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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#541

Post by toyg »

roca wrote: post #345
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…

> 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 websites. Of course this is not the experience of the vast majority of Firefox users, so it's pointless to suggest that this means something about Firefox's overall quality. You can easily find people making the same sorts of complaints…

Considering he was on Linux, btw, that was probably not a Mozilla build.

Sadly, one of the drawbacks of opensource is that people can take your code and butcher it, and users will blame you.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#542

Post by alasdair_ »

joecool1029 wrote: post #428
pmichaud wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not offended by that obit. I can see she was going for a "speaker for dead" thing. I know that sort of direct honesty is out of fashion, but that's the kind of obit I want.

> I am not offended by that obit. Let me break this down for you. This isn't about you and an obituary or eulogy isn't something written to the dead: It's written to their family, their coworkers and friends, and for those who may have never really known the deceased. No leader should write in such a way that would insult the families of the dead and their belief systems. Reminder: This is a non-family relative of th…

> It is obvious that the deceased's contributions outweighed their perceived transgressions, else they would have been terminated.

Possibly. Another possibility is that no one wanted to be the one to fire a man with terminal cancer who presumably depended upon the health insurance provided by the company.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#543

Post by saagarjha »

summerlight wrote: post #469
saagarjha wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> WebKit does not have hundreds of Apple assigned to it. Well, it's close to 100, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059393 ? You can bring up with other numbers to refute this. > Not really. Please don't assert this so lightly unless you have any evidence to support it. A rendering engine is just a tiny fraction and you gotta take care of literally thousands of other components to build a modern bro…

The number above is probably pretty close, but there's a misconception that WebKit is only a tiny fraction of Safari: it's not. Most of the manpower and work goes into it; Safari is just chrome around it (albeit chrome that does take a reasonable amount of work to make…just not as much as it does to support JavaScript and WebAssembly VMs, page styling, rendering, WebGL and WebGPU, networking, tracking prevention, and maintaining support for the the ever-growing list of web standards WebKit supports and participating in discussions on shaping them). Safari is just one of the clients of WebKit.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#544

Post by krambs »

andreasgal wrote: post #524
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…

Shoot me an email agal at apple. Also feel free to give my email to anyone else affected.

That's cool.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#545

Post by burnte »

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...

I knew Gerv, he was a convert to Christianity and as usual for converts to any religion, he was intense and fervent in his belief that he had discovered the ultimate truth. Unfortunately that can lead people to embracing the old testament bigotry more than the new testament forgiveness. Gerv wasn't a bad person, but Mitchell wasn't inaccurate in her post. Yes, Gerv was a great thing for Mozilla, but his legacy is not as clear.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#546

Post by toyg »

zelly wrote: post #171
strict9 wrote: post #43

Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops large and small over the past 10 or so years. In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop, and manage. But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can…

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…

You were probably not using a production-grade Mozilla build, or a recent one. All sorts of shenanigans go on in the Linux world when it comes to builds.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#547

Post by smnthermes »

zelly wrote: post #171
strict9 wrote: post #43

Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops large and small over the past 10 or so years. In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop, and manage. But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can…

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…

Weren't Quantum/Servo/e10 Firefox's saviors?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#548

Post by Klonoar »

saagarjha wrote: post #192
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…

> 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…

>And you've reported this, I assume?

This is a total non-response. They're not actually under an obligation to report a bug and use their time - Mozilla, however, is obliged to make their browser work properly, and to ensure the team that's working on it is properly staffed/resourced/competent.

Your response is downplaying someone's actual concern by acting like it's wrong that they don't spend their spare time participating in open source software development.

Furthermore, this "browser monoculture" argument is ridiculous. WebKit and Blink are both open source, and Mozilla is increasingly becoming what Opera was back with Presto: a lone engine with quirks that nobody wants to waste their time working around.

If Mozilla gave up Gecko tomorrow and forked WebKit (a la what Blink is) I don't think I'd bat an eye. This is like what junior programmers wind up learning at some point - nobody cares what the code looks like, just that it does what it's expected to.

I say this all as someone who's contributed to some Mozilla repos, has a massive personal investment in Rust (and has read a good chunk of Servo, and liked it), and has been a fan since the Mozilla Suite days.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#549

Post by burnte »

C14L wrote: post #418
phonon wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As much as I poured into Mozilla and the community, I have always been critical of how political it has always been. It inherited a lot of that from the end of Netscape.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#550

Post by cookie_monsta »

wbl wrote: post #534
cookie_monsta wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anderson's analysis feels very straw-mannish to me, giving the impression that Mitchell disagreed with Gerv being a Christian in the first place. > I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief. Well, maybe - you'd have to ask them. Quite likely they share Gerv's faith and outlook and possibly don't see anything negative there. But the point of the piece was obviousl…

Nihil nisi bonum. Imagine how his widow would feel reading it.

It's entirely impossible to say. One possibility would be "proud that the man she married stood up for what he believed in"
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