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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#571

Post by samantohermes »

jasonlotito wrote: post #205
tapoxi wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive. So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar. > Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos) This already exists, it's called Widevine and browsers download it as a binary blob. This is also a different argument, Chrome vs Chromium. If there…

> So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar. So, you were talking about not understanding why a mono-culture is bad. So your license argument here means you don't understand the parent. "BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive." This means that once FF is no more, what's stopping Google from slowing closing off even more parts of the browser to just Chrome…

Safari lags behind Chrome because Apple's business model doesn't depend on it.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#572

Post by celticmusic »

pmichaud wrote: post #335
phonon wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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've honestly always been fascinated with the ideas behind Speaker for the Dead.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#573

Post by scriptsmith »

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…

It could be a genuine leak, but it sounds an awful lot like Firefox using 28 GiB of virtual memory.

Firefox often appears to use large amounts of memory in top / htop, but I believe that's just reported address space allocations. The RES column gives a more accurate depiction of memory usage.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#574

Post by celticmusic »

specialist wrote: post #424
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…

Obligatory: quality assurance is not testing. "...de-emphasizing QA departments..." I feel like we (the industry) have forfeited. I did a stint as a SQA manager. Coming from a dev background, I took it very seriously, totally immersed myself in the domain, transmuted from skeptical to true believer. I honestly don't know what to make of today's state of affairs. For example, today's business analysts often do many of…

> For example, today's business analysts often do many of the tasks we used to associate with the QA role. Testing, verification, liaison with customers. Did we just rename the role?

The person asking for a features should absolutely be the one signing off on the feature.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#575

Post by Wowfunhappy »

malachismith wrote: post #307
zelly wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Again... The Mozilla Corporation is NOT a non-profit.

But they're fully controlled by the non-profit Mozilla foundation, no?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#576

Post by celticmusic »

simias wrote: post #222
saagarjha wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other browsers do just fine with significantly fewer engineers.

Like who for instance? Basically only Blink, WebKit and Gecko are usable non-toy web engines these days, and they're all backed by big companies with deep pockets and many engineers. Opera's long gone, now it's a chromium fork. Internet Explorer is gone, now MS uses a chromium fork. The hype new browsers like Brave and Vivaldi are just chromium under the hood. It's like the difference between making a Linux distro an…

I'm pretty sure Brave is FF.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#577

Post by joecool1029 »

samantohermes wrote: post #522
joecool1029 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No need for you to be rude either. Many people are on the autism spectrum, so it's not necessarily due to bad faith.

I had the author[1] in mind when I wrote my comment.

[1] https://rationality.org/about/staff : "cofounded an emotional intelligence and communication training organization"

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#578

Post by craftinator »

The_rationalist wrote: post #450
sushid wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross, is this actually a technique taught in management? Seems disingenuous and sounds like something a really bad manager would do.

It can actually be an effective method if the employee isn't able to listen to factual criticism.

s/employee/specimen|patient/

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#579

Post by dorfsmay »

hinkley wrote: post #292
icebraining wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense, there have been multiple cases in the west, e.g. John Chambers at Cisco, Michael Kneeland at United Rentals, Dan Price at Gravity Payments, Nicholas Woodman at GoPro.

Maybe it's like when a store has 20% off sale a couple weeks after they raised their prices 10%. Yeah, it's still a sale, it's just not as big of a price cut as you're making it out to be. Raise your salary, sock some money away, then take a big public paycut now that your house is paid off.

Ok. So right now, as they are letting 70 people go, and obviously not doing so well, would be a good time to take a big public pay cut.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#580

Post by cookie_monsta »

phonon wrote: post #563
cookie_monsta wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I get is "You do not have permission to access this content. (#418)"

Oh. It's the newsletter his wife sent out, as he was dying, and she was taking care of him. You can watch some videos she put up for the Thanksgiving event they held 9 months after the funeral. https://vimeo.com/user97457269

Man, I'm not saying that his wife didn't love him. I'm not saying that his death wasn't tragic for her and many other people. I'm not even saying that I'd heard of any of these people before today. But without any other context, I just can't see "incredibly rude and grotesque" in there.

What I am saying is that he was a divisive character, and he knew that, accepted it, apparently tried to modify it a bit but basically carried on with it in an organisation that he knew was at least mildly hostile to his beliefs.

And the depth of emotion that he inspired (deserved or not) could have lead to a very ugly pile on after his death. Maybe that happened anyway. Instead of taking it as cheap sniping, a better-faith reading of Mitchell's eulogy would be as a call for peace - acknowledge the critics but also point out the valuable contributions that the guy made in the hope that all the emotions surrounding his death don't spill over onto twitter or somesuch stupidity.

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