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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#751

Post by modarts »

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…

That’s terrible, really sorry that happened to you. The good news is that you have an extraordinarily rare and valuable skill set as a compiler eng

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#752

Post by dependenttypes »

the_duke wrote: post #695
iamleppert wrote: post #634

Mitchell Baker should be ashamed of her performance at Mozilla. Serious missteps in the development of Firefox led to the rise of Google Chrome, and only recently (and arguably too little, too late) have they seen the light and prioritized the re-development of Firefox. Nearly all of the other projects at Mozilla that aren't related to the browser itself have been abject failures. They have not only failed in their c…

Firefox did become horribly slow compared to Chrome and lost a lot of market share in the tech savvy community because of it. I also don't understand how they could fall so far behind with their primary product. (they finally caught up again now, I switched back to Firefox about 2 years ago) But: Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imagi…

> Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imaginable.

That makes me wonder, why did something like BrowserChoice.eu not happen for google?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#753

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

summerlight wrote: post #167
jahlove wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made $450m in revenue in 2018. What fraction of that is actually needed to keep a productive browser team afloat?

Assuming that Chrome team have thousands of engineers, designers and PMs (which is a pretty reasonable number as a modern browser is comparable to OS), I expect them to spend more than a billion each year. Mozilla is really in short of resources.

Is there any evidence that Google spend this much on Chrome/Chromium?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#754

Post by saagarjha »

Klonoar wrote: post #548
saagarjha wrote: post #192

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 $$$. 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 parti…

> 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.

Anything that broken would be fixed, almost instantly, had they reported it. I am not very amenable to people who discuss their very extreme personal anecdotes that they have failed to even put even the basic (some may even say courteous) amount of help and instead talk about their experience like it's typical.

> 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.

Open source does not ensure that a monoculture will not develop; both WebKit and Blink are financed by billion (trillion?) dollar corporations that have almost complete control over what will or will not be worked on or merged in. Every engine has its own quirks and slant on how it interprets the web standard: if WebKit was the dominant browser today we'd all be even more hesitant to roll out WebM or WebGL 2.

> 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.

Who exactly are you likening to "junior programmers"?

> 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.

And you know my personal history on this pretty well too, but you'll notice I'm advocating for Mozilla in this case.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#755

Post by coldtea »

Yoric wrote: post #166
coldtea wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be? I'd say 50 or so people would be fine. > How big do you think the Chromium team is? Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).

> I'd say 50 or so people would be fine. With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX. Not nearly a browser :( > Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc). That sounds like a really, really vast underestimation. To the best of my recoll…

>With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.

Not so sure. I remember the Webkit guys being a very small team (and they basically did the whole of Safari). There was some such mention on Dave Hyatt's blog at some point.

And, as far as the "chrome" part (UI, settings, etc) goes, wasn't Firefox at first the work of a couple of people, who forked their own UI version of Mozilla? And still it got to be the most popular browser at the time.

Not to mention how whole OSes and other challenging things have been done by smaller teams...

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#756

Post by BrendanEich »

paul7986 wrote: post #203
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...

Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.

If it wasn't obvious from my tweet, in a thread on "cancel culture", many valley investors were scared of being mobbed if they invested in me.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#757

Post by echelon »

dependenttypes wrote: post #752
the_duke wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox did become horribly slow compared to Chrome and lost a lot of market share in the tech savvy community because of it. I also don't understand how they could fall so far behind with their primary product. (they finally caught up again now, I switched back to Firefox about 2 years ago) But: Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imagi…

> Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imaginable. That makes me wonder, why did something like BrowserChoice.eu not happen for google?

> That makes me wonder, why did something like BrowserChoice.eu not happen for google?

Infinite this.

Google shouldn't be allowed to deploy their browser to their OS that defaults to their search engine and locks you into their paid app store. That's anti-competitive af.

Microsoft was skittles compared to what Google does today. And MS' telemetry has nothing on Google's pervy panopticon.

Google shouldn't be allowed to do browsers.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#758

Post by saagarjha »

Klonoar wrote: post #556
banachtarski wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly calling BS. Just writing a javascript runtime alone isn't just a "handful of engineers." WebGL stack? WebRTC? Layout engine/compositor? Notifications? You're kidding me, there is no small team in the world that could ship a browser stack end to end.

WebKit is a bad example, considering the KHTML history alone. These things don't just take devpower, but time - consider, for example, this: http://www.ekioh.com/flow They've managed to actually get GMail to render - a not insignificant task: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-ro... The timeline on this page alone is in years: https://www.ekioh.com/company/#team From what I understand, that tea…

I was aware of Ekioh, but only tangentially; I had no idea of their progress so I didn't bring it up. I'd say it's great that they've managed to come this far. And to clarify if it wasn't plain from my other comments, I think that Chrome is the exception rather than the rule: it's an absolutely massive team. Possibly the largest of all the browser vendors that can make something close to compatible with the modern web. When pressed for an example I mentioned WebKit because just happened to be the by far the best example: it's the one that I could point to as competing with Gecko or Blink, plus it had a nice webpage I could link to instead of making people comb through Git commits.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#759

Post by pascalpaillier »

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…

Your experience may be invaluable to us -- we're building a homomorphic virtual machine for machine learning, all open source and in Rust. Send me an email to pascal.paillier@zama.ai.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#760

Post by coldtea »

hinkley wrote: post #299
coldtea wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the position wasn't that challenging to begin with, like this one, I'd hire them!

You know those meetings you hate? Quadruple them, add more customers and some unsavory financiers. Then sprinkle it with a bunch of business trips where you never get to see the city. Think about that the next time you're thinking how much of a paycut you'd be willing to take if it meant you didn't have to talk to that guy every week.

>You know those meetings you hate? Quadruple them, add more customers and some unsavory financiers. Then sprinkle it with a bunch of business trips where you never get to see the city.

That argument is about "how hard/bothersome" the work is. That's not how compensation is set, however.

I, and most developers I presume, also don't like sweeping streets or cleaning gas station toilets (much more than business trips and tons of customer meetings), but nobody would pay millions to some gas station toilet attendant.

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