari does those two specific things with a quarter of the number you mentioned. The entire team is nowhere near a thousand people.
WebKit runs on macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS across Intel and ARM architectures.
WebKit provides the web views for countless 3rd party apps, including Mail, Calendar, iTunes, etc.
Apple certainly has fewer people who get paid to write code for Safari/WebKit than Google has on Chrome/Blink. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla has more people too, especially since they’re rewriting pieces of the browser engine at the same time.
This list has 400 pages of contributors (~8000 people). Even with a very conservative assumption in that only 10% of them are full time developers, it's still 800. This doesn't even include other derivative projects and non engineers.
One metric of power that has been constant throughout human history is the number of people you are in charge of. You'll find this to be the most common measure of power across all of industries, militaries, cultures and governments.
Bloated headcount destroys most software. People still think you can throw more people at it and it will get built faster and better, as if we were building the pyramids.
Rust is perhaps the best thing to come out of any corporation in years. Protobuf, Envoy, Kubernetes, ... -- I struggle to think of anything better for our industry than Rust.
You could feel that Rust as a programming language is the greatest thing to ever happen to computer science, the big question for a corporation’s C-suite is can it make money. I’d assume (perfect possible that I’m wrong) that Rust does nothing but cost money for Mozilla. This is not to say I think it will be cancelled or force to expatriate and become a separate legal entity, but management is beholden to shareholders, not the tech community at large.
And yes I know that Rust does receive some corporate funding from other entities, but it is still a Mozilla product.
> Mozilla has from the get-go attempted to create an independent governance structure and to solicit involvement from other companies, because we know this makes Rust a better language for everyone.
It seems like they have a lot of influence over the language, and other things. Like, whether there's independent governance or not. I'm happy they're looking for collaborators, but lets not pretend that founder status comes with zero influence.
That is really a separate issue, if I’m recalling correctly, there is a team of Rust devs who specifically are employees by Mozilla Corporation. Also, even with an attempt at ‘team’ independence, Mozilla still owns the Rust trademark and the payables for Rust, things like servers for crates.io, etc are also paid by Mozilla Corp. My point was if an executive with only revenue concerns looks at Rust and sees a team which is not just helping Mozilla, but who attempt to help the industry as a whole, including competitors, it is conceivable that cutting those expenses is an option to pursue. I do not think this is particularly likely (I would assume the expenditure on Rust is minimal compared to the salary and benefits of 70 employees), I was just exploring the rabbit hole the GP comment sent me down.
I'd go the opposite and say that Rust is a competitive edge for Firefox to beat other browsers, architecturally. There were things they tried and failed many times to do to improve Firefox's performance and it wasn't until Rust that they were achievable.
I'm a Rust fanboy, let's state that at the beginning. It does, however, have a slow production adoption even though there is a fairly quick developer adoption (much to my chagrin). I think it would do better to become it's own entity in light of this news, and the fact that it doesn't really get managed by Mozilla anymore anyway.
Mitchell Baker should be ashamed of her performance at Mozilla. Serious missteps in the development of Firefox led to the rise of Google Chrome, and only recently (and arguably too little, too late) have they seen the light and prioritized the re-development of Firefox.
Nearly all of the other projects at Mozilla that aren't related to the browser itself have been abject failures. They have not only failed in their core product against Google, but have shown that they are completely incapable of innovation in other areas of tech.
Her letter reads like someone who is completely clueless. Getting rid of people while earmarking $40 million for a so-called "innovation fund" with no real strategy?
They are hoping some half-baked VPN product generates enough revenue to make them independent of Google's search deal? Please remember this post when that product fails to deliver. It's not a matter of time, it just makes no sense in any kind of timeline and at this point Mitchell Baker is grasping at straws.
Firefox did become horribly slow compared to Chrome and lost a lot of market share in the tech savvy community because of it. I also don't understand how they could fall so far behind with their primary product.
(they finally caught up again now, I switched back to Firefox about 2 years ago)
But:
Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imaginable.
Then came the rise of mobile and tablets, with forced Safari on iOS and Chrome by default on Android/Chrome OS, with little incentive to switch...
I think you're assuming Chrome's very existence was inevitable, but it wasn't.
Chrome was created partly because Page just wanted to do a browser, but that wasn't enough by itself. Schmidt blocked a browser project for years on the grounds that it was a low priority and there wasn't much reason because Firefox was doing fine.
What changed things was Google trying to work with Mozilla to contribute resources, push the web forward faster and running into huge problems again and again. Political, corporate, technical. The Firefox architecture was over-engineered but also the Firefox guys thought they were top dog and kept dropping or ignoring Google's contributions for what looked like spurious reasons. Frustration grew amongst engineers who cared about improving HTML and with Page having always wanted to do a browser, now there was pressure from the top and the grassroots. When they got a few key hires who showed they could do a new browser with a much better architecture, and move way faster than cooperating with Mozilla, events were set in motion.
But there's a parallel universe in which Mozilla welcomed the Google contributions with open arms, in which Gecko had been written in normal C++, was easier to work on/better documented, where the app architecture was more conventional and thus more amenable to sandboxing etc. And in that world maybe Firefox would be even more dominant than Chrome. I don't think Mozilla realised back then they either could learn how to work with the Google engineering teams, even to the extent of giving up some architectural control, or Google would wipe them out.
> When they got a few key hires who showed they could do a new browser with a much better architecture, and move way faster than cooperating with Mozilla, events were set in motion.
They also bought up a significant fraction of the Firefox core devs -- there's a lot of "crushing the competition" you can do when your money pit is basically bottomless.
Mozilla was a firehose of money back then. Financially they were and still are Google: literally they get a fraction of Google's own revenue stream. That was more than sufficient to reward their developers in whatever way they liked.
Those devs weren't leaving Mozilla because of money. They left because they were being given a nearly blank slate on which to create a browser they felt would be much better.
> Firefox did become horribly slow compared to Chrome and lost a lot of market share in the tech savvy community because of it. I also don't understand how they could fall so far behind with their primary product.
This happened in 2011-2015 when Google was investing looooooooots of money in Chrome and Mozilla was betting the farm on FirefoxOS. Since then, Mozilla has improved Firefox a lot, but it's hard to compete with a company that has a way larger budget on essentially the same product.
> That makes me wonder, why did something like BrowserChoice.eu not happen for google?
Infinite this.
Google shouldn't be allowed to deploy their browser to their OS that defaults to their search engine and locks you into their paid app store. That's anti-competitive af.
Microsoft was skittles compared to what Google does today. And MS' telemetry has nothing on Google's pervy panopticon.
It did in Google Play for Europe. You got a screen showing a list of alternative search engines (eg. DDG, Qwant) and browsers (eg. Firefox, Opera). Though, that didn't change Google and Chrome being the default.
Fun fact, they promised hundred of thousand in revenue and got less than 1000.
The people let go weren't the people working on the failures for the most part. It looks like each was told "you have to save x% of money from your current operating budget. This can be lay off or by other means"
So layoffs all around,any engineers, some managers, some directors. This means mostly people who are paid more but not essential, hence you see senior people who worked a long time at Mozilla being let go, because most teams don't run services that cost a lot of money.
Note that this directive come from the new CFO and board. Feel free to look em up. When the previous CFO left I feared this would happen (previous CFO had some integrity)
I disagree. Though I am not in a position to evaluate her performance as interim CEO, I feel Mozilla and Firefox have moved on a lot in the last few years.
When I returned to Firefox a few years ago initially it felt quite behind Chrome, and few odd things like Pocket etc, but these days I can't see any reason to use Chrome. Love the container add-ons, thew new picture-in-picture works great. The leaner Quantum works better. I appreciate the work they do with Rust and webassembly. etc.
I am not certain that Chrome replacing Firefox market share was not inevitable with a reasonable product. Between the promotion on google properties and android name, it had to be bad to not get significant market share.
If I were Mozilla, I'd focus my efforts on creating a search engine. Search engine tech and computational resources are available these days and dare I say it's perfectly feasible to create an alternative to Google. In addition to that, create a Google docs or at least good Gmail competitor. They have the technical talent to do it, and they could capture a real market of people who would pay for such products, if done well, that are concerned with privacy and don't want to use Microsoft or Google products.
70 employees, at a grossly over-estimated cost of $200,000 a year each (QA "leads" would probably cost a fraction of that), would cost Mozilla about $14M to retain. They are retaining their $43M budget for blue sky research intact (per TFA).
It feels like a better compromise could have been made.
This might be a sign for other employees that they need to focus on the things that can help Mozilla actually earn more and not just be a good guy. It may sound horrible, but considering their market share dynamics it makes sense.
Employees don't drive a large company's focus. Driving the focus and direction of the company is the job of Mozilla's leadership. It's the directors' job to transform that direction and focus into actionable plans, the managers' job to drive those plans, and the employee's job to implement the plans.
The employees, in all reality, don't have the power to drive the direction and focus of a large company; that's a benefit limited to startups and small businesses.
Bower's 1970 book "Managing the Resource Allocation Process" discusses how in reality it's the other way around. Leadership often struggles to manage the company strategically. Often how employees are measured (in this case looking at who was let go) drives strategy. For example, if a company states privacy is it's #1 goal but bonuses on revenue generation, privacy efforts may go nowhere.
With that in mind I think the parent comment is right. Leadership can say what they will but it's ultimately up to the people doing the work that drives the actual strategy.
If it's the employees who are really driving the company strategy and focus... the board needs to fire the everliving fuck out of the leadership (and optionally find the nexii of communication at the employee level and promote them).
It's quite literally leadership's primary job to set the strategy and focus of the company. It's what they're being paid to do. If they aren't doing that, they need to be let go.
It's a balance. Leadership does have a role here (and in some organizations like the military it is more strictly top down). But in most companies leadership can at most set goals, incentive behavior, and approve budgets and projects and it's ultimately up to the employees to implement and adapt strategy
>>But in most companies leadership can at most set goals, incentive behavior, and approve budgets and projects and it's ultimately up to the employees to implement and adapt strategy
No, leadership isn't exactly a glorified supervision layer.
I've known of a case where a director refused to promote an employee, the employee escalated the case to HR. The case got investigated and director in his defence said the employee couldn't be promoted as he was doing the same task for months.
To the director's horror he was let go for not seeing why the employee had not automated his work. And why he hadn't proactively worked with stake holders to improve productivity. So as far as the employee was concerned he had done what he was asked to, and despite bringing up his promotion issue in 1-1's the managers hadn't told him anything about his work at all. And instead lauded for the good work and asked him to continue.
The decision was right because the next director who came in got this done.
The job of any who sits at the top is to take a high level view, and move things in the positive direction. Approving leaves, budgets and memos just happens to be a side gig at those levels. The real job is to make progress happen.
Or it might be a sign for other employees (typically the ones the company would actually like to keep) to start looking for other, safer, jobs. Layoffs are always bad for morale...
Remember how it really didn’t matter at all in the long run? Even “disaster” is overselling it, I doubt many outside of HN circles are aware of it at all. Did they even lose a noticeable number of users from it?
I don’t mean to imply that it was absolutely nothing, but the day Mozilla gives up launching new money making features because they’re terrified of the backlash from an absolutely tiny set of vocal users is the day they should give up trying to make money at all.
It wasn't so much of a disaster as a poorly-considered move.
Speaking of Pocket, the Pocket you see on the fresh Firefox instance often provided me interesting, enjoyable articles. I went to sign up -- keep this good stuff coming, I thought -- to learn that Pocket demanded the social element, requiring that I link up with other Pocket users to drive my feed. Yet it had done a great job without that, and now had turned completely stupid.
Which of course is by design to drive engagement, and it is absolutely obnoxious. Fuck social as a trend. If the only way a network gains users is by trying to make them pitchmen to other people, the network should die.
200k may not be overestimated. Employees cost a lot more than their salaries. There's the employer share of payroll taxes, unemployment, health insurance subsidies, 401k matching, training, travel, etc.
I don't know what Mozilla's benefits are like, but 25% may still be pretty conservative. Just payroll taxes and 401(k) matching can be ~15% of salary, before you take into account things like health insurance. At my company, I cost about double my actual salary.
They don't appear to, however. For another response, I was looking at their 2019 financials, and for the Mozilla Foundation unit, 60 employees cost about $11M. I stand by my guesstimate of $200,000 as a high estimate.
I expect the foundation (which is largely non-technical) to have much lower average compensation than the corporation (which is predominately engineering-focused).
"""
For VPs and above, we benchmark compensation against a blended peer group comprised of 70% similarly-sized public and private tech companies and 30% non-profit organizations. This approach serves to reinforce our mission-first orientation. Consistent with market best practice, at least 70% of compensation for senior leadership is “at risk” and tied to individual and company performance.
"""
The CEO (Mitchell Baker) made around $2.3M in 2017.
For the past couple of years the main measurable objective has been the second derivative of Firefox market share, ie. just slowing down the bleed was enough to get 100% (or over 100%) company performance based bonuses.
> QA "leads" would probably cost a fraction of that
While I agree with the sentiment here, there is no need to diminish the work of QA people. They are a very important of the development process. A good QA is hard to come by and I often see them single-single handedly carry a project to completion despite working with a team highly incompetent "developers"(see what I did there).
Yeah, we have the chance of having a few good QA in our company and they are very important in getting the SW through the door not overly late and without too many serious defects
$200k doesn't just include salary; there's also equity comp, benefits, payroll taxes, etc. That can sometimes cause an employee's total cost to be at least 2x their salary.
> “You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen
I don't want subscription garbage, and I don't want Firefox advertising stuff to me.
However, I have no idea how I'd try to fund Mozilla when most of their work is on a product that they give away for free.
I can't imagine that grants from foundations or the government could cover their budget, and I can't really see them being amazingly successful with apps (although I would pay for a bulletproof, high quality ad blocker for iPhone) or hardware (although Purism's phones and laptops seem kind of in Mozilla's ballpark, I doubt they are making much money.) Nobody wants to pay for web services, and it's hard to compete with the many cloud incumbents, so those don't really seem like a good options either. Running a consulting business to fund the browser doesn't seem like a winning idea. Development tools seem to be free from the likes of {Microsoft, Apple, Google} as well, so that doesn't seem like a great business. I can't imagine many people paying for Rust or webasm tools either. Perhaps web game development tools or platforms? Anyway, it's a hard problem.
So HN, does anyone have any actual, serious, good ideas on how Mozilla can make money and keep delivering a good Firefox browser (and Rust, webasm, etc.) for free?
This is a difficult problem. Donations wouldn't be reliable/stable enough to fund the company, and selling a different product (SaaS, consulting, etc.) would realign Mozilla's incentives to have its best people working on its revenue generator instead of the browser.
I know this'll be an unpopular suggestion (and it's not something I necessarily want), but the elephant in the room is _selling_ Firefox: I would be happy to pay for their browser provided it was more polished than the competition. I would even pay a yearly fee. (Again, not ideal, but I'm just brainstorming.)
Or maybe find a way to sell an "enterprise" Firefox to nontechnical companies who are privacy-oriented? I'm not sure how realistic this is.
The only other way they're going to be able to do this is to find something as creative as reCAPTCHA's business model [0]. With so many users, maybe there's an idea there.
Stop all the marketing and the nonsense advocacy, focus on developing a browser, get other companies to fund development. It's in the interest of quite a few vendors to have a good, neutral browser.
The linux foundation gets money because quite a lot of products, companies depend on it.
Their servers, their iot devices, etc, etc
A lot of the code contributions come from the industries that depend on it not just volunteers or people payed with donations by small time linux lovers.
Nobody directly depends on Mozilla and or features in their product and so nobody will give them money because of that. (you can argue rust trough kubernetes and such is an example of the opposite but despite their big influence and contribution it's not really a mozilla product) Electron has chromium at it's core, CEF apps have chromium at their core, all the other popular alternatives have chromium at their core and google has nice control.
Despite that this dominance is ultimately bad for everyone. Google gets too much control over internet standards and their implementation. It is trash. and Mozzila depends on them too for their funding.
I'd say we even risk that they wouldn't get hit with monopoly rulings if Mozilla and firefox dies despite their competition being utterly dependant on and at the mercy of the direction of their product.
Because, to me, even lockin to Firefox isn't a good thing.
I still use Chromium for garbage web time coughhackernews*cough for example.
All my actual work and projects are Firefox (tons of vertical tabs) and I don't want them polluted with my trash reading but would still like to see history/tabs etc at least browseable across browsers.
Containers are getting a bit more viable to combine work and consumption but not quite there.
edit - and yes I'm actually just about 100% Firefox mobile already
But then your bookmarks only live in Firefox which isn't always convenient. NextCloud Bookmarks, Floccus for browser sync and an API to add them everywhere else is really nice.
I get that Pocket exists but the whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth -- paying $5/mo to remove ads in a bookmarking service that should just be a built-in feature of sync is gross.
> All of this is part of the organization’s plans to become less reliant on income from search partnerships and to create more revenue channels. In 2018, the latest year for which Mozilla has published its financial records, about 91 percent of its royalty revenues came from search contracts.
This raises the question of what products Mozilla plans to make that will generate revenue. The article doesn't address this.
I found these after a quick search, all of which appear to depend on Firefox to some extent:
- VPN/password manager called Lockvise
- Pocket recommendations and sponsored content
- Firefox Monitor, "a free service which allows people to check whether their email address has been a part of a recent security breach"
- "DNS over HTTPS" and "Encrypted Server Name Indication", "... both of which we’ve partnered with Cloudflare to test in the U.S. market."
To the 70: Thank you for contributing to such incredible software for all these years. Your contribution to my life is not insignificant. Good luck on your next chapter.
To Mozilla: Let's figure out this monetization thing. Heck, I'd pay for Firefox to keep it as great as it is and independent.
Besides donating and the as-yet-to-be-released VPN service, how else can we support Mozilla? I don't see anything they're actually selling and I hate for stuff like this to happen.
From what I heard from other HN comments, donations don't actually go to the browser's development, instead they go to auxiliary projects of (IMO) dubious value like community outreach, etc.
I feel like the kind of money Mozilla needs to keep going each year isn't something that can be crowdsourced like Wikipedia. Unfortunately I think big corps will continue to be Mozilla's major donors. And the big cheques they cut will come with strings attached, just not in writing.
Personally, I run nightlies and report bugs -- I think that is more effective (but people who want more assurance may want to run beta instead) than most other things I might do (and doesn't really require a lot of commitment).
I would have expected in that email from the CEO something like, "I will myself take a massive salary reduction and divide my salary by 2". But strangely, it's never something we see during mass layoffs... I mean her salary is pretty much the salary 15 to 20 software engineers.
I diligently donate to Mozilla, Wikimedia, and openbsd. After reading about executives and their largesse on various threads today, I do want to know: do donations to the Mozilla Foundation go towards paying the salaries and various expenses of the executives at Mozilla the corporate?
Mozilla should provide products and services that are one level above the cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GC) since it doesn't have the scale and datacenter resources to compete. Mozilla should provide at the product level that's consumer facing.
Mozilla can focus on online related communication and collaboration products. Some examples: email, messenger & audio/video conference, online identity, and security.
Email - make a web-based and an offline version.
Messenger & audio/video conference - can be easily tied in with the browser.
Online identity - people and company pay to have verified online identities and brands.
If Google moved to more in-house development of Chromium, there wouldn't be many scraps soon left for proponents of the open web to browse with... It's sad to see Microsoft as well as Opera and Brave picking Chromium for their engine when at least I think Gecko is still very much on par with web standards support. It feels like a more sensible choice, including for their own business safety in case Google does some sneaky move to "streamline their development" and "focus on the next generation of smartphones and Fuchsia OS" or something like that. That would be a power move we used to attribute to Microsoft in the past.
I wish Mozilla good luck although I'm shaken by these news and how far reaching the restructuring seems to be. I hope it's not the beginning of a negative spiral where they end up lacking manpower in development and QA to deliver a stable browser supporting the latest web standards and lagging behind, because then they're truly out. We should see already in a couple of years.
This is sad. I don't really have any interest in whatever 'services' Firefox has in mind but I'd actually pay for a good browser - maybe a monthly fee. I really use no local apps these days - everything is IN my browser so whatever I was paying for apps I'd be happy to chuck towards a secure, updated browser...
Too many chiefs, and they can the good braves. Top heavy org chart is going to commence years of random re-orgs to dance around the real problem: management. Firefox is of course even more likely to founder going forward.
My friend used to work for Mozilla. She said she has never had a more boring job. She said there was no work to be done, her boss was remote and never asked her for deliverables. She was well paid with a 40% cash bonus and she would go on yearly boondoggles. I told her she should stay but she couldn’t bear it so she left after 2 years.
She said part of it was that they couldn’t save money because they were a non profit so all the money they got they had to spend, which caused over hiring.
This would be the Mozilla Foundation (not Corp), right? And I don't think it's literally true that a charitable foundation has to spend everything it gets - they can still save for a rainy day or even build up an endowment over time. They can't disburse profits obviously, but AIUI that's not the same thing as saving money internally.
> She said part of it was that they couldn’t save money because they were a non profit so all the money they got they had to spend, which caused over hiring.
She-if she exists-is wrong. And I’m doubting her existence because nobody working at an NGO would be able to hold onto such superficial misconceptions for long.
I had Mozilla hr straight up tell me they wanted me to hire someone based on color regardless of performance difference even if somewhat large and obvious. For you ladies, they indicated clearly that "we have enough women in engineering".
This wasn't exactly a fun moment. I left Mozilla after this. Most of the reason i post all this here now.
Mr. Corbet is predicting 'perturbations in the job market' for this year. I wonder if he will turn out to be right (also interesting that this news item did get this huge amount of comments)
Mozilla lays off people, yet it still doesn't accept donations. I don't understand it - there are tons of people (including me) would gladly donate to Mozilla to keep it afloat. Yet, you can only donate to the Mozilla foundation, but not to Mozilla Corporation (that develops the browser).
I guess, in addition to Chrome, Microsoft just _Edged_ Mozilla out a little more.
I use Linux as desktop and for me Chrome has been the choice for the last few years. The only thing I use most often from Mozilla is its MDN site, which is absolutely great.
If any of the ones laid off is interested in working for a startup developing a browser extension with WASM (from C#), poke me via email: andrew.forsure at gmail (remote working is welcome; part-time ok too)
Apparently Brenden Eich, who helped develop Firefox when he was at Mozilla, seems to be innovating with monetizing a browser, first with cryptocurrency and now with sponsored images: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061348
"officeoftheceo@mozilla.com", aka Mitchell, has a number grammar issues with their email. It's surprising that someone in such a high leadership position, who communicates for a living doesn't have an intuitive sense of basic grammar—especially for such an important announcement…
Wouldn't have happened if they hadn't forced Brendan Eich out. Just saying. I know as a patron I trust him and followed him over to brave especially for its privacy offering. Removing founders is hardly ever a good idea.
I find it interesting they are laying off 7% of their staff while hiring new developers. I say this as they had a job post in DC recently saying we could join their growing company. Are they growing or retracting?
Maybe it's like a controlled burn. Get rid of a bunch of low performers or those who they don't really need currently, hire quickly into what they do need.
wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. nice job if you can get it.
The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its ~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profitable source of the $368 million in Foundation assets that parent cited.
I understand why people are generally peeved about executive compensation, but this conversation is very rote and this is a particularly flamebait-y framing of it.
>She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet.
This statement is a fabrication. She was trained and worked as a lawyer. She went to Berkeley, not to study computer science or electrical engineering, but to study law. She graduated and went to a San Francisco law firm that specialized in intellectual property and had many clients in Silicon Valley. She eventually left and worked for Sun in the legal department. Netscape recruited her to help set up their legal department and that is how she became an executive at a technology company. She stayed at Netscape when it was bought by AOL to work on policy issues, but was eventually fired during a series of layoffs.
The only "foundational" piece of Mozilla she authored was the Mozilla Public License.
Any company that lost that much market share would have fired their CEO. At a minimum, she should take a deep pay cut and her compensation needs to be tied to performance.
I didn't say anything about software. You are free to dispute what I said but I did not fabricate it; here is a quote from a source, which is the #2 search result for her name:
"Mitchell has written the key documents that set out Mozilla's enduring mission and commitments – the Mozilla Public License in 1998, the Mozilla Manifesto in 2007 and the Mozilla Manifesto Addendum – also known as the Pledge for a Healthy Internet – in 2018".
You can understand why, here on Hacker News, we might have interpreted your statement that she "directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet" as claiming that she contributed code, rather than just drafting some legal docs and marketing pieces.
> She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet
Like what? The wiki page doesn't tell.
You are making it sounds like she created Mozilla & products herself, rather than an admin/exec role throughout.
And also making it sound like her presence alone is what is bringing in ~$500 million.
Is there some connection you would like to disclose?
> Is there some connection you would like to disclose?
You're not allowed to post insinuations like that to HN. It's nearly always imaginary and poisons discussion badly. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why not do if for less, if you are so dedicated to the supposed Mozilla cause? It is a non-profit after all. Random non-profit: Goodwill (way bigger than Mozilla) CEO makes $1,114,375[1]. PETA's CEO makes $31,285[2]. TOR Project executives receive $0 compensation[3].
> PETA's CEO makes $31,285[2]. TOR Project executives receive $0 compensation[3].
I'm inclined to agree with you, but I think there must be something missing here. Are they receiving some other form of compensation? How much does the median PETA employee make? More than that, I hope!
> Thirty-seven percent of PETA’s dedicated staff earn between $30,000 and $44,999, including President Ingrid Newkirk, who made $31,285 during the fiscal year ending July 31, 2016. Seven percent of PETA’s dedicated staff only earn between $16,000 and $29,999, and the remaining 56 percent make more than $45,000 per year. Most staff members give a portion of their earnings back to PETA’s lifesaving programs through payroll deductions.
> the remaining 56 percent make more than $45,000 per year
So the median is more than $45k. I would say the difference between $31k and $45k is pretty significant, at least depending on where you live. In San Francisco that would likely not be enough for someone to live comfortably alone.
Not the only one, but you are part of a very small group.
Anyway, I also disagree in general. If a person brings so much value, than why not compensate that person adequately?
The "only" thing that is bothering me with the insanely high salary of CEO's etc. is that they quite often seem disconnected from actual success. Like in this case:
> The market share of Firefox goes down, yet her compensation goes up. Why???
Obvious: because she has to make bank before the ship sinks for good. I'm sure she would put forward a lot of arguments for it (all the extra time she spent over the years "underpaid" etc etc).
Baker has been more than "a lawyer" to Mozilla, for a very long time. She shouldered a lot of decisions - some good, some bad, some terrible. It's not surprising that she might be reaching for the money (most execs will, at that level), but rather that nobody at the corporation or the foundation is willing or able to stop her anytime soon.
Maybe it's up to the community to stop this kind of behaviour. Maybe it's time to create another non-profit focused on Mozilla's goals, with a promise of having a more sane salary structure and just fork Firefox.
Nonprofits don’t fund something the size of Firefox (which doesn’t need 1100 people or now 1030 or whatever the headcount may be, but needs hundreds). They must give grants to get bigger grants as well as annual pledge drive donations from the long tail. They end up depending on the biggest foundations, which are tools of a relative-few billionaires.
> If a person brings so much value, than why not compensate that person adequately?
The question isn't only if the person brings that much value, but also - is there any other person who would bring as much value, but would work for less salary?
> Anyway, I also disagree in general. If a person brings so much value, than why not compensate that person adequately?
I'd be very interested to learn how a CEOs worth is evaluated, I cannot imagine it being a fair process that truly demonstrates that they deserve this much money.
I don't think that way of looking at things is fruitful, a CEO may have "presided" over huge growth, way above their compensation, but in practice that growth is most likely down to an amalgam of all the workers (and might have been higher without the CEO, for example).
Each worker gives the same, ultimately, an hour of their precious life each hour they work.
Workers have goals, and they can accomplish those goals while macro goals like 'company success' fail.
The ceo is responsible for those macro goals. Those macro goals are failing, ergo while most works should be receiving increases in comp, the CEO should be seeing a decrease.
She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did.
I knew Gerv, he was a convert to Christianity and as usual for converts to any religion, he was intense and fervent in his belief that he had discovered the ultimate truth. Unfortunately that can lead people to embracing the old testament bigotry more than the new testament forgiveness. Gerv wasn't a bad person, but Mitchell wasn't inaccurate in her post. Yes, Gerv was a great thing for Mozilla, but his legacy is not as clear.
A CEO in an employee obituary though, isn't their job at that time to laud the good rather than make it sound like "good riddance"?
>Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. //
So Mitchell's response is to publicly judge him in politely stated but damning terms, whilst simultaneously making an employee's obituary about how they - the obituary writer - were the only thing that moderated the person's overly judgemental nature.
Wowser.
It's like Mitchell realised people would be applauding his work at Mozilla and decided that couldn't be allowed.
It sounds like you're saying his actions at work were abhorrent; or was it that his beliefs were incompatible with yours?
That memoriam seems completely out of place. If you are a professional colleague, common sense would dictate that you write a professional piece that reflects on the person's services rendered to Mozilla. The repeated references to the deceased's religious beliefs seem very out of place and distateful, especially in a memoriam. No excuses there.
As I read that I figure she had to address the guy's controversial opinions such as to not offend people who were offended by them.
As someone who doesn't know anyone involved the suggestion I would make would be to acknowledge controversy upfront, directly and exactly once and then state that you will not address the most controversial points from there on out, in acknowledgement of the deceased and their loved ones. The fact that she waffles back and forth between praise and condemnation in such tight space makes it seem like she simultaneously doesn't stand for much and doesn't forgive even after a person's death.
Even when we find someone's behavior or opinions abhorrent, there isn't a lot of point in holding grudges against dead people. Maybe she could have said that.
It's taught in even the most basic teaching curriculum. I learned about it as a teenager learning to teach swimming. To be honest, it's nothing new or special, and I mean, I don't know where you're coming at with the snarky comment about management, but humans are human and sometimes _how you say something_ matters as much as _what you say_. Nobody likes taking criticism, so it helps blunt the blow, while still allowing for critical feedback to be communicated and heard.
It's been taught / used for a long time in North America, I can't speak for other parts of the world. It reminds me of the, "it's not you, it's me", break-up technique, but maybe I just watched too much Seinfeld.
I think it depends on how well it's done. Yeah, if you just transparently sandwich the criticism, it'll come off as a stupid management technique. But if you figure out how to do it genuinely, it can help.
Sorry, which bits are incredibly rude and grotesque? It reads like an honest appraisal of a person that the author has known for many years (and disagreed with occasionally as humans do)
Mitchel, as leader of Mozilla, was essentially speaking for the entire organization; an organization, and set of ideals, Gerv devoted his entire adult life to.
Saying things like--
"Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult for people to participate.
...
Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.
Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.
...
To memorialize Gerv’s passing, it is fitting that we remember all of Gerv — the full person, good and bad, the damage and trauma he caused, as well as his many positive contributions. Any other view is sentimental. We should be clear-eyed, acknowledge the problems, and appreciate the positive contributions."
I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief.
David Anderson articulates some of my feelings on the obit better than I can.
I guess she's learned you've really gotta CYA in the Valley these days. Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier. The matter was made an issue by so-called activists trawling the legally-required logs of political contributions and intentionally setting out to destroy Eich, if not Mozilla generally, merely because they disagreed with his political leanings.
If you can get flayed for that, I'd guess there's a substantial chance that you'd also be on the hook for failing to lambast the beliefs of a deceased colleague.
It would be nice to see Baker stand up against that, but one can only assume the thoughts of "Am I going to lose my job if I fail to call out the deceased's quote-unquote bigotry?" crossed her mind. Bonus consideration for Mozilla's top brass: "are we going to trigger another widespread blacklisting of the Firefox UA if we upset the mob?"
> Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier.
Minor correction: Prop 8 was supported by the majority (52%) in California.
In fact, Prop 8 (which Brendan Eich donated in support of) passed by 600,000 votes.
Anderson's analysis feels very straw-mannish to me, giving the impression that Mitchell disagreed with Gerv being a Christian in the first place.
> I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief.
Well, maybe - you'd have to ask them. Quite likely they share Gerv's faith and outlook and possibly don't see anything negative there.
But the point of the piece was obviously not to comfort the family, it was a message to the wider Mozilla community. And if he was the divisive character that he appears to have been, this sort of "he was a good person with some failings which he acknowledged and worked on" is just the sort of thing that prevents the truly ugly and grotesque internet pile-on that we are all so familiar with by now.
Man, I'm not saying that his wife didn't love him. I'm not saying that his death wasn't tragic for her and many other people. I'm not even saying that I'd heard of any of these people before today. But without any other context, I just can't see "incredibly rude and grotesque" in there.
What I am saying is that he was a divisive character, and he knew that, accepted it, apparently tried to modify it a bit but basically carried on with it in an organisation that he knew was at least mildly hostile to his beliefs.
And the depth of emotion that he inspired (deserved or not) could have lead to a very ugly pile on after his death. Maybe that happened anyway. Instead of taking it as cheap sniping, a better-faith reading of Mitchell's eulogy would be as a call for peace - acknowledge the critics but also point out the valuable contributions that the guy made in the hope that all the emotions surrounding his death don't spill over onto twitter or somesuch stupidity.
Baker's post is utterly dehumanizing. She could've talked about his resilience in fighting cancer for 18 years or his fervor for free software. She could've talked about the actual work product he produced over 20-ish years at Mozilla and how it helped move the platform forward.
Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity and that she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance.
So even if the explicit condemnation of his private beliefs had been omitted, the post is still self-righteous infantilization. Baker did a terrible job hiding her contempt. Tacking on "something-something-whole-person" is transparent self-justification and it doesn't do anything to change the fact that she just spent the whole post talking about what she perceived to be his inadequacies.
Baker could've talked about basically anything -- the ability to identify the humanity in your ideological opponents is crucial to civilized discourse -- but instead, she boiled it down to "Gerv couldn't understand middle ground, except for the tiny bit I was able to finally pound through his head, and his refusal to shut up on his personal blog caused a lot of damage here."
I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.
> She could've talked about his resilience in fighting cancer for 18 years
"Gerv’s work life was interspersed with a series of surgeries and radiation as new tumors appeared. Gerv would methodically inform everyone he would be away for a few weeks, and we would know he had some sort of major treatment coming up."
> or his fervor for free software. She could've talked about the actual work product he produced over 20-ish years at Mozilla and how it helped move the platform forward.
"Gerv was a wildly active and effective contributor almost from the moment he chose Mozilla as his university-era open source project. He started as a volunteer in January 2000, doing QA for early Gecko builds in return for plushies, including an early program called the Gecko BugAThon. (With gratitude to the Internet Archive for its work archiving digital history and making it publicly available.)
Gerv had many roles over the years, from volunteer to mostly-volunteer to part-time, to full-time, and back again. When he went back to student life to attend Bible College, he worked a few hours a week, and many more during breaks. In 2009 or so, he became a full time employee and remained one until early 2018 when it became clear his cancer was entering a new and final stage.
Gerv’s work varied over the years. After his start in QA, Gerv did trademark work, a ton of FLOSS licensing work, supported Thunderbird, supported Bugzilla, Certificate Authority work, policy work and set up the MOSS grant program, to name a few areas. Gerv had a remarkable ability to get things done. In the early years, Gerv was also an active ambassador for Mozilla, and many Mozillians found their way into the project during this period because of Gerv... As Gerv put it, he’s gone home now, leaving untold memories around the FLOSS world."
> Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity
"He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me."
> she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance.
Where does it say this?
> I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.
I guess that would depend on whether they skipped over the same parts you did.
> I guess that would depend on whether they skipped over the same parts you did.
I read the whole post.
The parts you've quoted are rote recitations of assignments and employment history. They could've been derived from an HR file.
A list of assignments is not a discussion about how his work product helped move the platform forward.
Stating that Gerv had to go to the doctor sometimes and that he was good about giving notice is not talking about the resilience inherent in maintaining a productive career and an apparently-happy family while simultaneously battling a terminal illness for 18 years.
> Where does it say this?
You quoted the last sentence of the paragraph above. Here:
> > Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.
Baker lists 5 things Gerv did and you quoted only the last one. 3 of the things are definitively negative: "challenged", "infuriated", and "enraged". One is neutral: "surprised". The only positive one is "impressed", but she immediately explains that she was impressed re: his "greater ability to work with ambiguity", which she had mentioned "work[ing] with him to ... better appreciate" two sentences earlier, i.e., she's impressed that some small portion of it appeared to finally stick.
Then, in the next paragraph, she immediately caveats her impression over his improved grasp of ambiguity with: "Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw." and "He was adamant that his interpretation was correct[.]" At least to my ears, that sounds a lot like "So I just said I was impressed, but I wasn't that impressed; he just wasn't smart enough to grasp the ambiguity that would've made it obvious that his personal beliefs were invalid".
I worked many years with gerv. I know that in the valley believing in Christ is seen as evil.
I'm not a believer. Gerv was a good person, easy to work with and never put his faith or illness in the way of work as far as i could see. All he had was a signature in his emails about his faith.
Nobody's perfect but he definitely never looked like Mitchell's description in my day to day interactions.
As much as I poured into Mozilla and the community, I have always been critical of how political it has always been. It inherited a lot of that from the end of Netscape.
Netscape had three phases, the startup, the amazing new big business, and then the slow decline. During the slow decline a lot of fiefdoms popped up. With some people control was more important than collaboration, process was more important than results. Too many suits took over without any real engineering prowess to understand how the things they wanted to do would actually work, and how long they'd take.
> Sorry, which bits are incredibly rude and grotesque?
I wouldn't say this is how I would like somebody to be remembered after his early death:
> Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.
Well maybe not, it depends very much on your value system. Fundamentalists (not saying that Gerv was one, just using that as an example) don't see anything wrong with fundamentalism, or at least their version of it.
Up until the last sentence Gerv probably would have been nodding along happily. If he did butt heads with the wider Moz community over those issues, the last sentence would come as no surprise.
I personally have some reactions to her statement, but I never met any of them, so all I can do is to imagine. To me, this seems like a demonstration of honesty and sincerity.
> ..that his interpretation should be encoded into law.
Law is dangerous, as it ultimately falls back into the (justification of the) usage of lethal force upon those who defy it.
So I imagine that directicy and strictness was related to him, and so, then, I imagine that it is respectful to respond in a direct and strict way, which I suppose is what she did.
(but this is just a reaction based on imagination and my own personal experiences with other people, ofc)
> imagine that it is respectful to respond in a direct and strict way //
Yes, to the person, in the same arena (maybe, consider that carefully).
LPT - don't scathingly attack an employee in an obituary after their recent early death. You can say you found then difficult to live with, etc., you don't have to try and crucify their mortal remains.
I have definitely gotten the impression (as a very peripheral observer of the Rust community) that ideological diversity is not at all the sort of diversity Mozilla is interested in.
I wonder where that impression comes from? The Rust project is surprisingly diverse there and especially the moderation teams run the gamut from very progressive to very classic conservative.
We have a common boundary agreement (that's what the CoC lays out), but other then that, you'd be surprised of the number of opinions you'd see.
Granted, some of the very public figures are very progressive/leftist, but they also do their legwork for it and generally keep that on the side when they speak with their Rust hat on.
They did clearly state "given the context". The context being someone who, supposedly (I don't know, that was before my time and outside of my circles), had those traits.
So I think saying "by thinking anyone with differing opinions is Xist" is a mischaracterization of what was expressed originally.
We're not talking about "anyone with differing opinions", we're talking about a specific person who publicly denounced their coworkers based on their gender and sexuality.
I went to lectures with Gervase at university 20 years ago and while I never really 'knew' him (and don't share his faith) his energy and enthusiasm were evident. This "obit" seems in bad taste; surely if he was causing so much "trauma" and "damage" at work, they would have done something about it during the last 18 years? It just seems unnecessarily mean-spirited.
I didn't see this before, interesting. I remember Gerv from his blog, he indeed had strong opinions regarding religion, but this obituary is completely out of place, it seems as if she had some personal issues with him.
This will sound outrageous to US technology workers in 2020, but some people are able to separate their professional lives from the religious and political beliefs of their co-workers.
About 15 years ago it was perfectly normal for this exchange to take place: Your view of marriage is a faith-based promise to your deity based on millennia of tradition and completely different from my view of it as a legalistic civil affair that is even less serious than renewing a recreational boating licence? Not a problem, let's go back to work now.
There are still tech companies like this. I have no detailed idea about my boss and coworkers' political beliefs, but I suspect they're different from mine. No problem, we keep things professional and respectful.
>Do they abide by work regulations and treat everyone equally/equitably (as the org requires)?
Probably not.
But in any case, why should non-white coworkers be expected to work with a racist just because the person in question (hypothetically) puts on a token display of being tolerant? It's insulting and demeaning to ask them to put up with that.
You seem more interested in defending some implausibly courteous hypothetical white supremacist than in ensuring that real work environments are minimally tolerable for people who aren't white.
If a person is a white supremacist, black supremacist, Indian supremacist, whatever, perhaps through working side-by-side towards common goals they can learn not only to fake non-discrimination but to adopt it as an ideology. If they're functionally equivalent to everyone else in their work I can't see a _reason_ to exclude them other than bigotry.
They're wrong, outside work I'm happy to address that head on; peace doesn't come through uncompromising segregation off people based on ideology.
Presumably you find Muslims, whose religious book demands they murder those who won't convert, to be anathema in your workplace?
Rather than it being demeaning to accommodate people with ideological differences it is essentially human and calls us to the highest standards of non-discrimination, IMO.
>If a person is a white supremacist, black supremacist, Indian supremacist, whatever, perhaps through working side-by-side towards common goals they can learn not only to fake non-discrimination but to adopt it as an ideology.
That's a nice thought, but it's unfair to put the burden of rehabilitation of white supremacists on your colleagues.
>If they're functionally equivalent to everyone else in their work I can't see a _reason_ to exclude them other than bigotry.
The idea of them being "functionally equivalent" is a philosophical hypothetical, not a realistic possibility. (Do you think someone who thinks black people are inferior to white people is going to make fair decisions about e.g. who gets promoted?) But apart from this, it's dehumanising and humiliating to make people work with others who regard them as inferior on the basis of their race.
>Presumably you find Muslims, whose religious book demands they murder those who won't convert, to be anathema in your workplace?
I find Muslims who want to murder non-Muslisms anathema in my workplace, yes. I work with a few Muslims, but curiously, none of them want to do this. But come on, your comment here is borderline trolling, and makes me question whether you're really being serious about white supremacists either.
How do you know? If you ask someone whether they're harboring murderous intent, they're obviously going to say they aren't. Most people that actually commit murder will go on to claim that they never had murderous intent, and in the majority of cases, they're probably not even lying. Yet they still murdered.
We can't even understand our own motives and intentions. The internal monologue is a parlor trick, consciousness is a lifelong self-delusion. If we can't accurately conceptualize or reliably control our own behavior, despite living inside of ourselves all the time, what makes us think we can do it for others?
When you're working to accomplish a specific end with a specific group of people, as long as they're providing useful work, adhering to social norms, and not otherwise exhibiting specific malice or triggering physiological fight-or-flight responses within the group, there's no sense getting worked up about whether or not the neuronal spasms that produce consciousness may've been yielding some unconventional theories lately.
"I have this really high-level theory that I feel may characterize typical variations among several major human ethnotypes" -- well, shit man, my brain is doing weird stuff today too. I dreamed about computer-birds. Now, can we stop talking about this and go over your commit from yesterday?
In general, everyone is wrong about everything all the time, and that ought to be good enough for all of us. Let's stop firing useful people over it.
If you think that there's some kind of connection between the (alleged) illusory nature of consciousness and practical issues of workplace politics, then you've probably gone off on an enormous tangent. In any case, I have no idea how you think your main argument gets from A to B, so I can't usefully respond to it. I know that my Muslim colleagues don't want to murder me in the ordinary everyday sense that I know lots of things, modulo irrelevant hyperskeptical scenarios of purely philosophical interest.
>this really high-level theory that I feel may characterize typical variations among several major human ethnotypes
I assume that you don't intend this as a characterization of the beliefs of actual white supremacists (?), so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
> If you think that there's some kind of connection between the (alleged) illusory nature of consciousness and practical issues of workplace politics, then you've probably gone off on an enormous tangent.
Yeah, I absolutely did. Upvoted.
> In any case, I have no idea how you think your main argument gets from A to B, so I can't usefully respond to it.
It boils down to "professionals should not allow differing opinions on non-work-related issues to negatively impact their working relationships, no matter how strongly they disagree." The fact that no one knows anything about anything just helps people cope with that reality.
> I assume that you don't intend this as a characterization of the beliefs of actual white supremacists (?), so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
It's a placeholder for any ideology, at least insofar as it remains in the realm of ideology and isn't unduly brought into the professional environment by the accused ideologue.
If someone starts bringing up politics, religion, or other controversial topics at work, redirect the conversation and ignore. If someone dispenses of their personal time advocating for causes that some others may find distasteful or even repugnant? Ignore, live and let live. It's not a professional issue.
Taking adverse action against an employee for using their private time to participate in the political process is not only already illegal in many states, but it's also hugely counterproductive. The ideologue is essentially compelled to lay their career at the problem ideology's altar (often post-facto, because the muckrakers are digging up some ancient LiveJournal entry or whatever). This creates fertile ground for a new internal narrative of heroic and principled self-martyrdom in behalf of the problem ideology. It's a fast track to radicalization, and you've likely just made the ideologue unsure how they're going to pay their rent next month. Bad scene.
If someone really hates the problem ideology and not the individual currently fascinated with it, "fire ideologue" will be pretty far down on the todo list.
tl;dr, If the employee is doing good work and they're not disrupting the work environment, leave them alone.
------
Pre-edit: harassment, stalking, direct interference with other employees' lives, threats of violence, and other types of red-flag behaviors should never be ignored, no matter how professionally someone behaves during business hours. Dangerous behavior should always be reported to HR and any applicable civil organization.
Pre-edit 2: This is not medical advice and I'm not your attorney. I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or counselor of any type. As discussed in the grandparent comment, I made all this up mostly on accident, everything I think is surely wrong and dumb, and everything I type should be ignored.
It seems that there was some subsection of Mozilla employees who were offended by Gerv's views and thus publicly ambivalent, though undoubtedly privately relieved, to hear of his passing. [0]
While that doesn't excuse the "obit" Baker posted, I'm sure it had some effect on her thought process. Common decency is apparently not valued above political homogeneity in the tech industry.
It's better to criticize people when they're still alive, rather than shortly after their death. Where I come from at least, it's considered crass at best to speak ill of the dead, unless they were some sort of heinous violent criminal.
I would feel deeply uncomfortable if my boss were to post an obit like that about a deceased coworker, even if I had hated that persons guts. It just isn't something you do, as you say it violates common decency.
Well, to be specific: by "common decency", I mean that the CEO should refrain from a publishing an infantilizing and derogatory post about a deceased employee. They should especially refrain from doing so days after the employee's death.
Employees dedicate roughly half of their waking hours to the employer, entailing much sacrifice from not only the employee themselves, but also their family. Regardless of the employee's competence, it insults that sacrifice when the employer comes out and denigrates the employment record of the deceased.
Bottom line: making an unprovoked publication indicating that the deceased's efforts caused damage to the organization as a whole is not a decent thing to do.
Just as a rule of thumb, if you can't memorialize a person without talking about how much damage was caused or how you just couldn't get him to understand "nuance", it's probably best to leave the memorializing to others.
Bottom line: making an unprovoked publication indicating that the deceased's efforts caused damage to the organization as a whole is not a decent thing to do.
And what if the deceased's actions DID cause damage (e.g. Brendan Eich and Gervase Markham)? Wouldn't that count as provocation?
Just because you happen to agree with their views on morality doesn't mean that their contempt for their fellow coworkers should be whitewashed.
> And what if the deceased's actions DID cause damage (e.g. Brendan Eich and Gervase Markham)? Wouldn't that count as provocation?
No -- employees cause damage all the live long day. There's nothing unusual about that. Furthermore, discretion and secrecy are indispensable components in any professional environment; you don't have to make a publication about negative experiences just because they happened.
If the aggregate effect of an individual's employment is net negative, you start the prescribed HR processes to accommodate, adjust, cross-train, improve, and/or re-assign. If worse comes to worst and none of that works, you'd initiate processes for involuntary termination of employment.
I don't know about you, but personally, I've never seen an HR process that includes publishing a condemnation of a recently-deceased employee's political or religious views.
Hypothetical events that may provoke negative statements from an employer would be things like becoming deceased shortly after being arrested for some well-publicized crime, especially if the crime impacted the employer's business (e.g., money manager accused of embezzlement, arrest goes awry and suspect is killed). "Dying after decades-long battle against terminal cancer" doesn't feel likely to enter provocation territory to me.
> Just because you happen to agree with their views on morality doesn't mean that their contempt for their fellow coworkers should be whitewashed.
You're ascribing motives that don't exist here. I don't know Eich and I didn't know Markham. I haven't read extensively about their private views and I'm sure that I disagree substantially with many of them.
Fortunately, you don't have to know anything about anyone's politics or religion to understand that it's incredibly crass for the CEO to a) publicly enumerate the managerial difficulties imposed by the deceased; b) publicly offer negative characterizations of the deceased's net impact on the organization; or c) really do anything except offer condolences and ensure prompt handling of the family's benefit claims.
No -- employees cause damage all the live long day.
Yeah, if that's normal to you all I can say is that you're working at the wrong places (or potentially you're the problem). If you want respect in death then act appropriately in life. No matter how talented Markham was, he was also well known for harassing and belittling his coworkers.
If you don't want to be remembered for being a jerk, don't be a jerk. It's pretty simple.
If you've got beef with someone, take it up with them while they're living. Once they're dead, you missed your chance.
If Baker thought he was damaging the org, it was her legal duty to protect its interests and terminate him. Not only did this never happen, but per Baker's account, Markham was repeatedly rehired.
If Moz changed their mind at some point and wanted him gone, well, he's gone -- crapping all over his legacy accomplishes nothing other than exacerbating the grief of survivors and potentially opening up legal liability.
Should someone allege that Baker's horrific "memorial" rises to the level of actionable defamation, she'll have a hard time winning the sympathy of the court. "Don't kick someone while they're down" and all that. You can't get any more down than "literally dead". If you can't settle the personnel file before the employee dies, just let it go.
Ultimately, it is pretty simple: a corporate officer publishing a barrage of criticism against a deceased subordinate can only be described as chickenshit.
Gerv's behavior would have led to him being fired a long time ago in any other company. He was a toxic employee. MoCo did him and his family a favor to keep him on the payroll until his death.
It would have been better to fire him when he was alive than to criticize him after he was dead. The former would have been productive, while the later is just distasteful.
Just speaking for myself here, but if someone would like to take adverse action against me, if they're willing to postpone it until after I'm dead, I'd vastly prefer that. Please and thank you. It makes no difference to me if you piss on my grave.
That being said, I sure as hell wouldn't write that obit, even for someone I hated. If I didn't have anything positive to say about the person, I wouldn't write anything. There is no upside to this kind of handling of the situation.
I am not offended by that obit. I can see she was going for a "speaker for dead" thing. I know that sort of direct honesty is out of fashion, but that's the kind of obit I want.
Let me break this down for you. This isn't about you and an obituary or eulogy isn't something written to the dead: It's written to their family, their coworkers and friends, and for those who may have never really known the deceased.
No leader should write in such a way that would insult the families of the dead and their belief systems. Reminder: This is a non-family relative of the deceased using their death to make a statement. This is that same leader telling the deceased's family that their relative was 'traumatic and damaging' while alive. What in the actual fuck?
It is obvious that the deceased's contributions outweighed their perceived transgressions, else they would have been terminated.
So yeah, it's disgusting and not being able to see why it would be such a vile thing reflects an inability to grasp or visualize other people's perspectives. These failures in leadership build the types of toxic culture full of intolerance that they claim to preach against. It's better to write nothing at all about controversial individuals or ideally give a generic nod to the deceased's contributions with the company and well wishes to their family in their time of grief. Pay a damn PR person to write your obits if you lack empathy, shit.
> It is obvious that the deceased's contributions outweighed their perceived transgressions, else they would have been terminated.
Possibly. Another possibility is that no one wanted to be the one to fire a man with terminal cancer who presumably depended upon the health insurance provided by the company.
I think I won't convince you about my capacity for empathy in this context, but I guess I'll just say that my opinion here isn't a lack of empathy for the guy or his family. I'm not confused that reading such things could hurt.
I have come to a place in my life where I crave more honesty all around, and I'm willing to pay for it with emotional pain. And it's not just a selfish sort of myopia--like, I can imagine you reading that and thinking I have some autistic flavored honesty fixation and I am projecting that onto everyone without considering their feelings. It's not that. Actually I believe that we as a society would better if we set the baseline somewhere closer to what she wrote than to perfunctory respect and polite platitudes. And I believe the various negative emotions that would come with that new baseline are both real costs dearly paid AND worth paying all the same. I know my perspective on this isn't popular.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about at least one thing: she probably wasn't the person who should have written this, even if we take as a given that it should have been written at all. If someone wrote something similar about me, I'd want them to be someone I loved and who loved me--the kind of person who could say something profoundly true about me, as a testament to the real effect I had in the world, both good and bad.
Edit: Oh, and since it obviously doesn't go without saying, I'll say this too: I am not offended by the obit she wrote, and I would want a similar thing for myself, but I nevertheless think she did the wrong thing by writing it. I might have a fantasy about what I consider to be a better world in which what she wrote was fine, but we don't live in that world and she clearly violated dearly held norms when she wrote that.
That was part of my context when I wrote the post that started this conversation, but I didn't make it clear at all.
As an exercise I want you to go back, read what you wrote on this topic and count the I's. Then read my response which I will now use neutral language in.
This nor my last post was written to suggest autistic perception, but rather that not everyone thinks from others' different perspectives naturally (wherever they sit on the spectrum). I will indulge in your stated interest to receive honesty. You don't write like someone that thinks by putting themselves in other's shoes and thinking through the lens of their values. Rather, the internal value systems you have becomes a framework to apply externally in your life. 'I believe' 'I think' 'I agree', checks upon those value systems you have logically/emotionally and your writing and actions are built upon that. Those with this line of thought seek to change the world to fit their value systems, not harmonize the chaos of different value systems by speaking inside them.
As one interested in emotional intelligence, I'm telling you this because it might actually help you, but more importantly help those you're trying to help. For what it's worth most of the people I chose to work with are more like you and don't think through others' value systems naturally. It 'feels' more authentic to see people's clear and consistent values than try to peg down the chameleons that constantly lens through systems.
>Actually I believe that we as a society would better if we set the baseline somewhere closer to what she wrote than to perfunctory respect and polite platitudes. And I believe the various negative emotions that would come with that new baseline are both real costs dearly paid AND worth paying all the same. I know my perspective on this isn't popular.
You're alive, you can write posts in response to criticism. The deceased cannot. An obit isn't a performance review of a person written while they are alive; it's a final send-off written to tell a story about someone's life and comfort the living.
I understand why you'd believe it's ok to have things written like this about you (this is directed to you) in your obituary, but you should be aware that it may cause pain to your friends and relatives, that they won't understand why people spoke of you in these ways. Everyone makes mistakes and values can change as we grow older and move between social groups. The 'you' that you see yourself as-is always going to be different from how others see you. It will never match your ideal. This is an inescapable fact.
The issue at hand is that you, whether or not you're consciously aware, are seeking to project your own value system onto those that won't share that value system. I'm not asking you to share in their values or even to fully understand them. I'm asking you to acknowledge their presence and understand that an obit isn't written to a party of one.
Consider this example: People feel pain and sadness after their relatives die. Even if Mitchell wanted to say she didn't get along with Gerv, she could have made her narrative something that would have respected his values that didn't match her own. There's a way to say something like: 'We did not always agree on matters, but Gerv's dedication always impressed me.' (Which is sort of what the totality of her post could be taken as) Rather than inform his family that he caused distress inside the organization, she could still try the express the totality of Gerv by not showcasing the pain he's caused.
If you read my original post it was a straightforward statement about my preferences for myself, and nothing about what I thought the right thing was or what other people should want. That wasn't an accident. I think your heuristics for judging people by their statements might be misleading you about who I am and what I think?
It's a little disorienting to have you relating to me as though I'm deficient in perspective taking, mainly because perspective taking (and teaching others to take perspectives) is literally my profession.
My best guess is that your main point in the last thing you wrote is that I am not thinking of my own relatives and loved ones when I say I want a warts-and-all style obit for myself--that if I took their perspective, and realized it would hurt them for me to receive what I want, then I might change my mind, particularly on the grounds that the obit is actually for them, not for me. Let me know if I got that wrong.
>It's a little disorienting to have you relating to me as though I'm deficient in perspective taking, mainly because perspective taking (and teaching others to take perspectives) is literally my profession.
Never claimed you were deficient. I claimed it appears that you do not naturally think this way and it shows in your writing.
>My best guess is that your main point in the last thing you wrote is that I am not thinking of my own relatives and loved ones when I say I want a warts-and-all style obit for myself--that if I took their perspective, and realized it would hurt them for me to receive what I want, then I might change my mind, particularly on the grounds that the obit is actually for them, not for me. Let me know if I got that wrong.
That's the gist of what I'm trying to convey. I can understand though that some, maybe you, would rather risk some distress to those around them in hopes others will have a better acceptance/understanding of who they really were.
If you feel I'm really off-base on my comments about you, I'm actually making a point with that too. If I were you wrote an obit about you, you'd obviously disagree with claims being made (yes, I'm aware we only know each other from a series of brief posts back and forth). It's the same way with any acquaintance doing it, they only get to know parts of you and the parts you think they know might be totally at odds with the values/image you tried to convey about yourself.
I find it annoying each time nonprofit compensation for various executives is raised. I don't want to derail the thread, but it is especially appalling in education, where entities brand themselves as nonprofit where administration swallows ridiculous amount of money.
Where do you get those executive jobs for relatively unknown entities that pay millions? Isn't there an entire IRS publication about how it is suppsed to be reasonable?
But its defenders constantly say "Mozilla is a non-profit" and when pressed, note that Mozilla Foundation is the sole owner of Mozilla Corporation.
You can't have it both ways: either it is subject to Foundation=good presumptions as defenders invoke, or it is not. If not, then its comp may not be excessive at the top, but it sure jumped in 2017 while market share dropped -- and anyway, if it is a for-profit, it needs to act like one to make more money and avoid layoffs!
The double standard here just stinks. I am bound by NDAs from when I was at Mozilla, but since then I've observed and heard enough to call bullshit, and I am.
Then you should have posted this in every single reply where you stated Mozilla Corporation is NOT a non-profit. Or else you look ( and I presume you are before this reply ) that you are defending their status.
MoCo doesn't get the goodies. It's a cash generator (in theory, probably not so much at the moment) for MoFo, and money has to flow only in that direction as I understand it.
It's not treated as a non-profit in any way, which is why it could do multi-million dollar partnerships and pay competitive tech salaries without the kind of scrutiny or restrictions a 501(c)-anything would have.
No, sorry -- it is encumbered as a for-profit to pay taxes, but it cannot operate as a for-profit wholly owned by private investors or public shareholders would (I'm not saying that is good or bad). It is different. It's like many sports stadia/teams, universities, hospitals: for-profit wholly owned sub of a non-profit.
As I just noted in my last reply, this is abused via double-think to defend Mozilla as a "non-profit" when that wins social status, and denied (as you do) when trying to spiff Mozilla as a commercially-savvy for-profit. Sorry, you cannot have it both ways.
One thing I think is clear from its history, including when I was there (but not based on any NDA'ed info): Mozilla has not been able to act aggressively as a commercial player. Just one example: KaiOSTech is the lineal descendent and successor to FirefoxOS, going to 200M+ smart-featurephones globally, even winning a Google investment. Mozilla dropped FirefoxOS (twice, painfully).
>Mozilla has not been able to act aggressively as a commercial player. Just one example: KaiOSTech ...
I am just speculating here, but would this involve significant compromise on Mozilla's core values - specifically privacy? For example one of their investors and partners is Reliance Jio (the reason why KaiOS is the second most popular mobile OS in India) who brag about monetizing the data of their subscribers as a fundamental business model and strategy. The reason i was excited about FirefoxOS was that i was hoping that they would do the same for mobile operating systems as they did for the World Wide Web. Personally, i trust KaiOS devices even less than Android in that regard.
AFAIK privacy had nothing to do with it. Mozilla did not want to keep investing, it lost hope in getting traction and had no other mobile-to-scale play, so it pulled back to focus on desktop. Confirmed in private comms from multiple execs.
it's funny how FirefoxOS still feels modern. Thinking about it, I have a 10 year old browser on my old smartphone, which also feels modern. Not really much has happened since HTML5. We got a datepicker?, wait, that was HTML5, so I guess nothing new has been added. Instead web dev's build their own web components using poor performing web frameworks. Speaking for myself I spent two weeks making a freaking window menu for a web app, yeh, I know window menus are not good UI, but it's what people are used to, and I made it work with keyboard and screen readers.
The browser market is worth around 5 billion, but that is only if you count bribe money from Google. You could double that number from showing ads directly. But you could make two orders of magnitude more if you had an actual business model (that did not resolve around ads, although ads can be used as a complement). Quick hanging fruit: Micro transactions, in (web) app purchases... Instead I have to walk around with a plastic card with numbers on it, the only security is the last 3 numbers, that are also printed on the plastic card. There is no encryption, no digital signing, freaking ston-age! And we pay 2-5% plus a monthly fee to use it, wtf!
The cloud business is a slow growing market, but I expect it to explode in maybe 10 years or so. Other companies, like Microsoft also thinks so, and are investing heavily in the cloud. But what is the main UI to access "the cloud"!? The browser... With "the browser" you become a middleman between the platform players and the content providers.
Normal users don't care what stack they are on, it's just that the native UI elements are better then the browser components. So native apps usually performs better then web apps. And are nicer to use.
Browsers are not just for documents any more. (most corporations still use word documents and pdf, sigh). Ever since browsers got scripting capabilities developers want (including myself) to build apps in the browser. Just look at electron. Developers want to build front-ends using browser technology!
Just like gfx cards give the developer the ability to draw triangles, the browser gives you divs. But a gfx card can paint billions of triangles per second, while the browser can only handle a few hundred DOM elements.
Another low hanging fruit are app to app integrations. On a native platform you can copy content from one app to another app, you can save a file in one app, and open it in another app, but not so much in the browser. Although modern browser can make use of the system clipboard, data is sent from one app -> to the device -> then back to the other app. It should instead go directly from (cloud) server to server.
Sorry for the random ramblings, I'm just a web developer trying to re-invent the wheel.
(I'm also looking for a job where I can play with this crippled browser tech, or a PO role where I can just point in the right direction and smarter people take care of the execution)
>Probably not but that is what the market cost is.
Is it really? The average pay for the CEO of a company of Mozilla's size is somewhere around $800,000 according to [1]. And a pretty large chunk of that is performance related.
Of course salaries may vary a lot between industries, but given Mozilla's performance, their CEO's salary appears to be on the high side.
Besides the fact tech skews much higher, especially tech in SV, Mozilla doesn't have stock or equity to pass around, so has historically had relatively high cash compensation for its size instead.
I think that has become less true over the years, but it does tend to inflate salary or salary+bonus numbers unless you compare to total comp elsewhere (including parachutes and other bonuses that may not make these sheets).
The numbers I quoted include new stock/equity as well as equity gains.
Also, Mozilla is a rather unusual tech company in many ways. Leading Mozilla comes with unique opportunities not easily found elsewhere. Monetary compensation is not the only incentive for people.
I disagree. The CEO seems to be hinting at lean years ahead. She should be cutting her pay instead. Like Nintendo's management did during their Wii U years.
Nonsense, there have been multiple cases in the west, e.g. John Chambers at Cisco, Michael Kneeland at United Rentals, Dan Price at Gravity Payments, Nicholas Woodman at GoPro.
Maybe it's like when a store has 20% off sale a couple weeks after they raised their prices 10%. Yeah, it's still a sale, it's just not as big of a price cut as you're making it out to be.
Raise your salary, sock some money away, then take a big public paycut now that your house is paid off.
It would be interesting to see if the CEO bailed if her pay was cut in half. Many CEOs are not in a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. So they can walk away if you cut their pay without looking like an asshole. Then the board is stuck looking for a replacement who will accept 1.25M and the expectation that it could get cut again if the company doesn't turn around.
> Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.
This is a dangerous limb to go out on an HN, but what if they just didn't have a CEO? Do you think the quality of the resulting product would be significantly worse?
This will discourage people from donating. Absolutely disgusting. Maybe it's good for them to go bankrupt, so that other non-profits will learn from their mistake.
The minute Mozilla goes bankrupt and Firefox loses funding is the minute the internet is dead. Imagine only having a single client for HTTP (Chrome/WebKit).
I don't see how that is an unreasonable salary for the CEO of a highly influential tech company. CEO pay for other large tech companies is much higher.
I guess I'm being a pedant about the way one might pursue the line of reasoning of comparing to other companies' pay, not its validity and overall applicability.
Mozilla constantly says it is not like “other companies”.
We were and are in the Bay Area, which is every year more expensive, but not 3x more.
It could be the 2.5m/year is justified, but not by market share up, new revenue lines, or both. What else? Competition? No, it is a custom fit job, chair of both boards and now even acting CEO. No competitive recruiting or chance for others to get the job, no real oversight.
They were not the CEO until a few months ago. They aren't even Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. They are the chair of the Mozilla Foundation board of directors.
Sure, I'll do dev for 150k if they're fine with me remoting in from Germany. Currently earning a third of that as security consultant which is on average better paid than developer afaik. I could retire at 37 instead of 47.
You see, I'm fine donating money to a lot of places because I feel like I earn a lot (and I earn about 50k/year, not 150k and I never expect to earn 400k). The Internet Archive, Climeworks, OpenStreetMap, a local hackerspace, random sites or tools that I found useful, etc. But when I see that we need a hundred thousand average-sized donations to cover the cost of a single employee in a non-profit (what is even the definition of that word if not to not turn out profit to its owners?) then we're all just financing a pretty face instead of the product we love. One can argue all one wants about it being the market value or competitive offers or whatever, but if you are only in it for the money, Mozilla should not be the company for you. I'm not financing that. This is also why I don't donate to Wikipedia: the money doesn't actually go to Wikipedia the platform.
You know those meetings you hate? Quadruple them, add more customers and some unsavory financiers. Then sprinkle it with a bunch of business trips where you never get to see the city.
Think about that the next time you're thinking how much of a paycut you'd be willing to take if it meant you didn't have to talk to that guy every week.
>You know those meetings you hate? Quadruple them, add more customers and some unsavory financiers. Then sprinkle it with a bunch of business trips where you never get to see the city.
That argument is about "how hard/bothersome" the work is. That's not how compensation is set, however.
I, and most developers I presume, also don't like sweeping streets or cleaning gas station toilets (much more than business trips and tons of customer meetings), but nobody would pay millions to some gas station toilet attendant.
> There is very little about software development expertise that will help with either of those endeavors
Good point, we can pay them much less than developers. Having a warm smile and making informed decisions about ~things is something my mom can do and I assure you her hourly wage is less than a developer's.
And the first industrial grade confidence trickster (and when you're managing $500 million you tend to get the cream of the crop going after you) will take her (and her company) for all she's worth. Having seen people who are great at people skills and those who are not there is a world of difference.
There probably are, but that's not the issue when recruiting CEO.
You have to find a person with a relevant experience. That's the real bottleneck. Number of people available who have enough track record to be considered to become CEO in a tech company with half a billion in revenue and over thousand employees is small, those who are willing to work for less pay is really small.
Running a company such as this is like living in a shark tank. Powerful, convincing people are going to lobby you to do what they think you ought to be doing. See the recent privatization of .org for how things can go wrong. You need the right person at the helm with strong convictions.
Main search deal is traffic based; user population, per statcounter and netmarketshare, continues downward trend. So less revenue over time, unless users search more for some reason.
Mitchell has been influential in Netscape and Mozilla since the beginning. Also, Mozilla isn’t just a software company. It’s also an technology and public policy advocacy organization.
Value isn't solely a function of effort, no. Some activities are more fruitful than others. This is a universal truth by the way, not simply a property of our current economic system. If I work up a sweat driving nails into wood with a hammer, that won't make whatever I'm creating stronger than if I used an electric screwdriver or nailgun.
Jobs do not have to be physically exhausting to be hard.
Coal miner's job is hard and deadly. programming is differently hard and not very deadly (arguably working at a desk, wreaking your brain 70h a week with 10 days off a year is somewhat deadly). i'd take the programming job any day as long as I get a bay area salary, granted that I can program.
However, i can tell you most programmer jobs are much harder, take much more hours than many lower paying jobs (not even mentioning the fact that you need to be somewhat smart and learn it for years before you can do anything).
Say drive a bus? Yeah its boring. But its not hard. Hold a 2 pers. shop? nope, not hard, and you do less hours. Etc. Heck even driving the trucks to the coal miners pay very well for a somewhat hard job.
This chart feels a bit disingenuous given that Mozilla's form990s show Eich's salary tracking along basically the same line until his departure in 2014.
It also doesn't take into consideration revenue growth, which according to the corporation's Wiki page grew much faster and higher in multiples than her salary.
As well, according to the same Wiki, "There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid." It would be a bummer to run a company of that size, be dedicated to it for so long, and not have any stake in it. Imagine her opportunity cost...
Wikipedia is unreliable. Perhaps you missed it, but Verizon bought Yahoo!, realized how Marissa's five year default search deal with Firefox was bleeding money as most users reset their default to Google, and Mozilla and Verizon declared the other party in breach in rapid succession. This will go to court, and my money is on Verizon. There will be no balloon payment of the last two years.
The jump in comp in 2017, as far as I can tell, was predicated on the Verizon payments being fulfilled. I hear it was also a quid pro quo for Foundation board members who demanded (order of magnitude smaller) salaries for their work as board members. Perhaps they do a lot, but in past, board members (including me) worked for no added comp.
Mitchell may be worth it, but I'd want more of a turnaround in market share, new revenue sources, or both. Maybe that is just me.
Thanks, I missed that. I asked around, and I'm told that Mozilla's suit was dismissed with prejudice in Santa Clara County Superior Court (original case id is 17CV319921, I think). If true this helps account for both Chris Beard termination and layoffs.
I'm in no way an insider and haven't paid attention to the history of this saga. I was just using public, possibly shaky info like the others. My point was to show that one graph is not the whole story, and it prompted you to add even more details.
Your last point is definitely fair.
I use Firefox on my phone and recently started learning JavaScript, so um, thank you.
Correction, the source said "corporation board members" demanded compensation, not foundation board members. The 2018 form 990 backs this up: $0 to board members other than Baker. No transparency re: corp board member comp.
Why? Becoming a publicly traded company comes with assumed responsibilities to make a profit; and, at least in the United States, an assumption that you should reduce your morals for the express purpose of turning a profit, lest your board of directors kick you out for someone that will.
There are greater goals, especially for a company like Mozilla, than making lots of money.
Hmm I don't know. I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev tools are great, it's simply not as polished as the competition.
For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO.
I think that alert's design is actually a _feature_. Safari made a similar change a while back not make the alerts look like system UI, to prevent phishing and similar attacks.
The person you responded to specifically explained that. It's made to look non-native on purpose so that users don't think a pop-up, phishing, asking for their password, is a native system prompt. Safari did the same thing. It's not that it's neglected, quite the opposite, actually.
Personally, I don't think the Firefox version looks any worse than the Safari version, they're just different. It comes down to preference. Just like you saying it's the ugliest tab bar which I very much disagree with.
When I say polished I don't mean a polished visual style in an aesthetic sense. What I mean is that a designer has put some work on a UI element and after some iterations there has been a conscious decision over why an element looks the way it looks.
For example, one of the major considerations when doing UI design is creating elements that have a cohesive style (regardless of which aesthetic style that is).
None of that happened on that god forgotten alert. It's probably the first thing that someone came up with in a rush, in a style that no other UI element of FF shares, and it has stayed like this probably because nobody cares.
It is a great browser, once we agree on priorities on what they should be great at.
All modern browsers suck badly wrt UI. User interfaces dumbed down to unusability is the new fashion and both Chrome and Mozilla suffer equally from that (which is why I use Waterfox Classic). But while FF focuses on privacy, and definitely delivers in this context, Chrome and others don't, by design. I would happily trade 50% of everything else for 10% more privacy, because an ugly tab, panel, window, menu etc. does no harm compared to the potential disgrace caused by the loss of control on personal data.
Do you know how customisable firefox's UI is in ways that chrome isn't? They limited it a bit in recent years so you can no longer can easily turn the url bar and tab bar into one bar which i'm sad about but all in all most of the buttons i don't use i can remove, those i do i can add, i can change the colours, shapes and location. Chrome is ugly by default and doesn't allow me to fix it.
Very true, but it costs money and neither Google's browser with their nearly infinite resources has them.
FF might just need more time to implement them properly; I only wish they didn't fall into the dumbed down UI fashion like they did when they copied from others the "let's fill the main page with junk and remove a perfectly working configuration panel completely".
> also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking
The English spell checking is pretty bad, too, giving me at least an order of magnitude more false positives [1] than Safari or Chrome on my Mac, and Edge or Chrome on Windows. Same when compared to things other than browsers, such as Word, LibreOffice, BBEdit, Pages.
What's baffling is that Firefox, LibreOffice, and Chrome all use Hunspell [2], so presumably the reason Firefox spell check sucks compared to LibreOffice is they have a terrible dictionary.
So why doesn't Mozilla just take the LibreOffice dictionary?
[1] In case I've got the terminology wrong for spell checkers, by false positive I mean where the spell checker says that a word is spelled wrong when it is in fact spelled correctly.
@pier25 Would honestly disagree on your 'polish' concerns. I consciously 'returned' to Firefox macOS a little over a year ago from a contented experience with Chrome, for entirely non-practical reasons (it just felt like a good idea). And it's been nothing but pleasant. I'm a massive fan of the UI, it's simplicity, flexibility, but also its bold sense of self. I despise the too-polished feel of safari. It is impractical. And chrome I return to semi-regularly for debugging or QA, but it honestly feels like a downgrade. It's so plain. So lifeless. So google. Sure there may be edge-case usability issues on FF, such as your multi-lingual spell check, but this seems like an entirely workable extension challenge. Safari on the other hand is drowning in edge cases ... and chrome - privacy.
> Sure there may be edge-case usability issues on FF, such as your multi-lingual spell check, but this seems like an entirely workable extension challenge
It's an issue that affects anyone that writes in multiple languages. This accounts for the majority of internet users in the world since they write at least in their own language and English. This is not an edge case that affects 10% of users.
Like I already explained, it can't be solved properly with an extension. The ones that try to solve it slow down FF. This has to be solved at the native level, not in JS.
Firefox's spellchecking is just generally awful, even for English. It fails to recognize even basic words such as 'surveil' with the closest suggestion being 'survive'. I've found several other words I wanted to use that weren't found too. I have spellcheck off by default but when I write something long I do a quick check at the end so I don't normally notice this.
Firefox is by far my least favorite piece of software that I regularly use and I've considered throwing my computer out the window because of it.
I think you need to install a new or different dictionary. It’s dumb, but that’s how it works - spellcheck dictionaries are provided on the Mozilla extension store. You could try a new one.
There is something seriously wrong with Firefox if the default spellcheck dictionary is so bad that I might need to install a different one, especially for the English language. Hell they should just be able to merge theirs with Chromium's. Regardless, as I said I don't normally use spellcheck and I trust my own judgement over the computer's so it isn't a big deal for me.
> The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
I switched to FF about 2 months ago. I made a FF Color theme [0] that matches Chrome's colors to help ease my transition. Only color I wasn't able to adjust with FF color is the tab onhover color.
> The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
It's horrible on all platforms ;) . The way tabs are handled is by far my biggest complaint, you can't fit as many tabs in as with chrome and since they "upgraded" the extension system the vertical tab extensions don't work well (can't remove top tab panel).
I wish they'd just make a native UI for each platform, their cross platform one has always been a train wreck but it's especially bad since they dropped XUL.
But the user will switch to a browser that works for them. Which is happening.
All the people I know, who left FF, myself partly included, did so for this reason.
Quite some sites did not work anymore on firefox. And the normal user does not care that this is because of vendorprefixes which are not standard. They care about that their website does not work anymore.
> It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO.
Really? Do you learn a new language every day? I installed languages that I am interested years ago and forgot about it until you mentioned it.
A lot of us are bi-lingual. English is not my first language, so being able to use spell checking for my native language and English without things breaking is important to me.
well, I'm bi-lingual as well, I only needed to install languages once. I don't want to have installed dictionary for every language under the sun. They do take space.
you can add as many as you want (at least I didn't hit the limit) it's just 2 clicks for each and they are retained between upgrades, the parent issue is that Firefox doesn't come with every language installed by default.
Yeah but you don't have spell checking on all these languages unless you manually switch between those.
I write in 4 languages so it's quite annoying to do that every time. In Chrome there is multilingual spell checking even when you mix languages in the same sentence.
It is definitely a great browser. I think the market share dropping has a lot to do with browser lockin on specific hardware, and site-specific apps being used more and more. We are losing more and more of the open, public infrastructure of the open web.
The decline of Firefox is largely due to Mozilla's incompetence.
If you look at their own statistics [1], you will notice that (worldwide) usage started declining after the introduction of Quantum (November 2017), and dropped substantially after the April 2019 addons outage.
This would suggest, IMHO, that Firefox loses market share when beloved features - customization, addons - stop working or got worse.
This is unsurprising to anyone who has been using Firefox for a long time: the primary differentiation factor of Firefox has always been customization. Messing with that would always be a risky proposition. Nuking the whole ecosystem entirely and starting over in the space of a few of months was simply idiotic. Disabling everyone's addon's because of an admin screw up was just the icing on the fucking cake.
Using Nightly on Linux (Bunsen Helium), 360 tabs, using 1.5 GB, but that will grow if I fire up dormant tabs. Starts going out to swap if I run it too long, then I kill it and update Nightly.
Isn't that a very low maintenance thing?
Generally just a light and very speedy stripped down version of the browser with simple security/privacy changes that aren't in the main one because they'd be inconvenient for people.
given Mozillas funding and the fact that most users don't care about browser marketing (except for sneaky performance "tricks" or Google's "want some more speed"-in your face mechanism) I really think, they should focus on the core (e.g. building a browser) and just leave politics (e.g. "safe-sync", "better media integration" - e.g. pocket) out of it completely... And yeah, I'd be more than happy to subscribe to my browser-vendor at this point if this means freedom or not.
But not if I look at what Mozilla (and wikipedia) which are raking in money from corporate shills and still want my money to develop their "business" (which is very much specified and as a not-for-profit I don't see the need to "expand")
well, it's not directly related to browser/app development (which is still the purpose of the non-profit Mozilla foundation???), but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO? coming from traditional dead-tree press in germany... I also shuddered when I saw right under layoff-press that the marketing VP comes straight out of facebook.
Instead of building a beacon of a non-commercial, individual and free web, it seems that people at Mozilla are more concerned with having just another carreer but with a better image up front (facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!)
>well, it's not directly related to browser/app development (which is still the purpose of the non-profit Mozilla foundation???)
"The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions"
Making a browser was part of supporting FOSS and open web standards.
>but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO?
Whilst I agree that the implementation was horrendous the idea behind it was good.
Do you know what I love? I can bookmark something and have that bookmark available at home.
I can log in somewhere and quickly do it elsewhere. That's firefox sync. Nobody complains about it because it isn't noticed as such a service.
The main dominator of the web currently is Google's chrome. It goes beyond even that. A lot of chrome's convenience and incentive for use for people comes from providing an ecosystem.
Keep, calendar and the like and despite how terrible the limited functionality for addons is they all nicely integrate with the browser by defaault and their mobile versions everyone gets on android.
Tried an addon for keep on firefox? It's trash. There's no convenient alternatives and without pushing them they won't appear.
Additionally they're entirely dependent on funding from their competitor who pushes the monopolising of webstandards and implementation that they try to combat.
>facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!
The fuck are you on about. moz literally implemented facebook containers to keep the tracking out and their defined data privacy principles can be trusted. Facebook isn't even a consumer or product focused service business (with some exceptions of course) they're generally in it for your data for advertising purposes given that you don't give em a dime for the privilege of using their social media.
I was curious so I put together a chart comparing Baker, Eich, James Cook (the treasurer, not the explorer), and a baseline of 500k with a 10% raise per year:
I think your point is the most important one. This is not "Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share" as Eich says. This appears to be a misleading graph of how much one guy has been paid. His salary went way up in 2016, unsurprisingly (shortly after Eich was fired), and Firefox has continued its downward slide from when Eich was there.
1. The increase was in 2017, reported per IRS regs in Mozilla Foundation's Form 990 filing (which must list all comp to board members even if they work for the for-profit Mozilla Corporation subsidiary).
2. The "one guy" is Mitchell Baker, and she is chair of both foundation and corporation boards.
But nice try attempting to pin blame on market share slide these last almost six years on me.
In your Twitter thread you claimed it was a "chart for top job" at Mozilla. Will you now say that was false, that Baker was not the highest paid employee for the duration of that chart?
Don't be dense or try "gotcha" games with me: Mitchell is chair of both boards, hirer and firer of CEOs, she has the top job. I'm told Mitchell is now acting CEO too, so: hat trick!
Also you didn't acknowledge your 2016 blunder, or retract your scurrilous insinuation that I'm to blame lo these past almost six years for continued and even accelerating decline, not to mention loss of FirefoxOS to KaiOSTech. Please do better, or save it.
> your scurrilous insinuation that I'm to blame lo these past almost six years
Ooh, "scurrilous"! I'm struck where I stand! If only I had actually said you were to blame for the last 5-6 years, you might have something. I said Mozilla continued its downward slide from when you were there, not that you were to blame for that.
> even accelerating decline
Your chart doesn't show an accelerating decline in the last six years, so you don't have much to go on there either.
In fairness to you, you did say "top job", and I quoted you as saying "chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive", which is what dman said at the top of the thread. Baker was not the highest paid executive for the duration of the chart, but I shouldn't have claimed you said that. So I do apologize for that. I also apologize for misgendering Baker.
It really wasn’t clear to me at all until I read this comment. I interpreted the tweet (and GP) to mean “this chart tracks CEO pay at Mozilla, regardless of who the CEO is.” Seeing this comment completely changed the perspective for me, so it was helpful.
Wow. This makes me wince. My mind is making an emotional connection here to the .org fiasco and recent posts about "the internet of yore". Something(s) odd, unethical seems to be brewing/happening.
Remember, I'm the bad guy. Ignore this looting operation amid market share tanking, also do please ignore past board members tied to Epstein. It's all about me. :-/
Nice deflection. I'm a founder of mozilla.org, Mitchell joined 8 months after, we worked closely for 15+ years. She set the salaries with board approval, always made somewhat more than I did, I never complained. Neither of us was making more than high six figures, until after I left. Something changed, and it is not generic to "industries". No excuses!
I didn't intend for it to come off as a deflection, though I see that it would be easy to read it that way.
I agree that something changed at Mozilla, but I've seen it get justified at other previously reasonable organizations with excuses like "everyone else is doing it," or "This is still below-market rate for C-level talent." The fact that it's happening everywhere doesn't make it less nauseating.
[edit]
Mitchell could drop her salary to a "mere" 6 figures and lay off 7 fewer people, but you hardly ever see executives do things like that.
Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.
Creating a language 20 years ago doesn't mean you're responsible for everything the language produced. If javascript didn't exist something different would have taken it's place and produced just as much value.
Microsoft tried with VBScript, but JS was fit enough to survive, and no one wanted a second language after it. No point in speculating, we know JS matters. Asserting it could have been Blub means nothing. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155.
Also, I kept working on JS, while doing other things. I worked on JS in both Netscape and Ecma TC39 through late 1997, then co-founded mozilla.org with jwz and others. For mozilla.org I was chief architect, but I still kept working on the Mozilla JS engine, SpiderMonkey, adding features such as getters and setters that became important in 2005 due to use by Microsoft's Live Maps.
Live Maps emulated the IE DOM in Firefox via those same getter and setter extensions that I'd added over the years since 1997. In IE, Live Maps of course used the native DOM. This left Safari and Opera failing unless they reverse engineered the getter and setter extensions from SpiderMonkey in Firefox quickly. It took them about a week, and then Live Maps worked in Safari and Opera too.
This shows how quickly browsers can evolve, based on innovation in just one browser's engine, even in the wake of a monopoly period of stagnation.
Ubiquity doesn't equate to profitability. In fact, most of the big internet Startups (Twitter comes instantly to mind) lose and money and likely always will.
It doesn't matter - it's legal, protected political speech in donation form. There's nothing wrong with having differing opinions about things; you can disagree as much as you like and donate as much as you want to counter it.
Appeal to legality isn't proof of moral superiority. Racial segregation was also legal via Jim Crow laws, and people still hold the political opinion it should still be despite society changing and moving forward.
It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions.
Only in enacting company-wide policies to coerce political participation. Terminating employment for political actions in an at-will employment state like California is still legal.
From your article:
>On the contrary, political beliefs or views are not a specifically protected category under California's discrimination laws. Nothing in either of the two labor code provisions above directly addresses discrimination or retaliation on the basis of expressed political views. Nor does the First Amendment serve to provide any further guidance. With limited exceptions, the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of "freedom of speech" applies only to government action and not private employers/employees. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 prohibits political affiliation discrimination against federal employees only.
That's a lawyer's marketing blog selling his services to sue for wrongful termination. The labor code § 1101 they cite is the same thing: it applies only to employers using threatening to terminate in order to coerce political activity, not actually terminating someone for political actions.
This is an important distinction. It is illegal for an employer to threaten all employees with termination if they do not vote on X, for example. It is not illegal for an employer to terminate an employee for taking a specific political action.
Mozilla did not threaten to terminate in order to coerce action, they terminated for actions already taken place, making it legal.
> it applies only to employers using threatening to terminate in order to coerce political activity, not actually terminating someone for political actions.
So your idea is that it's not okay to threaten to fire an employee over political actions, but it is okay to actually fire someone over political actions? No worker protections protects against both. Read it closely:
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through _or_ by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
It prohibits both discharge and threat of discharge. The argument that Mozilla did not threaten to discharge Eich, and thus discharging Eich because of his political activity is not relevant. Both are prohibited.
I didn't make the laws - this is what they are. GP is making the appeal to legality which is wrong in this case.
The law is to prevent employers from extorting all employees into taking political action under threat of termination. Terminating a single employee for their past political actions is different from extorting all employees into action.
> The law is to prevent employers from extorting all employees into taking political action under threat of termination.
Not incorrect, but an incomplete description of these worker protections. It is also prevents employers from threatening employees into refraining from taking political action, "No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity."
> Terminating a single employee for their past political actions is different from extorting all employees into action.
Terminating an employee for their political action makes it crystal clear to the remaining employees that they need to refrain from that political action if they want to keep their jobs - and that violates worker protections.
Again, you seem to be under the impression that these protections only exist to prevent employers from making their employees carry out a political action. That's not the case, they also prohibit influencing employees from refraining taking political action. Firing an employee from donating to a ballot initiative is a very explicit way to get employees to refrain from donating to said ballot initiative.
And yet again, I as well as other commenters have provided you with analysis from law groups that explain that Mozilla firing Eich over his political donations would have violated these worker protections.
This is becoming ad nauseum. You're missing the point about how the law applies differently to company policy and actions, but my guess is that you desperately want them to be the same hence your repeated arguments and confirmation bias. The lawyer blogs you and another commenter linked to are trying to sell services to sue employers and are not valid analyses.
> This is becoming ad nauseum. You're missing the point about how the law applies differently to company policy and actions
Where are you getting this idea that this law only applies to company "policy". Reread the protections:
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through _or_ by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
Where does it say that this is only prohibited by policy? It says "No employer shall..." not "No employer shall implement policy to...". The law does not apply differently to company "policy" versus "actions".
How is policy of terminating employees who donate to certain ballot propositions not amount to coercing political participation? It's directly coercing employees against donating with the threat of losing their jobs.
How do you know that it is Mozilla's company policy? That is the distinction based on the law that you cited. Firing someone for a reason in an at-will employment state does not suddenly make that reason part of the company policy.
Because they fired an employee specifically for their political donations. Your claim that firing employees for their political activity is ok as long as it's not a company policy and only one-off instances is not what law groups are saying. Here's one that addresses Eich's case specifically: https://shawlawgroup.com/2014/05/california-law-protects-emp...
> Mr. Eich’s situation is somewhat analogous to the one addressed in Nava v. Safeway, Inc., an unpublished decision of the California Court of Appeal. There, the court found that an employee had a viable wrongful termination claim because Safeway allegedly fired him for opposing gay marriage. Safeway claimed to have discharged Nava for taking down a sign he considered to be pro-gay. Nava claimed he was fired for his political beliefs.
> Eich therefore likely had the right to contribute to Proposition 8 as a protected political activity.
I'm not claiming anything, just explaining the law you cited.
Being fired for your political actions is entirely legal in at-will employment states like California.
The law you cited does not apply, except to companies that use company policy to _coerce_ political action from employees.
Firing someone for their actions does not make it company policy.
Mozilla was not coercing employees to take political action by adding politics into their company policy. Mozilla was saying that for that particular position at their company, the employee's political actions were grounds to be terminated.
I'm not sure how many more ways I can explain this, but that's why what happened is legal, despite the lawyers opinion you googled.
I understand what you're saying, but the point is you're wrong. A company cannot go around firing any employees that donates or otherwise supports a candidate from a particular party, for example. The protections read:
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity. [1]
This not only prohibits employers from coercing employers to adopt a particular stance, it also prohibits employers from influencing employees to refrain from adoption or following any lines of politician action or activity.
How could firing an employee for political donations not be considered influencing an employee to refrain from a particular line of political action. Specifically, in Mozilla was influencing employees to refrain from the political action of donating in favor of Proposition 8.
> Mozilla was not coercing employees to take political action by adding politics into their company policy. Mozilla was saying that for that particular position at their company, the employee's political actions were grounds to be terminated.
Again, this is not just about specifically telling employees to support a particular cause in its company policy. Employers coercing employees to refrain from adopting or following political action is prohibited too. And in this case, it is pretty explicit what political action Mozilla was trying to make employees refrain from: donating to Proposition 8.
And again, people that study law say that firing Eich for his donations would have been illegal as I provided above.
Both are prohibited, "...through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment". It's illegal to do influence employees through means of discharge or through threat of discharge. Firing someone for political activity and threatening to fire someone for political activity are both in violation of these employment protections.
You're cherry picking the statement by quoting it out of context, which shows the law only applies to one (coercion):
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees...
So it's not just coercion, it's prohibiting influence (as well as attempts at either). And it also describes the manner of influence that is prohibited:
> through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment.
It is prohibited to influence employees through discharge or loss of employment or through threat of discharge or loss of employment. Both threatening to fire someone and actually firing someone over political activity are prohibited.
And lastly it describes what the employer is prohibited from influencing their employers to or to refrain from doing:
> to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
Using the above to get employees to follow a political action to to refrain from following a political action is prohibited.
> You also dodged the question.
Because the question is inane and you know it. My whole point was that both threatening to fire Eich and actually firing Eich for donations violated these protections, so this distinction is irrelevant. But I'll entertain you: threatening to discharge someone over political activity is when an employer threatens and employee to fire someone for taking or refusing to take a political action. Discharging someone over political activity is when they are actually fired.
And now it's my turn to give you an inane question of my own: When the law prohibits both threatening to discharge someone for political activity and actually discharging someone for political activity, is trying to justify firing someone for political actions by saying, "it's okay they actually discharged him for political activity, they didn't threaten to discharge him" an effective approach?
> Mozilla contends Eich voluntarily stepped down; if true, of course, there is no legal issue.
The article was using the Eich example to illustrate the case law it was discussing. It did not state that there was a legal issue in Eich's case, merely hinted that Mozilla's contention might be false and, if so, there was illegal behavior. But the primary purpose of its inclusion in the article was to elucidate the relevant issues, not to argue for or against what happened in that instance.
Here's an equally correct example invoking Godwin's law.
>Why yes I do donate lots to the ANP.
>Why? Well they align with my love for Hitler, racial purity and fascism.
>What do you mean the board things this'll make jewish employees uncomfortable?
>A wider range of customers/employees won't like it either?
>So what. It's legal, protected political speech in donation form!
Nobody gives a fuck. It's equally legal to not want to associate with such a person.
Whether it's a racist or someone that wants to ban gay marriage, etc i wouldn't to work for them, with them or fund them.
And guess what.
I don't expect the Mormon church or whatever to put part of a gay couple or an advocate or donor for related stuff in an executive position either.
You're right, it absolutely is. The corollary to this is that no one has to hire him/work with him; they're allowed to fire him for his legally-protected speech. I don't agree with how it was handled either, but we must protect their freedom to act as they choose as much as Mr. Eich's freedom to speak as he chooses.
You've been downvoted; I sympathize. While you stick to "speech", I think you miss two things, one about speech and the other from a different area of law:
1. Free speech is not just a U.S. 1st Amendment issue, and who cares what else goes wrong at subsidiary levels. From the Committee for the First Amendment (Humphrey Bogard had to disavow under HUAC pressure; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_First_Amendm...) on, depending on whose ox was being gored, both left and right have decried "chilling effects" of less than federal censorship effects on free speech. Cory Doctorow had a good piece on this recently:
Cory covers the full space, including corporate censorship of dissidents of all political stripes, corporate capture via monopolies and market super-powers, etc. Recommended.
2. California has labor law from the New Deal era, which protects employees from being fired or demoted due to political affiliation, participation, or any action including speech:
Respectfully, with full benefit of hindsight, do you think it would have been better if you had stayed at Mozilla, forcing them to either fire you (which would have been illegal) or learn to deal with dissent? I ask not to criticize but to strategize.
Thanks for standing up and fighting these good fights.
Oh, sure, until it ends up in the situation where you have to prove your perfect ideological allegiance to the Party in order to have employment. It's already the case that you can't publicly post things without getting dox'd and fired for a lot of opinions that were 100% the norm not that long ago.
You may call it progress, but the progression is towards totalitarian liberalism; your gay marriage is really not going to make that experience that much better once they find some place where you're not faithful enough. For example, what if you're a white gay male?
If I remember correctly he didn't get fired for just not supporting gay marriage, he got fired for donating to some bill that was trying to prohibit gay marriage. That's quite the difference.
That's an entirely disingenuous way of putting this situation. Mozilla's profits are NOT the salaries of its employees - the profits are AFTER payroll. It was Eich's personal money, not Mozilla's money, and there is absolutely zero implication that Mozilla itself had the same opinions as its CEO - nor should there be.
If you draw that inference, it is because you're acting as part of Cancel Culture, which is totalitarian liberalism in action.
He was forced to resign (the Mozilla board was actually in favor of having him stay on) for having donated to a group supporting an anti-gay-marriage bill 3 years before he became CEO. And, as far as I am aware, not giving any further indication of support in the intervening 3 years.
Hi jcranmer, please be careful. Prop 8 passed in 2008, almost six years before 2014 when I was CEO. Also, neither of us can say (for different reasons) whether I was forced, and if so, by whom. Mozilla is clear that it did not fire me, nor could it have legally:
I don't see that as being very different. Why is him exercising his protected right to political speech in donation form subject to your judgement when it doesn't have any impact on the quality of the software he gives you for free?
I think that it was less about the end-user as it was about the gay people working for Mozilla who felt uncomfortable working with a CEO who took the actions Eich took in his past. One cannot know peoples' private thoughts or biases, so folks often take what ever signal they can get.
You're seriously likening the inability of gay people to go through the motions of a marriage ceremony to children being subjected to slave labour? That's the falsest equivocation I have ever read.
I'm comparing avoiding a company because of human rights issues with avoiding another company because of human rights issues. Its understandable for a well adjusted person to not want to fund either of these things.
>You're seriously likening the inability of gay people to go through the motions of a marriage ceremony to children being subjected to slave labour? That's the falsest equivocation I have ever read.
I'm not too familiar with the US and it's laws but doesn't marriage have an impact on legal matters, benefits and taxation?
I know for example that here I can't get a higher loan based on a higher percentage of my income because i'm single and the bank is limited in how it can lend out the money it lends from a state entity.
More specifically, he was asked to step down when it came to light that he donated to proposition 8. This proposition was passed. So by the logic of Eich's firing the majority of Californian voters would be excluded due to their political beliefs - a rather interesting take on inclusion.
I'm a little bit on the fence about Eich's firing as well, even though I wholeheartedly disagree with his stance on same-sex marriage.
But your comparison is not very apt.
This proposition was passed. So by the logic of Eich's
firing the majority of Californian voters would be
excluded due to their political beliefs
Big difference between "voting for" and "funding."
That's why we have secret ballots. So you can vote without fear of repercussions.
For better or for worse, once you have a C-level title, you are seen as representing the company and emblematic of its values. As you move up that ladder, things change.
I can't think of too many corporations where the executives' political activity wouldn't be grounds for some scrutiny.
I'm sure we can come up with some pathological examples where very few people would complain an an executive's ouster, such as an executive who supported openly Nazi candidates and figures. And I'm sure we can come up with much trickier and ambiguous scenarios, such as an executive who donated to a politician who then, in turn, opposed gay rights. When it comes to our two-party system, even with our current level of strife, very few would like to see somebody fired simply for voting for the "wrong" one of the two.
Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry).
tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded Brave instead.
And of course, once I got Brave started outside the valley, we got "funders" in the valley to invest, including many top VC firms (who now constitute <10% of all funds we raised to date so don't switch horses to argue we are VC-controlled).
Legality and morality are very often unrelated; in this case, the implication is not that he did something illegal, but that he is an asshole for spending his money for the purpose of making other people’s lives worse to the benefit of nobody.
Personally, I think that’s a perfectly good reason for not giving him more money.
“Cancel culture” is many people (many of whom matter to investors in one way or another) stating that they also feel that that is a bad place to put money.
I did not know that. It is odd though. I used to remember no one cared what about your Views as long as you were good at what you did. CS was as close to meritocracy as it could have been. It is a shame.
Strange, I don't remember any Mozilla employees organizing and rallying for political causes in the 1990s, and Mozilla was certainly around, if not the dominant platform at the time. Gay rights was no less of an issue then than it is today, it simply hadn't been popularized by the media and endorsed by politicians and corporations.
Personally I find it abhorrent that anyone was so quick to rally against Brendan Eich. If we keep going down this path, all we'll be left with are people that change their opinions on a whim and flip flop on issues so quickly that they resemble politicians. I'd rather have a good leader I don't agree with on every issue, than a poor leader who's trying to pretend to be on the right side of whatever political stance is in-vogue.
Part of his job was to acquire and retain employees, allocate capital, and engage in public relations.
Spending his personal money on fucking over other people (with no real benefit to the world), many of whom worked for or could work for him, is a bad sign about those parts of his job.
(That may not be an argument for the board to fire him, of course, but it is an answer to “how good is he at his job?”)
Well, how is him spending his personal money anyone's business but his own? Now, you could make an argument that his sort of mob mentality is why people now skulk around behind various trusts, llcs and PACs to any kind of political work other people may dislike.
To your point, I guess it really depends on how you define his set of responsibilities, which is a valid point to make. I thought of something very limited ( writing lines of code ).
From that perspective.. why does it matter who he donates to and why. Is it not up to him to decide?
He was the CEO, so it was much more than coding. For a regular software engineer (ie, no direct reports) I think it’s a very different calculus.
And it _is_ up to him to decide how to spend his money. But if he spends that money on things that deeply impact other people, it is more than fair for other people to care.
CS was never close to meritocracy (I'd argue that finance is/was historically far closer to meritocracy than CS ever was). Eich was raised in the Valley, got a Master's in CS before he had gotten a job, and was a millionaire and investing in Silicon Valley real estate before he had been working for ten years (he never started a company, and only created Javascript after something like eleven). There are people working on life-saving infrastructure in CS who've been working for forty years who don't have a million.
Also, "your Views" are different from "your Actions." If I think you're ridiculous, so what? If I think you're so ridiculous that I pay people money to promote a law that would increase what you have to pay in taxes, suddenly everyone cares, and rightfully so!
I was never a millionaire from real estate before I'd been working ten years. Are you perhaps misinformed by someone who was at SGI and exaggerated rumors they heard? I made more off of SGI options than I did by ten years in from real estate, and I never flipped. I've owned the same properties for over 30 years.
I agree with you that many fine people do life-saving or otherwise important work for far less. But facts matter, and I'm here to correct the record.
P.S. I was raised in Pittsburgh and Maryland as much as in the Valley.
This says you were a millionaire before you'd been working ten years, and as far as I'm aware it's fairly accurate? It's a profile of you that happened long before you were controversial. I didn't claim that you were a millionaire because you had invested in real estate, just that you also had invested in real estate (I assumed that it was obvious that the former was probably a precursor to the latter, but I guess not).
It does not say "due to real estate". How hard is this to read accurately and relate on HN faithfully? I had more upside from SGI's IPO than from valley real estate (which was good too, but I never flipped). Yeesh!
It does not say "due to real estate". How hard is this to read accurately and relate on HN faithfully?
Sir, the last comment was stating that I was trying to avoid implying that it was due to real estate.
> I didn't claim that you were a millionaire because you had invested in real estate
> just that you also had invested in real estate
I'm not accusing you of getting rich off of real estate.
I'm just saying that "investing in real estate" is something that requires a substantial volume of money (as you said, a nest egg): it was a way to show that you were well off, not a way to imply you were a slumlord or something.
I misread your comment, sorry. But I must say real estate was cheap in the ‘80s, especially after downturns. Remember the crash of ‘87 aka Black Monday? Yikes, I’m old.
I can see that ( finance-wise ). Tbh, I did not know there were this many female bank CEOs until I just checked a moment ago. I was pleasantly surprised.
As for meritocracy, in the 90s no one cared who my online persona was. My persona was about as eye-grabbing as the one I use here. My contributions, for lack of a better term, were dismissed for being crap, which I eventually understood. I think people miss out on that.
As for your point actions and views, I respectfully disagree. You only seem to separate them, because you dislike his views, the resulting words and would like them not to be translated into action. I can understand that, but it sounds .. convenient? You are free to talk about stuff, but the moment you get politically active you get shunned? It seems very backwards to me.
Not just banking! Despite not being seen as "Computer Science," the technical areas of finance are also highly diverse. If you can make money, someone will be willing to give you $250,000 a year to fuck off and play with implementing trading algorithms, regardless of who you are. It's pretty sweet.
I don't know who or what your online persona is, either: I'm still talking to you, and it's still an interesting conversation. There are still places to play anonymously or pseudonymously, and they usually have more people than they did during the 1990s. People generally tend to forego that, though.
As for your point actions and views, I respectfully disagree. You only seem to separate them, because you dislike his views, the resulting words and would like them not to be translated into action. I can understand that, but it sounds .. convenient? You are free to talk about stuff, but the moment you get politically active you get shunned? It seems very backwards to me.
Think of it in terms of separation of church and state, right? I can call you a sinner who's going to hell all I'd like, but it's unconstitutional and wrong on many levels to try and take away something from you that I have no plans to stop partaking in. (I think Eich is an atheist so this is just for the matter of example; I don't know why he didn't support it, he doesn't seem open about his reasoning and as such I'm not going to try and conjure up some reasoning for him.)
I'm not passionate about what Eich did or did not support, because frankly I have no idea why he funded what he funded, but if you look at it in terms of taxes, he's a very well off guy trying to increase the tax burden of a bunch of people (his coworkers/later-employees, no less) solely because he disagrees either morally or pragmatically that they should be able to get married. (Tax benefits to marriage are controversial in the first place, but definitely something incredibly beneficial.)
This country was founded on violent response to moralistic taxes; it's in its blood to care about increasing taxes arbitrarily, and the Prop 8 ads his cash helped fund were absolutely aimed at blurring the separation between church and state, even if that wasn't his intention (though he never denied it was, so we'll never know).
It is a good argument. Tbh, I am struggling a little with forming a counter-argument.
It is a little odd. I think I see action as just an extension of speech. This is probably a reason I hesitate when anyone says you can talk about something, boy you better not, say, actually exercise your theoretical right to assemble.
I think I will need to think about it a little more.
I don't agree. While things might be changing,I know for a fact that on my journey, I went from having no degree or experience, to becoming a senior engineer at one of the largest companies in the world, solving some of the hardest problems in the world, with nothing more than luck, a computer, and a passion for learning. And I know many other people in the same boat, which I hear is not the norm in other professions.
So, take that anecdotal evidence as you will. But I think I'm not the only one, and a lot of people will disagree with you. We're part of one of the only professions in the world where you can enjoy a very high standard of living in a white-collar profession with little to no expectation of having academic credentials.
So being fired for holding a particular view is okay now? Regardless of your views, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of corporations having a de facto role in enforcing public morality, through who they chose to hire and fire. People okay with this have obviously learned nothing from the days where you could be fired for being gay. Other way around? Nothing wrong with it according to some people. This whole trend is worrying.
Having said that - corporations do have a right to hire and fire who they please. But it is important to at least acknowledge "cancel culture" as a legitimate and immature trend that is happening. Often the pressure to fire somebody comes from the outside, not from within.
To be clear, it wasn't that he was "anti-gay" it was that he donated $1000 to Prop 8 in 2008, a California Proposition that made gay marriage illegal in CA until Obergefell struck it down 7 years later.
This is important because it is a clear delineation between "privately disagreeing but allowing individuals their freedom" and "actively campaigning to take away rights from Mozilla employees and users".
We do have a brood of reactionaries attempting to blur that distinction like they always do, but there are plenty of conservatives who do not share that particular bias.
I have met plenty of bigots on both sides of politics. But immediately trying to call me out on labeling this man a conservative by saying he is actually a bigot is, ironically, bigotry itself.
__jal's comment was ambiguous. I think they may have been saying the opposite: that not all conservatives are bigots, and that it's unfair on conservatives to brand bigotry as conservatism.
taking into account mobile browser traffic (50% of all traffic)...in the US it's about half that based on our visitors. (home remodeling industry / DIY, e-commerce).
Many CEOs derive a significant portion - often even the majority - of their compensation from performance-based bonuses. Compensation not only reflects performance, it is directly tied to it.
Millions/Billions were paid out in bailout money, to the very same people responsible for collapsing the housing market in 2009. Compensation for that level is complete bullshit.
Sure, the ones that actually paid back with interest. But that doesn't help the 'performance bonus' discussion. These people destroyed the housing market, then got bailed out by the people they destroyed, THEN got paid millions/billions in bonuses for doing it.
Housing market got destroyed by people not paying back their loans. Assigning this to be a moral responsibility of banks and regulators is simplistic and naive.
It was much deeper than that. While you're partially correct, that people not paying back their loans is what ultimate set off the collapse, the reason for it was the straight greed, and manipulation of the repackaged junk sub-prime mortgages by the banks. Collateralized Debt Obligations, and even worse CDO-Squared, bundled up complete crap, and sold them off with triple-A ratings. When the mortgagor failed to pay, those CDOs were finally downgraded and became worthless, losing banks hundreds of billions. Predatory practices on homeowners, and bank greed.
The price of oil goes up, and all the oil company executives get bonuses (it sounds silly, but this genuinely does happen).
A lot of these compensation packages are well intended, but they aren't without problems. People who make bad decisions often get performance bonuses regardless.
Those are the ones you hear about in the press, but the press looks for outrage.
"CEO earns 10x less than previous year due to declining stock price linked to market share loss" is not a headline to set pulses racing. Performance linked comp works OK most of the time. Sometimes CEOs negotiate deals that are terrible for the company, where they get paid lots even if the firm tanks. My experience has been that this usually happens when the firm is in deep trouble anyway, the CEO knows they probably can't turn it around, but will have a tarnished reputation regardless. Getting experienced people to try and turn the Titanic is expensive and many will want a big reward for even trying.
Also, badly run companies do things like sign bad deals. But it's a circular problem. If they were well run they wouldn't be signing bad CEO deals to begin with.
Well I dunno.,. maybe it was good.. ever since Windows 8 came out (which was a pile of fucking shit) I would say things have gotten worse.. Windows is complete garbage as far as actual desktop improvements.
From Win98>Win2000>WinXP>Win7 it has been a slow but steady improvement in stability and features.. sure could have been better, but compared to Linux desktop distro's which none of them can barely even fucking match WinXp in terms desktop features and stability.. nvm the power shell extensions and eco system which don't exist. Because that only comes from good API's documentation and community that isn't completely stupid ... I would say that MS had a fairly good team of people up until the release of Win7, after that they seemed to have got a retarded shit for brains CEO Satyan noob tard, and replaced all the skilled people with fellow idiots.
And now Win10 is a stinking pile of broken and bug infested noob trash... it's built on the work that proceeded it, but they sure have done as much as possible to ruin that while doing fuck useful as an improvement in the underlying system let alone the UX/UI which hasn't improved at all its at best worse, they've just tacked on crap everywhere.
Sadly, I have to agree. There have been just a few of really good features in Windows after 7: app sandboxing, first party VR support (if not for that, we'd only have locked down VR platforms like PS VR and Oculus), the new Mail client, and using voice to set reminders and alarms (when it works). Maybe better support for tablet mode in Mail, browser and the Start Menu, and the dark mode lately.
Outside of that list, I'd struggle to name a single thing in Windows, that became better. Number of bugs certainly increased. Specifically, search and language switching are the worst offenders.
I don't have the same issues with Windows 10 but I only really use it for work and some gaming so I'm hardly an authority on it. Any issues you have might be due to the fact that they got rid of the Windows team awhile back.
I don't use Windows (linux), so couldn't say how great it is or not, but the shareholders are loving Satya Nadella. MSFT is up about 160% in the last two years.
It's both. When I worked there, the Foundation (non-profit) owned the Corporation (for-profit). If you donate to Mozilla it's going to the non-profit org.
Would be interested in hearing more about your views on this. I use Firefox and Thunderbird almost exclusively, and every time I think about donating money I then remember all the wasted time and effort they've poured into what seem to be pipe dreams over the years. I WANT them to succeed. I WANT there to be an alternative on the desktop to Chrome (now that Edge is basically rebranded Chromium), and on iOS to both Chrome and Safari, I WANT to support their excellent documentation portal (which everyone else rides on the back of - even MS points to it a lot now). But man, I just don't trust the powers-that-be there to make non-braindead strategic decisions, year after year. Talk me out of that prejudice against them, please?
Not really able to make a good argument against it, the poor leadership I had to deal with is one of the reasons I left.
I'm still happy to use Firefox and want them to not have to rely on Google Search placement for funding but the company has a shaky track record and it's reasonable to view them critically.
FWIW while Firefox OS was a failure I don't actually view that project as a mistake - trying to give mobile phone users more freedom was a good idea, and we've seen how things have worked out. But they didn't do a very good job of it and that largely is the fault of upper leadership.
On the bright side the worst person I worked with there is no longer making decisions for the company, so that's great.
Thanks for the reply. I see my comment got downvoted (I figured it would), but I was still curious as to what your response would be and I appreciate it.
Not the person you're responding to, but my thoughts - Mozilla could be serving a role similar to academia in that doing work that's not profit based allows one to explore more widely. Those results can be shared with the community. Rust is an example and I imagine there are others.
Come to think of it, did Microsoft ever consider replacing their rendering engine with Gecko, rather than Blink? I'm surprised they ceded such control over the future direction of the web to Google.
If it was still Ballmer Microsoft, this would be absolutely on brand - spend a couple years and a huge effort on pivoting Edge to Chromium, then acqu-hire a different product in the same lane and mothball all of that investment.
Hacker news, please block topics from techcrunch- and verison media-articles. They use a lot of third party cookies, ad banners, fingerprinting and other evil stuff.
Mozilla should just ship Chromium with privacy oriented features. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel and keep iterating on Gecko when its obvious there's less and less demand for it, especially when it costs them so much money.
If Firefox was actually gaining share I'd feel differently, but I'd rather see Mozilla switch tech stacks than fizzle out and die.
I don't understand that argument, IE was a closed source browser, Chromium is BSD-licensed. If anything the closest comparison is probably the widespread use of Linux.
BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive.
Imagine this: Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos), and cites this as an excuse to close sources. Then, it starts updating it's own websites with specific code that can run properly only in new (proprietary) versions of Chrome.
Of course, outcry in tech press, but average Joe User does not care, he just needs stuff to work. Then, developers say, screw it, we just need stuff to work for users. Just like they did in 2004. This is a very crude model, reality will likely be more subtle, but I hope you get the idea
> BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive.
So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar.
> Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos)
This already exists, it's called Widevine and browsers download it as a binary blob.
This is also a different argument, Chrome vs Chromium. If there was a healthy ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers then one vendor not playing by the rules would have limited impact.
> So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar.
So, you were talking about not understanding why a mono-culture is bad. So your license argument here means you don't understand the parent.
"BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive."
This means that once FF is no more, what's stopping Google from slowing closing off even more parts of the browser to just Chrome? They can start forcing their will with their control over Chromium. They make the rules. And the BSD license can't do anything to stop it. That's the point.
And because these other browsers invested into Chromium, simply forking and continuing work on their Chromium version becomes more and more challenging without massive financial support. Only a few companies can do that.
Look at Apple and Safari. Safari lags behind Chrome in many areas. And this is Apple, not some small startup.
> once FF is no more, what's stopping Google from slowing closing off even more parts of the browser to just Chrome?
Nothing is stopping. In fact, they already do that with Android. Starting with version 5, AOSP barely improves, but they add more and more and more proprietary APIs like Firebase, severely limit background apps, pushing developers to use proprietary push notifications, with each release more and more functions are tied to Google Play Services. [0]
> And because these other browsers invested into Chromium, simply forking and continuing work on their Chromium version becomes more and more challenging without massive financial support. Only a few companies can do that.
Sure, I don't see why Mozilla can't do that, especially combined with Microsoft, Vivaldi, and Opera. Right now they're going it alone and are losing marketshare.
This of course, assumes that Google decides to do this and destroy any user trust, which would result in an immediate fork of Android and potential EU antitrust action.
What I'm suggesting may not be ideal, but it's realistic. Mozilla is losing share, even after the massive Quantum rework it continues to decline. Developers don't like working with it because it's a complex codebase.
I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10 years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.