Mozilla Lifeboat

zoom has already become a verb.

honestly, i was aok with riot as a name being a barrier to entry, i’m fully convinced at this point that barriers to entry somewhat mitigate against eternal september and the toxicity which follows with it. take irc, while it certainly has toxicity issues, the esoteric nature kept the worst away.

so even if element, as a name, adds to keeping it low enough profile to keep it from becoming a verb–i know many will disagree (particularly the devs (sorry Arathorn))–im fine with that.

i hope we can find that magic balance where it’s a fundamental project which will bring in funding and people power, but not so fundamental that everyone’s toxic aunt and uncle uses it as a verb.

> If your company doesn't have stock... what do they do?

As someone working at a private finance company - annual bonuses at a rate similar to big tech stock grants work just fine.

I went through the exact same thing on a smaller scale when I decided to rename an independent project I was working on. The existing community suddenly became really attached to the old name, and I had a number of people tell me that the new name was a mistake.

Even people who agreed that the old name was a problem were still telling me that they just didn't like the shift in tone, that they felt doubtful about everything. It was a very surreal experience, because I knew the old name was a problem and I knew the newer name better invoked the feeling I wanted, but all of a sudden I was seeing so much pushback from so many people that I wasn't confident any more.

The solution was to take the project to a big conference with a bunch of brand new users and ask them about it while I demoed. Across the board, pretty much everyone liked the new name better, it immediately got across what I wanted. It was a complete 180 in reactions. So after that, I stuck to my guns and in a month or two everyone in the existing community was used to it and a lot of them had come around to saying they now preferred the new name.

My take is people are familiar with 'Riot', it has a sense of nostalgia for them, and even if they don't like the name Riot, that's just what pops into their head when they think about the project. If it's something you feel confident about, then you should ignore the people complaining. Or maybe not ignore, but at least filter their complaints a bit and don't treat them like gospel.

When thinking about branding changes, there's danger in listening too closely to the existing community, because it's going to be hard for them not to have a familiarity bias towards the things they're used to.

Why would it hurt? Those people will easily find well-paid jobs on Chrome's own security and devtools teams, where they can work on improving Chrome both in terms of security and developer-focused features, all the while bringing their own values and ideas. Win-win.

Not an insider although I have some contacts at Mozilla who talk freely over beers.

Mozilla is definitely moving away from Firefox over the next few years, this is but one of the first steps to that end. They have decided to renew Google's partnership so Google will remain the default search engine for the foreseeable future (next 3+ years), once again talking the talk instead of walking the walk and switch to a privacy-first engine.

The security and devtools teams getting axed is not only a clear signal but also the physical implementation of de-emphasizing Firefox and pushing for new standalone subscription services that don't need to be integrated (as tightly) into any browser to be used by actual people.

A few years down the line of such a "strategy", all things remaining equal, I can't see the browser being even used by developers/FOSS advocates because even these kinds of people need to see at least some progress over time and get at least some increasing value over time from a piece of software they use as heavily as they are, every single day of their professional as well as personal lives.

Last but not least, with all due respect to Aaron, I can't see such strategic decisions to be taken with the assent of his team at all. In effect, the GeckoView team could get axed overnight and implementations would immediately turn to using Android's WebView instead. It's actually a bit ironic that GeckoView's own wiki lists itself as "not a dropin replacement of Android's WebView" in that regard, as most differences between the two are due to GeckoView's rejection of existing, native APIs, leading the team to do much rework. And teams that base themselves on doing unnecessary rework and following NIH instead of building on existing libraries and APIs often get canned first during such strategic shifts.