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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#381

Post by cookiecaper »

zelly wrote: post #194
crazypython wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 n…

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).

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#382

Post by tracker1 »

thrower123 wrote: post #253
Nextgrid wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

If this was easy to do, Office 365 and GSuite wouldn't have a lock on the market. IBM can't even be bothered to try anymore - they sold off the carcass of Lotus a while back.

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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#384

Post by multiplegeorges »

lucis wrote: post #332
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…

Do you find Firefox Dev Tools better than Chrome? It's probably the only reason that I stick with Chrome, its dev tools are fantastic and often gets new incredible features.

The change can be jarring at first, but I honestly prefer the FF dev tools now.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#385

Post by bscphil »

zelly wrote: post #240
shawndrost wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-profit…

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]. [1] https://paddockpost.com/2018/02/03/executive-salaries-at-goo... [2] https://www.peta.org/misc/how-much-money-does-ingrid-newkirk... [3] https://www.…

> 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!

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#386

Post by jorvi »

zelly wrote: post #268
saagarjha wrote: post #192

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 $$$. 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 fe…

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 s…

> 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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#387

Post by jcranmer »

roca wrote: post #333
zelly wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Hi, I'm the architect of rr. 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.

In terms of contributing to declining market share, my personal opinion is that Mozilla's big mistake with Firefox was killing embedding around 2010.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#388

Post by throwaway17_17 »

dom96 wrote: post #322
i_dursun wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Would Rust be where it is today if it wasn't for Mozilla's clout?

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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#389

Post by bscphil »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #54
petagonoral wrote: post #35

in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets: 2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... 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. n…

> is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.

> 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?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#390

Post by saagarjha »

marcinzm wrote: post #314
saagarjha wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Safari runs on 1.5 operating systems and a limited set of hardware.

WebKit runs on a lot more.
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