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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#851

Post by joshsyn »

wdanilo wrote: post #824
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…

LUNA ( http://luna-lang.org ) - write to us! :) I'm one of the founders. We are looking for senior compiler engineers (GraalVM) and senior WebGL developers (Rust ) in our team. We are doing a visual programming language for data science and we just got funding of $2.5M. We'd love to chat :)

Are you guys moving away from haskell?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#852

Post by JohnFen »

bsder wrote: post #519
JohnFen wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to. Why does that sound like a good demographic? Sure, cover that group, but not at the expense of the much, much larger demographic of "ordinary people".

That demographic can cut you checks with 7 digits or more. "Ordinary people" earn you nothing unless you vacuum up their personal information.

Firefox users don't cut checks, though. What Firefox needs is a much larger number of users. How wealthy they are isn't terribly relevant.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#853

Post by jfk13 »

aloisdg wrote: post #769
BrendanEich wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

You know better than anybody the size of the task of rolling a homemade engine. Is this some vaporware promise or does Brave already started something around this idea?

I'm not sure "chart our own engine course" necessarily means "roll our own engine".

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#854

Post by BrendanEich »

m3adow wrote: post #827
BrendanEich wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

To stay in the martialistic metaphor: In this fight you merely wield the weapons your opponent forges for you. If Google decides to dull your edge in the fight for privacy, you have little influence to sharpen it again. The only reason you are even able to fight this battle is because of the existance of Firefox. All of the Chrome based browsers are toothless tigers without Mozilla.

I am a for-real founder of Mozilla so spare me. I poured 16 years into it, including a bunch of coding as well as recruiting key talent, managing, and strategic decision making. We restarted the browser market when conventional wisdom said it could not be done. This enabled us to restart web standards (WHATWG => HTML5, ECMA-262 new editions). We did that (not you, unless I know you from old days).

But Google is a monopoly now and has tied its browser to its other products to take over adjacent markets, or buy other companies that pioneered such markets. Mozilla depends on Google for most of its revenue, and on a declining (traffic) basis. Reality requires acknowledging my and others work on Mozilla but not dying on that nostalgic hill. Especially not with such arrant mismanagement as is going on there now.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#855

Post by BrendanEich »

bjl wrote: post #840
BrendanEich wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

It seems a bit rich to claim that Brave cares about privacy when just one year ago they were spoofing identities to commit charity fraud. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

Your comment shows malice (ascribing motives to us), as that blunder was quickly corrected, and the tokens at stake came from our fund. Try Hanlon’s Razor.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#856

Post by BrendanEich »

m3adow wrote: post #827
BrendanEich wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

To stay in the martialistic metaphor: In this fight you merely wield the weapons your opponent forges for you. If Google decides to dull your edge in the fight for privacy, you have little influence to sharpen it again. The only reason you are even able to fight this battle is because of the existance of Firefox. All of the Chrome based browsers are toothless tigers without Mozilla.

On engine futures, slow forking works, that is how chromium/Blink emerged from from WebKit. New engines taking lots of capital may happen, probably when there is a massive Bell’s Law device class shift. To argue for others without deep pockets dying on the last war’s hill is to wish those others ill (whether you mean it or not). Users deserve better browsers, and the big user value fight is truly a level up from the engine.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#857

Post by BrendanEich »

loulouxiv wrote: post #810
BrendanEich wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

The more influence Google gets over the web standards, the more they will steer it in order to raise the barrier of entry for web engine makers. It will also get them more and more power over what can be commercially viable on the web. Making it easier for them to set the rules for everyone on the web seems directly detrimental to your business. As time passes by for Brave to became "big enough" (supposedly to develo…

This happens already, e.g. AirBnB deploys new content that breaks in Firefox (perhaps not totally; could be cosmetic or a corner case). Webdevs do not test in low share browsers.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#858

Post by BrendanEich »

timwaagh wrote: post #772
ksec wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for misdirecting the company? As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised. At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again. >Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 e…

i don't know what they do for money, but i suppose it's not giving away free internet browsers. so it might have something to do with that.

Search revenue share deals, mainly with Google.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#859

Post by PyroLagus »

vbezhenar wrote: post #850
aloisdg wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know better than anybody the size of the task of rolling a homemade engine. Is this some vaporware promise or does Brave already started something around this idea?

May be in the future web will be simpler? My theory: browser of the future will need to support wasm and webgl (well, not webgl, but something similar, providing fast and safe interface for GPU). Of course along with smaller standards like fetch api, but that's manageable. Most of the useful websites will utilize those tech to build their UI from scratch without using of HTML, CSS or JS. And HTML, CSS and JS engines…

That just sounds terrible for both SEO and accessibility.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#860

Post by paul7986 »

BrendanEich wrote: post #756
paul7986 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes once learning the back story via the comments here it's clearer/obvious.

Maybe I should delete my comment too...seems a lot of HN members in this thread did the same once you popped in ...lol

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