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Brave layoffs

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Re: Brave layoffs

#101

Post by charcircuit »

mthoms wrote: post #92
charcircuit wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This never happened as far as I can tell.

It didn’t. They did append their affiliate id to type-ins for a single crypto exchange once. They quickly retracted and apologized. That’s bad, but not nearly as bad as what the parent commenter described.

>They did append their affiliate id to type-ins for a single crypto exchange once

They didn't do this either. There was an omnibox site suggestion that included an affiliate id. Nothing got appended and people were able to see the affiliate id before hitting enter to visit the site. These site suggestions could also be disabled in the settings.

Re: Brave layoffs

#102

Post by kbelder »

Georgelemental wrote: post #60
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #19

I'm going to treat this like a product engineering discussion User Story: As a Private Citizen and Engineer, I want a graphical multi-input interface to load, view, interact with and post documents to remote and local HTTP servers ("web-browsing") on any personal computing device. I want web-browsing to have out of the box default security and privacy guardrails that are well documented can be disabled or modified by…

Brave's CEO (Brendan Eich) used to be co-founder and CEO of Mozilla. They kicked him out because in 2008 he donated $1000 of his money to an unapproved political cause. Can't put time/effort into something that is more interested in virtue signalling than improving.

Shouldn't be a dead comment; this is exactly what happened.

Re: Brave layoffs

#103

Post by zo1 »

cwzwarich wrote: post #57
izacus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be negative, but what value would Servo exactly bring to users and the web after all the engineering effort? I'm sure it was technically impressive. Chrome, when it came, was stupidly faster than any other competitor, including Mozilla Firefox. What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users, beyond ideology and fun work for its developers? (Ideology doesn't sell software, as opensource effo…

> What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users The biggest advantage would be having a memory-safe browser engine.

As someone with almost no knowledge of Servo, and personally not having a good opinion of the Mozilla foundation, your comment tells me all I need to know why they stopped support of Servo development.

Only social initiatives get feel good money to waste on nice to haves. This "Servo" thing does not sound like it.

Re: Brave layoffs

#104

Post by wwtrv »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #86
hooverd wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing Firefox users hate more than Mozilla taking money from Google is Mozilla making money from other sources. Why can't the Mozilla team just be ascetic hairshirts who make exactly the browser they want and bring XUL back while they're at it. /s

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit that owns the for-profit Mozilla Corporation. Step 1 is get rid of the for-profit corporation that pays its CEO 2.4 million dollars a year to lose market share. That's 24 well-paid developers, or double that from lower-income countries. The foundation had a revenue of $441 million in 2020. We know that in 2014 ~90% of their revenue come from its search-engine deal with Google. T…

> That's 24 well-paid developers, or double that from lower-income countries.

That's a stretch even if we don't count the additional overhead.

Re: Brave layoffs

#105

Post by Brybry »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #86
hooverd wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing Firefox users hate more than Mozilla taking money from Google is Mozilla making money from other sources. Why can't the Mozilla team just be ascetic hairshirts who make exactly the browser they want and bring XUL back while they're at it. /s

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit that owns the for-profit Mozilla Corporation. Step 1 is get rid of the for-profit corporation that pays its CEO 2.4 million dollars a year to lose market share. That's 24 well-paid developers, or double that from lower-income countries. The foundation had a revenue of $441 million in 2020. We know that in 2014 ~90% of their revenue come from its search-engine deal with Google. T…

Couldn't they take the Google money, invest it, and pay developers purely from the interest? Like a university endowment?

How many years of Google money would it take to support ~500 staff purely for making Firefox in perpetuity? That's maybe ~$50 million/year?

This[1] says endowments target ~7.5% annualized returns. So a very conservative 5% return could pay for ~500 staff with ~$1 billion in Google bucks.

[1] https://www.nacubo.org/Press-Releases/2023/Higher-Education-...

Re: Brave layoffs

#106

Post by qwytw »

izacus wrote: post #41
cwzwarich wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? [disclaimer: former Servo team member] Mozilla had a chance to advance browser tech with Servo and fumbled it.

Not to be negative, but what value would Servo exactly bring to users and the web after all the engineering effort? I'm sure it was technically impressive. Chrome, when it came, was stupidly faster than any other competitor, including Mozilla Firefox. What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users, beyond ideology and fun work for its developers? (Ideology doesn't sell software, as opensource effo…

> Chrome, when it came, was stupidly faster than any other competitor

Wasn't it just using WebKit initially? IIRC you could actually use Safari on Windows back then.

Re: Brave layoffs

#107

Post by wolpoli »

kyleee wrote: post #96
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this a hypothesis that we can specify and test? Is this how we would approach this problem? It sounds more like a cynical write-off, not a actual strategy There is nothing to test, it's why I stopped using Firefox. Check the Mozilla foundation page for all the crap they fund instead of the browser. Look how much the UI looks like Chrome, even little things like clicking the searchbar expanding it outside its bou…

Yep, they’d need to fire Baker to right the ship at this point, among other things

Under section 3.5 of the Mozilla foundation Bylaws [1], Baker could be removed by the board, which consists of Mitchell Baker, Brian Behlendorf, Helen Turvey, Nicole Wong, Amy Keating, and Mark Surman [2]. Note that the directors are elected by the directors in the first place so sadly, it is unlikely to happen.

[1]: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-bylaws.pd...

[2]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/leadership/

Re: Brave layoffs

#108

Post by cpeterso »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #51
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #19

I'm going to treat this like a product engineering discussion User Story: As a Private Citizen and Engineer, I want a graphical multi-input interface to load, view, interact with and post documents to remote and local HTTP servers ("web-browsing") on any personal computing device. I want web-browsing to have out of the box default security and privacy guardrails that are well documented can be disabled or modified by…

[flagged]

If you read more than that post’s title, you will see that it’s calling for alternatives to deplatforming.

Re: Brave layoffs

#109

Post by inemesitaffia »

Timon3 wrote: post #16
atdrummond wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opera did have a business model that worked monetizing the browser itself through sales - until smartphones fully supplanted feature phones.

That's not quite the full story. Since 2000 Opera showed ads if you didn't pay for it, and they removed those in 2005, a good bit before smartphones really started. In a way they were ahead of the curve, considering how popular ad-based models with optional removal purchases are these days.

The ads were still there as of last year in mini.

Re: Brave layoffs

#110

Post by mdaniel »

zo1 wrote: post #103
cwzwarich wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users The biggest advantage would be having a memory-safe browser engine.

As someone with almost no knowledge of Servo, and personally not having a good opinion of the Mozilla foundation, your comment tells me all I need to know why they stopped support of Servo development. Only social initiatives get feel good money to waste on nice to haves. This "Servo" thing does not sound like it.

I want to draw one's attention to the (at this point impressive) number of CVEs related to memory issues in Chromium's C++ codebase: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20... and control-f for CVE

Even granting that some of them come from dependent libraries, if the world's arguably best funded software engineering organization can't keep C++ footguns out of an application that runs untrusted code on the regular ... one may want to have a think about whether C++ is the best tool for that purpose

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