Mozilla lays off 70 • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#921

Post by wesgarland » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

zelly wrote: post #171

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…

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…

How, exactly, would you replace Gecko with V8?

One is a layout engine, one is a JavaScript interpreter.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#922

Post by wesgarland » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

wott wrote: post #882

toyg wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering he was on Linux, btw, that was probably not a Mozilla build. Sadly, one of the drawbacks of opensource is that people can take your code and butcher it, and users will blame you.

Firefox gigantic leaks happen to me on Windows too. Depending on the mood, it ends with a crash or with Windows warning me that it will kill some processes if that keeps going on.

Happens on mac, too.

Some mornings I'm beachballing for my whole first coffee. Eventually I just wind up power cycling the mac if I can't open a shell prompt with which to `pkill -9 plugin-container`....

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#923

Post by toyg » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

wesgarland wrote: post #922

wott wrote: post #882

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox gigantic leaks happen to me on Windows too. Depending on the mood, it ends with a crash or with Windows warning me that it will kill some processes if that keeps going on.

Happens on mac, too. Some mornings I'm beachballing for my whole first coffee. Eventually I just wind up power cycling the mac if I can't open a shell prompt with which to `pkill -9 plugin-container`....

I'm on Mac too and I've never seen anything like this. The odd tab will crash (particularly after I started using containers extensively and more than one adblocker/anti-tracker), but that's it.

> pkill -9 plugin-container

Ahhh, ok - that's not FF, that's a crap plugin (likely Flash). It's the browser equivalent of blaming Windows when a crap taiwanese driver gets it stuck. You could try uninstalling all that crap.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#924

Post by timwaagh » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

BrendanEich wrote: post #858

timwaagh wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks. Although it doesn't really clear up the mystery of what that workforce of theirs is doing.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#925

Post by BrendanEich » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

tripzilch wrote: post #918

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.

Privacy is not using Google's engine. I would have given Brave a more serious try if it weren't for that. (although I very much dislike the payment system, presented as an alternative to the tracking privacy nightmare the web has become. I'm not paying for the difference, that's ridiculous. I saw what they did to the web, I'm not paying to keep them away)

Engines do not by themselves raid user privacy, and we strip out front end and middleware tracking from chromium/Blink. See https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-....

You have “who pays” exactly backwards about optional Brave Rewards in your closing parenthetical. We pay you, we do not make you pay.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#926

Post by BrendanEich » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

timwaagh wrote: post #924

BrendanEich wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search revenue share deals, mainly with Google.

Thanks. Although it doesn't really clear up the mystery of what that workforce of theirs is doing.

Look at the majority of the titles under https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#927

Post by rurban » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

joshsyn wrote: post #851

wdanilo wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Scala apparently

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#928

Post by baud147258 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #765

falcolas wrote: post #8

70 employees, at a grossly over-estimated cost of $200,000 a year each (QA "leads" would probably cost a fraction of that), would cost Mozilla about $14M to retain. They are retaining their $43M budget for blue sky research intact (per TFA). It feels like a better compromise could have been made.

> QA "leads" would probably cost a fraction of that While I agree with the sentiment here, there is no need to diminish the work of QA people. They are a very important of the development process. A good QA is hard to come by and I often see them single-single handedly carry a project to completion despite working with a team highly incompetent "developers"(see what I did there).

Yeah, we have the chance of having a few good QA in our company and they are very important in getting the SW through the door not overly late and without too many serious defects

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#929

Post by baud147258 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #892

petagonoral wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet Like what? The wiki page doesn't tell. You are making it sounds like she created Mozilla & products herself, rather than an admin/exec role throughout. And also making it sound like her presence alone is what is bringing in ~$500 million. Is there some connection you would like to disclose? by the way, I'm not arguing her posi…

> Is there some connection you would like to disclose? You're not allowed to post insinuations like that to HN. It's nearly always imaginary and poisons discussion badly. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think the connection the parent was asking was between the 500M$ and Mitchell Baker

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#930

Post by baud147258 » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

ReverseCold wrote: post #216

zelly wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will discourage people from donating. Absolutely disgusting. Maybe it's good for them to go bankrupt, so that other non-profits will learn from their mistake.

The minute Mozilla goes bankrupt and Firefox loses funding is the minute the internet is dead. Imagine only having a single client for HTTP (Chrome/WebKit).

Well, it also means you just have to test your web app on one browser. No more compatibility issues!