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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#411

Post by Blake_Emigro »

phonon wrote: post #282
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…

She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did. https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...

She used the sandwich feedback technique for a eulogy - an interesting approach. https://www.rightattitudes.com/2008/02/20/sandwich-feedback-...

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#412

Post by cookiecaper »

phonon wrote: post #347
cookie_monsta wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, which bits are incredibly rude and grotesque? It reads like an honest appraisal of a person that the author has known for many years (and disagreed with occasionally as humans do)

Mitchel, as leader of Mozilla, was essentially speaking for the entire organization; an organization, and set of ideals, Gerv devoted his entire adult life to. Saying things like-- "Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult…

Ouch.

I guess she's learned you've really gotta CYA in the Valley these days. Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier. The matter was made an issue by so-called activists trawling the legally-required logs of political contributions and intentionally setting out to destroy Eich, if not Mozilla generally, merely because they disagreed with his political leanings.

If you can get flayed for that, I'd guess there's a substantial chance that you'd also be on the hook for failing to lambast the beliefs of a deceased colleague.

It would be nice to see Baker stand up against that, but one can only assume the thoughts of "Am I going to lose my job if I fail to call out the deceased's quote-unquote bigotry?" crossed her mind. Bonus consideration for Mozilla's top brass: "are we going to trigger another widespread blacklisting of the Firefox UA if we upset the mob?"

It must be terrible to live under those auspices.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#413

Post by saagarjha »

summerlight wrote: post #300
saagarjha wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am responding specifically to the claim that Mozilla is short on resources because Google has a thousand people working on Chrome.

Google and Mozilla are competing in the browser market so it's pretty reasonable to compare their investments. I don't understand your reasoning here.

My reasoning is that Google's investment is massive and just because they're throwing money and people at a problem doesn't make it necessary for everyone else to do so as well.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#414

Post by wwright »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #358
sp332 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Views" are one thing... I guess. Working to make sure your employees don't get the legal right to get married is another.

[flagged]

Part of his job was to acquire and retain employees, allocate capital, and engage in public relations.

Spending his personal money on fucking over other people (with no real benefit to the world), many of whom worked for or could work for him, is a bad sign about those parts of his job.

(That may not be an argument for the board to fire him, of course, but it is an answer to “how good is he at his job?”)

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#415

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #262
eschaton wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I did not know that. It is odd though. I used to remember no one cared what about your Views as long as you were good at what you did. CS was as close to meritocracy as it could have been. It is a shame.

> CS was as close to meritocracy as it could have been.

...as long as you were a white, heterosexual man in the US.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#416

Post by saagarjha »

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.

That and I believe the new modal prevents locking up the entire browser.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#417

Post by pier25 »

gmanley wrote: post #380
pier25 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, aesthetics is ultimately a subjective thing, but that's not what I'm saying.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#418

Post by C14L »

phonon wrote: post #347
cookie_monsta wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, which bits are incredibly rude and grotesque? It reads like an honest appraisal of a person that the author has known for many years (and disagreed with occasionally as humans do)

Mitchel, as leader of Mozilla, was essentially speaking for the entire organization; an organization, and set of ideals, Gerv devoted his entire adult life to. Saying things like-- "Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult…

Mozilla seems to be more like a political organization nowadays.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#419

Post by apaprocki »

sstangl wrote: post #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 fut…

We... like SpiderMonkey very much. Contact in profile ;)

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#420

Post by saagarjha »

summerlight wrote: post #294
saagarjha wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other browsers do just fine with significantly fewer engineers.

And almost all of them gave up developing their own engine except Apple and Mozilla? FYI, WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple (which would be roughly similar to Blink). And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase. Thus Apple is investing a comparable amount of engineering resource into Safari. Where are "Other browsers"?

> WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple

WebKit does not have hundreds of Apple assigned to it.

> And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase.

Not really.

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