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Brave layoffs

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Re: Brave layoffs

#111

Post by [deleted] »

qwytw wrote: post #106
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…

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Brave layoffs

#112

Post by init2null »

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.

CTO would've been appropriate, but not CEO. Mozilla could not keep a CEO donating to ban gay marriage. I rather doubt even Microsoft would've kept him. It's divisive and distracting, especially for a public benefit organization. They made the right call.

Re: Brave layoffs

#113

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

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.

Brave collected crypto donations on behalf of unsuspecting online creators and pocketed them. As far as I'm concerned that's as bad as fraud.

Re: Brave layoffs

#114

Post by jjav »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #50
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. 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 >I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-sh…

> 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…

> Check the Mozilla foundation page for all the crap they fund instead of the browser.

Notwithstanding that, they still put out firefox. And Firefox is a far superior browser to any of the alternatives if you care about user-centric control and privacy. So to anyone who cares even a little about being able about these things, supporting Firefox is the way to go.

If a mythical even-better browser shows up, great. But here and now, it's Firefox, or completely surrender the web to commercial interests.

Re: Brave layoffs

#115

Post by fabrice_d »

charcircuit wrote: post #84
flagrant_taco wrote: post #39

We aren't going to see browser competition unless and until we fundamentally rethink what the internet should be. The specifications are simply too complex to foster any meaningful competition. There's too much ground to cover playing catchup and Google has such a large market share that, combined with their data and ad monopoly, allows them to create new specs and features that focus entirely on growing their busine…

Google's browser engine is open source. You can reuse Google's browser engine meaning that you can focus on the features that differentiate your browser instead of implementing the spec like you suggest.

What if you need changes at the engine level to differentiate your browser?

Re: Brave layoffs

#116

Post by izacus »

mdaniel wrote: post #110
zo1 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

So what's the monetary value of not having those CVEs? How did any of that actually touch users beyond having to wait a bit for Chrome to autoupdate?

Re: Brave layoffs

#117

Post by kazinator »

> challenging economic environment

The "environment" problem isn't economic, but social. It's not new, and it's not about to change:

- Most users don't know that the browser that came with their device can be replaced by something else.

- Of those that know, many don't.

- Of those who do, they want it free; you cannot monetize it. You can't lock them in; they will switch to something else at the sign of any trouble.

The alternative browser user is pretty much the same person who doesn't want to see a single ad anywhere, or pay for anything.

You might as well wrap quartz pebbles in cloth and wait for whey to drip out.

A possible area for an alternative browser might be the corporate environment; employers who want to prescribe some kind of more locked down, security-fortified browser for use within their intranet. The challenge there is demonstrating value, compared to regular approaches: using regular browsers and securing things elsewhere.

Recently there was a HN submission to a story about how scalpers are able to get Ticketmaster tickets before everyone else, which mentioned custom browsers that the use. Someone makes money in that niche.

Re: Brave layoffs

#118

Post by toyg »

mdaniel wrote: post #110
zo1 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

The point is that all this is not seen as valuable by users and market leaders. You don't gain marketshare in b2c by saying "my gizmo is more memory-safe than other gizmos", you have to show features. Chrome's process-separation was a feature: you could easily dispose of non-responsive pages, which other browsers couldn't do as well. Even then, it wasn't really why Chrome took off - it took off because of deep integration with Google's ecosystem, incessant marketing efforts, and monopolistic behaviour (Google "unwittingly" breaking GMail and other G products on other browsers, on a regular basis).

So what feature would full memory-safety actually enable? I suspect that's the bit that the Servo folks couldn't articulate well enough.

Re: Brave layoffs

#119

Post by blinkingled »

zee2345 wrote: post #81
blinkingled wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has built and lightly studied Firefox codebase out of pure curiosity this technical joke doesn't really ring remotely true. Sure it's an older codebase and Mozilla doesn't have enough funding manpower to do big rewrites but I don't remember Firefox crashing on me in recent times and I use it exclusively on Mac/Linux and Windows. No site compat issues either. So stop blowing smoke I guess and provide ac…

It is not about crashing, but security. Chromium based browsers have multiple layers of sandboxing and hardening. Webpage rendered basically runs in several virtual machines that are very hard to breach. Mozilla had process based isolation (mainly due old code base). That is far less effective. Some things like GPU access are not sandboxed at all! > Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox…

GPU sandboxing landed in 110 on Windows. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox/Process_model#GPU_... says it will be likely added to OSX and Linux with Webrender. Web Content processes are already sandboxed so I wouldn't say it's a joke ;) - sure they lag behind Chromium but Google has way more resources than Mozilla.

Re: Brave layoffs

#120

Post by sirwhinesalot »

wwtrv wrote: post #104
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a non-profit that (already) runs a mass of volunteers? Surely you jest. The CEO of the blender foundation makes around 100k. They develop one of the greatest open source success stories on 2 million a year. That's less (for the whole project) than Baker makes (2.4 million). There's no excuse for the shitshow that is Mozilla, none.
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