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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#591

Post by inferiorhuman »

pdog wrote: post #509
cookiecaper wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Minor correction: Prop 8 was supported by the majority (52%) in California. In fact, Prop 8 (which Brendan Eich donated in support of) passed by 600,000 votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8

If you'd like to be properly pedantic. 52% of the folks surveyed in one poll were against Prop 8, 52% of the voters voted for Prop 8. Other polls ranged from 35 to 55% against. Prop 8 was designed to prevent a minority group from attaining equivalent rights of the majority so it's not really surprising that Eich got skewered for that. For fucks sake Prop 8 wasn't "quote-unquote bigotry" it was absolutely bigoted — bigoted enough to be struck down by the courts.

Edit: to be clear what I'm getting at is that there is a difference between voters, voters who actually voted, and the overall California population.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#592

Post by sgentle »

malachismith wrote: post #159
dman wrote: post #56

Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

To be clear... this charts the comp of ONE person at Mozilla (the Board Chair - and now interim CEO).

I was curious so I put together a chart comparing Baker, Eich, James Cook (the treasurer, not the explorer), and a baseline of 500k with a 10% raise per year:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR2HoMXrWo3H...

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#593

Post by zelly »

scriptsmith wrote: post #573
roca wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It was real memory. I know the difference. I only noticed because I got an OOM error in my Java program and X11 froze, couldn't use my mouse. This happened multiple times with different heavy duty JS websites, particularly SPAs.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#594

Post by inferiorhuman »

cookiecaper wrote: post #444
catalogia wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's appalling. How did that make people still working at Mozilla feel? I can't imagine working under somebody like that.

It seems that there was some subsection of Mozilla employees who were offended by Gerv's views and thus publicly ambivalent, though undoubtedly privately relieved, to hear of his passing. [0] While that doesn't excuse the "obit" Baker posted, I'm sure it had some effect on her thought process. Common decency is apparently not valued above political homogeneity in the tech industry. [0] http://archive.today/2020.01.16…

Common decency is apparently not valued above political homogeneity in the tech industry.

Common decency? You mean like not going out of your way to deny rights to others or do you mean tolerance of bigotry? Hmm.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#595

Post by zelly »

toyg wrote: post #546
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…

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.

I used the official, automatically-updating build from getfirefox dot com. Package managers are always outdated, which you don't want for browsers (CVE madness).

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#596

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #278
Sammi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world today is different. Can't skimp on marketing any more, as the competition is extremely heavy on marketing.

Is it though? Tesla is very light on traditional marketing, while its competitors are spending heavily. Nothing changed. People are the same.

Tesla has Musk who has become extremely popular, he's probably better than whole marketing department with good funding.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#597

Post by zelly »

jorvi wrote: post #386
zelly wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm skeptical of this argument. Advertising companies shill garbage to us all the time. If it were bad, people would have stopped using it. As strong as the Google brand is, I don't think people are using it just because they were told to. Consumers, even the least technical of them, are still savvy enough to notice "slow internet". Their friends tell them to switch to Chrome, then they stop complaining about it, done.

> Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world

Yes, this is the reason why it became the best. It had loads of talented developers deployed on it for years and years. You can either complain about it or be happy that it happened and you have access to the fruits of this labor for free.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#598

Post by paul7986 »

BrendanEich wrote: post #473
kick wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CS was never close to meritocracy (I'd argue that finance is/was historically far closer to meritocracy than CS ever was). Eich was raised in the Valley, got a Master's in CS before he had gotten a job, and was a millionaire and investing in Silicon Valley real estate before he had been working for ten years (he never started a company, and only created Javascript after something like eleven). There are people workin…

I was never a millionaire from real estate before I'd been working ten years. Are you perhaps misinformed by someone who was at SGI and exaggerated rumors they heard? I made more off of SGI options than I did by ten years in from real estate, and I never flipped. I've owned the same properties for over 30 years. I agree with you that many fine people do life-saving or otherwise important work for far less. But facts…

Cool, where in MD? I grew up in Towson and Bel Air.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#599

Post by phonon »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #580
phonon wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basical…

I'll leave with this...how someone who disagreed with his religious values can still write a meaningful obit.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/29/gerv.html

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#600

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

manfredo wrote: post #566
overcast wrote: post #540

Only in fairy tale land does CEO/Executive compensation reflect performance.

Many CEOs derive a significant portion - often even the majority - of their compensation from performance-based bonuses. Compensation not only reflects performance, it is directly tied to it.

Short-term performance, which can often warp long-term incentives
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