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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#271

Post by usr1106 »

fencepost wrote: post #212
zelly wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 webs…

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. Edit: Win10 Pro on a Xeon with 48gb ram available

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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#272

Post by doublekill »

eschaton wrote: post #239
Thorentis wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 B…

Don’t sanitize it, he was fired for being anti-gay. That should make it a little clearer why funders won’t touch him (and many won’t touch his new work).

Did he not donate to a legal political cause, without publicizing it?

I doubt funders care about your opinions on gay marriage, but they do care a lot about the stink the cancel culture raised around him.

The poison seems to be applied externally.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#273

Post by somebodythere »

tyingq wrote: post #73
falcolas wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Not to mention office space!

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#274

Post by thrower123 »

tanilama wrote: post #208

If MSFT bought Mozilla to counter Google, that will be hilariously glorious to fulfill a cycle, but makes logical sense.

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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#275

Post by jldugger »

i_dursun wrote: post #152
throwaway17_17 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shareholder…

Rust is not a Mozilla product. It is heavily used at and funded by Mozilla but they have almost zero influence over the direction of the language. Actually, this kind of perception is the reason that they have been recently talking about forming a Rust Foundation. http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2020/01/09/towa...

> Rust is not a Mozilla product.

And yet from your own citation:

> 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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#277

Post by GranPC »

takeda wrote: post #270
pier25 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multil…

> 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.

No, but some people write text in more than one language inside Firefox.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#278

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

Sammi wrote: post #64
tracker1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The world today is different. Can't skimp on marketing any more, as the competition is extremely heavy on marketing.

Is it though? Tesla is very light on traditional marketing, while its competitors are spending heavily.

Nothing changed. People are the same.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#279

Post by reaperducer »

pier25 wrote: post #255
throwaway123x2 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy how much FF's marketshare has dropped. It's such a great browser.

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 multil…

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.

The polish of developer tools has exactly zero to do with a browser's popular marketshare.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#280

Post by reaperducer »

madeofpalk wrote: post #257
pier25 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multil…

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.

Ah, I wondered why that was done. Thanks for the light bulb.
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