1. the largest part of the work on the "major rewrite" - do you mean quantum or servo? If the former, most of the bits we really care about will get shipped on Nov. 14th, and some other things like webrender will get shipped over the winter.
If you mean servo, you're right, that is a longer-term strategic project, but has recently provide useful as a source for innovation in Gecko with things like stylo and webrender, and especially Rust's capabilities as a language.
2. Mozilla is self-funded and has a very different governance model than perhaps you're used to - we are a US Corp ( and subsidiaries ) owned entirely by a US-based Not-for-profit.
A very small shop in a very beaurocratic EU country receives the invoices in PDF at the end of the month, from another country far outside the EU, pays the bill through standard bank wire transfer. Why Mozilla can't do the same?
...and, yes there is a legacy problem with old code bases, but one trade-off for interns, contributors, junior developers is that you get to make an impact on a codebase used in a commercial project by hundreds of millions of people. Terrible tools written in anger in 2003 are still in use, sure, and terrible architectural decisions have been made, re-made, then made again over the years. It's the kind of messy any codebase eventually gets to.
This codebase still has life in it though, and the proof is in how far Gecko has come in the last year. Go run Nightly for a bit, compare it to Chrome or current Firefox. It's a big deal.
Nothing specific. It is being used to convey that the code was written at an emotional high or low maybe when the author was tired or under time pressure to get something that worked.
You'd be surprised. And if not that many, I know many many people with 100+ tabs. I never really understood the workflow myself. Every time I have more than 20 tabs, I generally can get to the page I'm looking for faster by googling it than having to find it in my tabs. But I guess to each their own.
For me its a linear view of how I got somewhere when I'm doing exploratory research. Usually a tree of tabs (I use side tabs) will start with a google search, then go to a site, then another site, then another. When I find something interesting and think "how did I get here again?" and I can just glance at my open tabs.
This context is useful if I get sidetracked/distracted by a coworker, so I can retrace why I was looking at a certain page.
Typing some part of the tab title or url in the URL bar and then selecting the "switch to tab" option in the dropdown is faster than googling. Prefix with "% " if you want to search _only_ the tabs and not your history or bookmarks.
Of course not all browsers have that feature, but Firefox does. So finding the tab you want is pretty easy.
Sometimes after searching for some time I'll come to something quite arcane that I want to hold on to. (I know this is what bookmarks are for but the UI is so poor here)
Other times I'll find something and think; I'll read that later.
Or. Less often, I'll be recurring into different things looking for solutions to a problem I have. Eventually I'll find something relevant and close the tab that was last opened, I forget the others and they become orphaned in my like of tabs I'll likely never get back to, until my browser crashes hard and I lose everything.
After the mild panic a wave of relief washes over me, and I go about my business hoarding tabs once again.
The first example, it seems like we need a better UI for bookmarks. Something that allows you to organize and quickly search them (url, title and even maybe page content).
For the second, we all do that, but again, the optimal thing there would be to have some extension or tool that keeps track of your "to read" list.
As for tabs stacking when you're looking for a solution, that's generally what my comment referred to. I know somewhere in those 20 tabs, there's one for the documentations to the function I'm trying to use, but it's honestly faster to search for it again than look at those 20 tabs for it.
