Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla lays off 70

techcrunch.com

371–380 of 962 posts

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#371
post #341
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…

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 softwar…

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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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? Did he say "gay people can't use Firefox"?

> Why is him exercising his protected right to political speech in donation form subject to your judgement

Because it has an impact on whether I can marry my partner.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#374
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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn’t not support gay marriage, he actively gave money to oppose it. That’s a little different.

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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#376
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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally, I'd be a lot happier if they cut efforts on the branding side of things and strengthen the technical one.

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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#379
post #255

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 found a UX quirk that bothered me.

I documented it, proposed a solution with my own justifications for why it would be better, and submitted a bug report.

Feedback from Moz, the work done on it, the patches created, and the release plan for it were all done in the open and I could track it.

The change I suggested was implemented and is now out.

Be the change you want to see... only Firefox/Mozilla would do this in such an open way.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#380
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Safari alert doesn't look native and yet it looks polished. https://imgur.com/rvsjJtO

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.
Post reply on HN