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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#91

Post by akvadrako »

CapacitorSet wrote: post #80
jensv wrote: post #3

Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"

I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.

It does seem counterintuitive, but the justification is that cutting a top employee's salary in half only frees up less than a percent increase in all the lower-level position salaries.

I know about 20 years ago, Ben & Jerry's tried to hire a CEO for a reasonable salary and decided they couldn't make it work.

So maybe it really does make sense.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#92

Post by sjellis »

lucaspiller wrote: post #10
Santosh83 wrote: post #2

A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones. Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which you can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family to use it too, unless there's a…

There is a third major independent option: Microsoft Edge. I assume (like me) a lot web of developers aren’t using Windows, but we can at least help people out by making sure our applications work fine on those browsers. Since IE 9, with a polyfill, most things just work unless you need some very recent HTML5 APIs. Microsoft provides free VMs for testing different browsers here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/…

The situation with Microsoft Edge is strange. Not only is Microsoft Edge not available for older versions of Windows, it is not supported on Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, Windows 10 LTSB, or, most importantly, Windows Server editions. Virtual desktop hosting (VDI/terminal servers) has to be based on Windows Server (licensing requirement). This means that Edge can't actually be the only supported Microsoft browser for Windows: if you do corporate work, you still have deal with Internet Explorer 11.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#93

Post by astura »

markpapadakis wrote: post #79

I think this is just too many people. No matter how you spin this it’s just too many. Do Google or Microsoft have half as many working on their browsers? I’d be very surprised if they do. It should also be interesting to look back and find out how many people Netscape employed at its peak. I would love to know the distribution of those 1.2k people ( engineers, marketing, whatever ). Of course, it’s likely that I am t…

However many people Netscape employed is irrelevant, browsers now are very different in complexity and security than browsers in the Netscape era.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#94

Post by krapp »

profalseidol wrote: post #58

Supporting FF then is a kind of participating in mass movement to fight against capitalism.

If you're supporting Firefox with money, it's still capitalism even if Mozilla is a non-profit. You're paying an entity to continue maintaining a product, and attempting to bias market share in favor of that product over its competitors.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#95

Post by Sylos »

CapacitorSet wrote: post #80
jensv wrote: post #3

Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"

I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.

It's because there's so much competition for experienced people in Silicon Valley. If Mozilla wouldn't pay her that much, another company would.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#96

Post by mattmanser »

mijowi wrote: post #8
cknight wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched back to Firefox 57 about a decade after abandoning it for Opera. I remember the advocacy movement around Firefox 1.0 which I was quite involved in. I thought (and still think) it was great. I don't plan to go quite as far this time, but do plan to try and convince all my friends and family to get on board. It'll be a harder task for sure since Chrome is not IE6, but as the resident IT guy that everyone ask…

Check out FF nightly on Android. It has the new features. I use it and it's great

Firefox on android kills my phone, gobbles tons of memory. Nexus 5x, no plugins.

I've given up on it now.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#97

Post by nasso »

Santosh83 wrote: post #2

A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones. Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which you can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family to use it too, unless there's a…

I tried to switch over. Switched from chrome to firefox completely for about two weeks after quantum.

I got random high cpu usage from firefox. Some random pages just spiked the cpu and everything slowed down. Same thing on both my workstation and laptop.

I also didnt find a way to make opensearch working. In chrome i can just type part of the url of a website, press tab and write a search query and get a search on the website.

That is so worked into my daily routine. It just became an annoyance and a dealbreaker. :(

I really really want to switch. But chrome works really well and my browser is such an important tool for me so i really want to use the absolute best.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#98

Post by roca »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #61
roca wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you claiming now? Are you claiming Mozilla was the tool of Google, switched to being the tool of Microsoft or Yahoo, and then back to being the tool of Google? Or are you claiming that Mozilla is the tool of the "search industry" which is some amorphous group containing all of the above? Google (and other companies in some countries) pay Mozilla to be the default search in Firefox. It's a business transactio…

It is super, super simple. When 80%+ of your revenue depends on a search engine, and you still have payroll to make, you are by definition dependent upon it, regardless of which one it happens to be at the time. The article title is "Maintaining an Independent Browser is Expensive". I'm just calling it out. From the tone of the replies, kicked off by a guy in the analytics industry who went so far as to google me for…

I left Mozilla nearly two years ago so you can lay off the baseless speculations about my salary, thanks.

Incidentally I explicitly defined "independent" in my blog post: "I mean a browser with its own implementation of HTML, CSS, JS, etc". Choosing an alternative definition and then ranting about it is irrelevant to what I wrote.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#99

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

khedoros1 wrote: post #25
csydas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see the flip side on this too though - the user action is pretty universal in apps, and it's disruptive when 9 out of 10 apps use this and you're trying to get fresh data out of app #10. There should be some consistency in user expectations across apps, or a clear way of performing the same action. That being said, I agree with you and really like that FF doesn't have a motion for refresh. It's mildly annoying…

I expect swiping down to take me to the top of the page. It's frustrating when it does more (like reloading the page). I guess I'm the wrong person to ask whether 9/10 apps do it; I usually find a replacement when they do. Firefox, Pale Moon, and Chrome all have a refresh command in the "3 dots" menu. I usually use that.

Swiping down only refreshes when you are already at the top of the page, and it even gives some visual feedback to see that you have indeed reached the top and you are now initiating a refresh gesture.

I'm a quite energetic swiper and, to be honest, I have never found a situation where I wanted to return to the top and ended up refreshing due to too much swiping. But YMMV, I guess.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#100

Post by markpapadakis »

astura wrote: post #93
markpapadakis wrote: post #79

I think this is just too many people. No matter how you spin this it’s just too many. Do Google or Microsoft have half as many working on their browsers? I’d be very surprised if they do. It should also be interesting to look back and find out how many people Netscape employed at its peak. I would love to know the distribution of those 1.2k people ( engineers, marketing, whatever ). Of course, it’s likely that I am t…

However many people Netscape employed is irrelevant, browsers now are very different in complexity and security than browsers in the Netscape era.

On the flip-side though, the tools, expertise/skills and means for building browsers some 25+ years ago don't match what's available today.
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