901–910 of 962 posts
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Mozilla has way too many VP and above employees that are useless (check what the once VP engineering, then interim CTO, then fellow is actually doing for instance). They should let go a few, but as far as I know, none has been fired. Gotta keep getting twice the bonus percentage as regular ICs...
You mean ekr yea? I don't know what he's doing either or why he's been promoted along the way. Nobody really knows.
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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…
I have come to a place in my life where I crave more honesty all around, and I'm willing to pay for it with emotional pain. And it's not just a selfish sort of myopia--like, I can imagine you reading that and thinking I have some autistic flavored honesty fixation and I am projecting that onto everyone without considering their feelings. It's not that. Actually I believe that we as a society would better if we set the baseline somewhere closer to what she wrote than to perfunctory respect and polite platitudes. And I believe the various negative emotions that would come with that new baseline are both real costs dearly paid AND worth paying all the same. I know my perspective on this isn't popular.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about at least one thing: she probably wasn't the person who should have written this, even if we take as a given that it should have been written at all. If someone wrote something similar about me, I'd want them to be someone I loved and who loved me--the kind of person who could say something profoundly true about me, as a testament to the real effect I had in the world, both good and bad.
Edit: Oh, and since it obviously doesn't go without saying, I'll say this too: I am not offended by the obit she wrote, and I would want a similar thing for myself, but I nevertheless think she did the wrong thing by writing it. I might have a fantasy about what I consider to be a better world in which what she wrote was fine, but we don't live in that world and she clearly violated dearly held norms when she wrote that.
That was part of my context when I wrote the post that started this conversation, but I didn't make it clear at all.
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> How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends Well, I mean, they started off as a HTTP server company with a not lightweight browser, won an antitrust case but lost the war, and reformed as a non profit. Or, well, a for profit company wholly owned by a non profit. At which point they went about rebuilding Netscape suite, the one with mail clients and calendars (and IRC and n…
Not accurate. Netscape was the browser company, with servers too (I worked with the McCool twins and Ari Luotonen in first month on board). I have no idea what "not lightweight" means but Netscape took over the market from Mosaic and pioneered SSL (now TLS) for secure e-commerce. This is all pretty well known and many still alive who saw it. Taher El Gamal among them. Why do people make up fables on HN?
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> The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS. It's horrible on all platforms ;) . The way tabs are handled is by far my biggest complaint, you can't fit as many tabs in as with chrome and since they "upgraded" the extension system the vertical tab extensions don't work well (can't remove top tab panel). I wish they'd just make a native UI for each platform, their cross platform o…
Wait you can't scroll trough tabs on macOS? I have hundreds open and can read em perfectly fine
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Absolutely.
Absolutely it would or wouldn't be underfunded?
Elsewhere in these comments people have estimated that Google pays at least 1000 people to work on Chrome. That's about the size of all of Mozilla, and a lot of those Mozilla staff are necessarily not working directly on Firefox --- you need HR, accountants, marketing, etc. Also, Google pays its developers significantly more than Mozilla does, on average; Mozilla developers tend to get big raises when they move to Google.
And that's just direct spending. Historically Google has done a lot of Chrome marketing on its Web sites, which is prime advertising real estate that would cost astronomical amounts of money if it was for sale. And historically Google has paid hardware and software vendors to preinstall Chrome, which is also expensive, though I'm not sure how much that happens these days.
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Only a tiny part of Firefox is in Rust now. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_Components .
Also, Rust code can have security bugs. Memory safety bugs are not the only kind of bugs.
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Two days back I wrote this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034293 I doubt if this is just with Mozilla. Things like these are come as job perks when you enter management. And this one of the reasons why you must aspire to be a manager and not a programmer on the longer run. >>The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-fi…
I used to work at Stanford, once upon a time. Our boss got us training for a week around Hollywood with a Jag as a rental. Our boss'es boss seriously put in to have helicopter rides to work, and they definitely had $100+ per diem and expense accounts. What's interesting is when your boss has self-approval over their own budget and expenses. They're not really big on accountability so much as expanding prestige and py…
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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 has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. This statement is a fabrication. She was trained and worked as a lawyer. She went to Berkeley, not to study computer science or electrical engineering, but to study law. She graduated and went to a San Francisco law firm that specialized in intellectual property and had many clients in Silicon Valley. She eventually left and w…
"Mitchell has written the key documents that set out Mozilla's enduring mission and commitments – the Mozilla Public License in 1998, the Mozilla Manifesto in 2007 and the Mozilla Manifesto Addendum – also known as the Pledge for a Healthy Internet – in 2018".
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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 mon…
PS, thanks for saving the Web when you did. It seems genuinely heroic to me.
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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 mon…
I left Mozilla (brief undistinguished tenure; briefer overlap with you) in part because I felt it simply refused to acknowledge that the Internet of 2005 (dominated by 500M people using web browsers in democracies) was not the Internet of 2015 (3B people, mostly apps on smartphones, tracked by their SIM cards and social networks). I was thrilled to start working on FirefoxOS, then soon experienced it as a kind of dou…