261–270 of 962 posts
If MSFT bought Mozilla to counter Google, that will be hilariously glorious to fulfill a cycle, but makes logical sense.
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Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry). tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded B…
Don’t sanitize it, he was fired for being anti-gay. That should make it a little clearer why funders won’t touch him (and many won’t touch his new work).
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Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.
Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry). tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded B…
We do have a brood of reactionaries attempting to blur that distinction like they always do, but there are plenty of conservatives who do not share that particular bias.
I don't understand Mozilla. How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends $450m annually and dedicates $43m just for future endeavors? Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?
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> BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive. So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar. > Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos) This already exists, it's called Widevine and browsers download it as a binary blob. This is also a different argument, Chrome vs Chromium. If there…
> So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar. So, you were talking about not understanding why a mono-culture is bad. So your license argument here means you don't understand the parent. "BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive." This means that once FF is no more, what's stopping Google from slowing closing off even more parts of the browser to just Chrome…
Sure, I don't see why Mozilla can't do that, especially combined with Microsoft, Vivaldi, and Opera. Right now they're going it alone and are losing marketshare.
This of course, assumes that Google decides to do this and destroy any user trust, which would result in an immediate fork of Android and potential EU antitrust action.
What I'm suggesting may not be ideal, but it's realistic. Mozilla is losing share, even after the massive Quantum rework it continues to decline. Developers don't like working with it because it's a complex codebase.
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Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry). tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded B…
Don’t sanitize it, he was fired for being anti-gay. That should make it a little clearer why funders won’t touch him (and many won’t touch his new work).
This is important because it is a clear delineation between "privately disagreeing but allowing individuals their freedom" and "actively campaigning to take away rights from Mozilla employees and users".
I don't understand Mozilla. How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends $450m annually and dedicates $43m just for future endeavors? Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?
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 nntp), as open source software. Then some rogue employees and interns thought 'nobody wants this shit' (https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...) and firefox was born. Well, phoenix, because engineers never do trademark searches when naming projects. So yea, I don't think anyone fully understands Mozilla, except maybe a few annoyed IRS auditors.
I don't know when Mozilla started taking money for search engine placement, but whoever invented the idea should get a few mil, because now that nobody buys HTTP servers, it's all Netscape/Mozilla has left.
From Google's perspective, it's quite easy to see why they fund chrome: each user that converts to chrome is money they dont have to pay Mozilla. Somehow, despite that depressing metric of user share, mozilla's been making more money every time search bar placement contracts are up for renewal. Some of that was likely competition in search engine space, with both Bing and Yahoo under Marissa chomping for some revenue. I guess the layoffs signal that isn't going to happen again?
Or maybe it signals that you don't need users if your main value anymore is to prove to the DOJ there is no monopoly?
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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 $$$. I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy webs…
> If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$. And further contribute to the browser monoculture? > 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 fe…
There just aren't enough users out there to stick to a bad browser for religious reasons. It has to actually be better.
The browser market is as free of a market as you can get. Chromium has won. It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE. It's basically too late to catch up. While trying to catch up, they will lose what little market share they have left, and the result will be an undisputable browser monoculture. What Mozilla can offer is a different frontend (or "userspace" if you will) to Chromium. That is the realistic approach.
> I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.
desktop user agents: 8% and dropping, about to be overtaken by Internet Explorer (lmao)
4.9% with mobile included
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
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…
>The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs Heck, the burden can be shifted to users! But then you might not have so many users in the future. :(
Very low engagement out of QA. I'm not sure if they just have a way they like to work, or they think that if they exist then no bugs make it to prod (don't laugh, plenty of our twitter adverts get comments from folks thinking you don't need any monitoring if you have a tester on the team or if a dev writes unit tests).
Understand how the end user experiences your software. That's the actual source of the truth.
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It's crazy how much FF's marketshare has dropped. It's such a great browser.
Hmm I don't know. I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev tools are great, it's simply not as polished as the competition. For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS. It also misses important features such as multil…
Really? Do you learn a new language every day? I installed languages that I am interested years ago and forgot about it until you mentioned it.