Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla lays off 70

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 962 posts

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#391

Post by takeda »

flexd wrote: post #291
takeda wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A lot of us are bi-lingual. English is not my first language, so being able to use spell checking for my native language and English without things breaking is important to me.

well, I'm bi-lingual as well, I only needed to install languages once. I don't want to have installed dictionary for every language under the sun. They do take space.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#392

Post by tzs »

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…

> also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking

The English spell checking is pretty bad, too, giving me at least an order of magnitude more false positives [1] than Safari or Chrome on my Mac, and Edge or Chrome on Windows. Same when compared to things other than browsers, such as Word, LibreOffice, BBEdit, Pages.

What's baffling is that Firefox, LibreOffice, and Chrome all use Hunspell [2], so presumably the reason Firefox spell check sucks compared to LibreOffice is they have a terrible dictionary.

So why doesn't Mozilla just take the LibreOffice dictionary?

[1] In case I've got the terminology wrong for spell checkers, by false positive I mean where the spell checker says that a word is spelled wrong when it is in fact spelled correctly.

[2] https://hunspell.github.io/

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#393

Post by nicolas_t »

I would have expected in that email from the CEO something like, "I will myself take a massive salary reduction and divide my salary by 2". But strangely, it's never something we see during mass layoffs... I mean her salary is pretty much the salary 15 to 20 software engineers.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#394

Post by takeda »

GranPC wrote: post #277
takeda wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

you can add as many as you want (at least I didn't hit the limit) it's just 2 clicks for each and they are retained between upgrades, the parent issue is that Firefox doesn't come with every language installed by default.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#395

Post by tomrod »

usr1106 wrote: post #271
fencepost wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bookmark…

You might consider usint Zotero as a bookmark manager. It is originally for bibliographies. I don't think I can ever go back.

It has a fantastic FF extension.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#396

Post by t-writescode »

Blake_Emigro wrote: post #364
bearcobra wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This chart feels a bit disingenuous given that Mozilla's form990s show Eich's salary tracking along basically the same line until his departure in 2014.

It also doesn't take into consideration revenue growth, which according to the corporation's Wiki page grew much faster and higher in multiples than her salary. As well, according to the same Wiki, "There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid." It would be a bummer to run a company of that size, be dedicated to it for so long, and not have any stake in it. Imagine her…

Why? Becoming a publicly traded company comes with assumed responsibilities to make a profit; and, at least in the United States, an assumption that you should reduce your morals for the express purpose of turning a profit, lest your board of directors kick you out for someone that will.

There are greater goals, especially for a company like Mozilla, than making lots of money.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#397

Post by flukus »

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…

> The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.

It's horrible on all platforms ;) . The way tabs are handled is by far my biggest complaint, you can't fit as many tabs in as with chrome and since they "upgraded" the extension system the vertical tab extensions don't work well (can't remove top tab panel).

I wish they'd just make a native UI for each platform, their cross platform one has always been a train wreck but it's especially bad since they dropped XUL.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#398

Post by codezero »

core-questions wrote: post #352
YorickPeterse wrote: post #246

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"?

I think that it was less about the end-user as it was about the gay people working for Mozilla who felt uncomfortable working with a CEO who took the actions Eich took in his past. One cannot know peoples' private thoughts or biases, so folks often take what ever signal they can get.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#399

Post by disordinary »

Slashbot2 wrote: post #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 ma…

I don't have the same issues with Windows 10 but I only really use it for work and some gaming so I'm hardly an authority on it. Any issues you have might be due to the fact that they got rid of the Windows team awhile back.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#400

Post by huntie »

orf wrote: post #371
huntie wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is something seriously wrong with Firefox if the default spellcheck dictionary is so bad that I might need to install a different one, especially for the English language. Hell they should just be able to merge theirs with Chromium's. Regardless, as I said I don't normally use spellcheck and I trust my own judgement over the computer's so it isn't a big deal for me.
Post reply on HN