Mozilla lays off 70
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10 years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.
As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised.
At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again.
>Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.
Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser, But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few senior engineers with a decade of experience.
I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.
By which I mean developers vs managers vs other assorted e.g. "tech evangelists" or whatever it's called.
Just curious, but could Cranelift (or rustc_codegen_cranelift, I'm not sure which would be the closest) also acquire a C-transpiling backend, making it a viable replacement for mrustc? There might be quite a few people willing to fund that sort of work, since it could suffice to bring Rust to a whole lot of platforms that people care about.
The CLIF format is low level but relatively architecture-independent.
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 :)
https://jobs.lever.co/kraken/4c864c8f-bde6-443d-b521-dd90df0...
At this point I don't know who was affected.
I'm guilty too having used such great tool but haven't directly contributed anything.
But from what I hear, it seem the layoffs are directed not by technical reasons, and amazing people were let go. In this case, I fear for the future of firefox, which are not well protected or funded like the open sourced titan Linux.
Good luck with your next adventure and thanks for your work with Firefox!
Yours,
An appreciative Firefox user.
Mozilla was captured by career executives and people with an ageneda - and money for years was not spend on engineering but squandered. I've been using FF since Mosaic days on and off (lately on again as Brave doesn't block more and more ads) and I'm said there is no alternative (FF hangs Twitch for me for which I need to use Chrome, WHY?)
Now they lay of senior engineers.
I doubt if this is just with Mozilla. Things like these are come as job perks when you enter management. And this one of the reasons why you must aspire to be a manager and not a programmer on the longer run.
>>The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures.
They will always come up with reasons why they need to do this. The most common one is they need to be fresh with brains in clouds so that they can to talk to clients etc well. And they are doing this for the employees good.
“Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”
- George Orwell.
>>This is not even included in comp.
Things like this generally go in some top level budget and the are approvals are not even audited at item level spending. Like no asks if you had a $100 dinner. It just goes into a group by statement in some dashboard. This is also why so many managers spend lavishly. It's almost anonymous spending. And money once given is never asked back.
If you think this is saying something. Wait till you discover how comp works in those roles. Pretty much anything given is never audited and its given fairly unchecked. Big bonuses and stock grants are just every day activities.
As in Indian who worked in the US for a while, I've even seen Green cards handed to manager's pets like candies. Again no asks questions, no audits done. Its just how awesome managerial jobs are.
>>The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last.
I doubt if military or any people structure works this way.
Don't fall for these pep talk like speeches.
Similarly, Big 4 and MBB tend to have healthy expense accounts and fringe benefits.
PS: One of my coworkers kept a counter for all-hands meetings because previous said entitled boss'es boss tended to go full mission statement by overusing a particular "motivational" word during their carefully-choreographed, dog-and-pony PowerPoint. Dilbert and Dogbert would've both doubled hand/pawpalmed.
As you go up, its hard to say no to your friends. Because you might need a bailout from them someday, so you don't go cheap on them. Some one asks for money they don't say no.
>>They're not really big on accountability so much as expanding prestige and pyramids on their sides of the org charts.
There is also this thing that if you look rich and affluent you tend to command respect. That is from where the "Dress for the job" kind of saying comes from.
I wasn't aware greencards were something managers could hand out.
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 be shifted to devs and PMs, though usually with mixed results.
For Mozilla, axing quality and security first is a bad look when those are crucial aspects of a privacy-first company value.
There is a lot of "shift-left" emphasis out there, but ultimate their is a conflict of interest problem. I think there's no need to go beyond the "we are losing money" explanation and QA is considered more of a cost center.
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.
This in itself is a not a problem, coming from an oncall minded company. You take care of code you write and you're given time budget to KTFLO.
It was a point of nerd pride on Usenet how well your operating system could handle a Netscape crash back in the day.
"...de-emphasizing QA departments..."
I feel like we (the industry) have forfeited. I did a stint as a SQA manager. Coming from a dev background, I took it very seriously, totally immersed myself in the domain, transmuted from skeptical to true believer.
I honestly don't know what to make of today's state of affairs.
For example, today's business analysts often do many of the tasks we used to associate with the QA role. Testing, verification, liaison with customers. Did we just rename the role?
Did "Agile" smother QA? Until very recently, I've never heard an Agile explanation for how to do QA/Test. I mean really do it, not just wave your arms. The "Test Into Prod" thesis, strategy, whatever, is the first intellectually honest, actionable, constructive (criticizable) methodology I've seen which is tailored for our new market realties.
I've never understood Agile. My teams were way more "nimble" (to use a different adjective) using PMI, critical path, iterative, lightest weight decision making, front loading work, managing risk, and so forth. All the battle hardened time proven stuff people untrained in project management pejoratively call "waterfall".
One correct criticism of all failing methodologists, including Agile, is lack of feedback loops. The "throwing over the wall" of work downstream. We designed feedback loops into our processes, some of what today would be called CI/CD. We were definitely not waterfall. (Another is managing transaction costs, something Agile has manifestly failed to do.)
Rant over. Sorry. Now get off my lawn.
The person asking for a features should absolutely be the one signing off on the feature.
A fuzzer is not going to replace unit tests or good SDLC, which often involves QA.
If there's anything they're going to be in the history books for, it's going to say Rust, not Firefox.
Mozilla is very good at making browsers. Making browsers is incredibly hard and it's amazing that Firefox is competitive with Chrome given a fraction of the development resources Chrome has.
Mozilla has made some big mistakes, but so have the other browser vendors. It's easier to brush over your mistakes when you have an ocean of resources and market power.
Quality and popularity are rarely correlated, but such metrics are even further confounded when you have monopolistic factions like Google and MS pumping huge money into user acquisition for their competing platforms. It's ridiculous to imply that Firefox is being rejected by users just because Google has been dumping millions into getting people switched to Chrome (and doing so not only with marketing dollars, but increasingly with bully tactics).
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 websites. Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.
Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.
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 few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.
And you've reported this, I assume?
> Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.
Really? I explicitly avoid Chrome on my computer because it can't handle the web without chewing through my RAM.
> Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.
I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.
Of course this is not the experience of the vast majority of Firefox users, so it's pointless to suggest that this means something about Firefox's overall quality. You can easily find people making the same sorts of complaints about Chrome.
Maybe it's poor Linux support, I have a distressingly high 4 digit number of tabs open on a Windows box and I don't think I've seen it go past 8gb with multiple weeks of runtime.
Edit: Win10 Pro on a Xeon with 48gb ram available
1) Not using the recommended performance settings. Setting 'Content Process Limit' to 2 removed more than half the memory usage IIRC. There are other settings that you will need to go to about:config to change like what size images are cached to memory etc.
2) Use the 'Auto Tab Discard' extension. You will have to configure this to not discard tabs on certain sites or you may lose info you have typed into a webpage. Fortunately this is easily configured by right clicking a tab.
At the moment Firefox is using 700MB to display 5 tabs. 4 HN and on Reddit tab. Given that these sites are close to just text I find 700MB absurd, but that is just the web these days.
Not sure what was going on with your experience, but I use Firefox on x86_64 machines with far less than 28 GiB of RAM daily and several extensions (including uBlock Origin), and I've never had anything like that happen. I'm not sure how JS-heavy the sites I visit are though, as I don't have any issues, so I don't really pay attention to that.
One is a layout engine, one is a JavaScript interpreter.
This is about 7% of all their employees.
People report that a lot of QA, security, and release management folks were sacked.
A lot more details in the TechCrunch article: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-...
> In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this decision
edit: fixed the numbers, added some more details.
I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product on the server component. As much as I hated Lotus Notes, something between Lotus Notes, Outlook and MS Teams could be something great and that the Mozilla org would be in a good position to create.
I know they may have good reach with the VPN service as well... I'm unsure how they can reduce security, qa and release management people when orchestration, automation and verification are such huge needs.
They get enough income from search (for now) that they could concentrate on best of breed tech, build mindshare from that, then re-introduce marketing for critical mass.
Where Mozilla could have the upper hand, is the idealistic community. They would do the marketing, if FF would align with their goals ... which seems to be more and more a problem.
I was really alienated when FF tried to sell me advertisement as a feature some time ago. Those moves destroy trust. "Ah, so just another bullshit company. No thanks. Why should I support them?"
But the community and people who actually love open technology, privacy and the internet and don't want to hand it all over to google, facebook and co. are still there.
I can see them succeeding with an open-core enterprise e-mail & calendar solution where the base features are free to use and an enterprise version with extra features, like the Gitlab model with self-hosting as the key selling point.
Which worked because IE 6 was a dumpster fire for both users and developers. Developers were looking for any excuse to jump ship off it.
The browser market in 2020 is 'good enough' for users and developers. It's like gasoline - nobody cares which refinery the gas in their tank comes from.
Unless e.g. Lin Clark was among those who were laid off, they've been doing some excellent developer-side community outreach through the Mozilla Hacks blog in the past couple of years.
This sort of ruthless management is a way to destabilise the workforce and disrupt the team. What I've often found is management might cull the worst performing people but the best people follow them voluntarily because of the toxic culture, and then there's the fact that the worst performing person in the best performing team might be better than the best performing person in the worst performing team.
Also people just game the system and only do what will get them a good review.
I know some on at a big UK company who was bucking for a promotion and they blew through 1 Mill and 15 Man years for no good reason.
If you’re going to lay off the bottom x% every n period of time, it might be fine. But you’d better be damn sure your metrics are good (sales comes to mind though even then there’s a lot of ambiguity). If you’re dropping the weakest performer in groups you’re not only going to create the most toxic environment ever, you’re going to lay off plenty who are probably middle of the bell curve.
Microsoft’s plan was, in addition to being unwise, just poorly reasoned statistically.
Look at the changes Chief People Office Michael D'Angelo introduced (after leaving Pinterest), especially the multi-tier bonus system that crystallized the executive hierarchy and made ironclad the gap between Mozilla leaders and the Mozilla proletariat. How much does he make?
Ask yourself- what value or improvement did Chris Lin, VP of Mozilla's horrid IT, hired from Facebook, bring to the company? And look at his overpaid group of Directors, who do not have a single win between them that improved Mozilla's bottom line. Why did they hire a leader from Facebook? Were they trying to sink the ship?
Ask yourself- with all of Mozilla's failed marketing initiatives, why has the CMO never been held to account?
There was great hope that Mitchell Baker would return and clean house where it was needed, starting with many of the execs. This layoff, with so far no indication of leaders being held to account, is a sign that things are not going to improve.
It's a shame, because the people of Mozilla are the finest people you could ever work with. They don't deserve this leadership. The rank and file at Mozilla are amazing, though some of the best were let go today.
As others have posted their financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
They seem to be very dependent on search engine revenue: 91% and 93% for their revenue. Once again, I feel she is worried Mozilla will be cut off very soon.
Still feels like really bad news for Firefox. Microsoft cut their QA people for Windows. Windows 10 to this day still has update issues.
I do agree that Mozilla needs more products to stay competitive. Especially when the Google docs team doesn't fix issues that make Google sheets very frustrating to enter data into with Firefox. Just listen to Linus(TechTips) complain about Google Calendar issues when he pays for the commercial version of GSuite.
I wonder if Mozilla gets cut off from search engine revenue means they will start to develop products/fund OSS competitors to GSuite?
Still, when you introduce new products, that is when you need Q/A the most.
However, Pocket is not one these products. I disable the pocket button on every new Firefox install I do. They have an entire page on it in their financial statement.
And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m). Nintendo's management took a pay cut during their Wii U years before the Switch. And that is what management in general should be doing well before a layout.
The Mozilla steering committee certainly didn't consider this when "we plan to eliminate about 70 roles from across MoCo... ...(were) considered as part of our 2020 planning and budgeting exercise only after all other avenues were explored."
How would Mozilla fund this?
> And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m).
Where do you find this? At the moment, Mozilla doesn't have a CEO, only an interim CEO, are you sure that's her?
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?
Risk... companies that make too much revenue from one product or too much from one customer risk death.
Nearly all of the other projects at Mozilla that aren't related to the browser itself have been abject failures. They have not only failed in their core product against Google, but have shown that they are completely incapable of innovation in other areas of tech.
Her letter reads like someone who is completely clueless. Getting rid of people while earmarking $40 million for a so-called "innovation fund" with no real strategy?
They are hoping some half-baked VPN product generates enough revenue to make them independent of Google's search deal? Please remember this post when that product fails to deliver. It's not a matter of time, it just makes no sense in any kind of timeline and at this point Mitchell Baker is grasping at straws.
(they finally caught up again now, I switched back to Firefox about 2 years ago)
But:
Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imaginable.
Then came the rise of mobile and tablets, with forced Safari on iOS and Chrome by default on Android/Chrome OS, with little incentive to switch...
The bulk of market share loss was inevitable.
Chrome was created partly because Page just wanted to do a browser, but that wasn't enough by itself. Schmidt blocked a browser project for years on the grounds that it was a low priority and there wasn't much reason because Firefox was doing fine.
What changed things was Google trying to work with Mozilla to contribute resources, push the web forward faster and running into huge problems again and again. Political, corporate, technical. The Firefox architecture was over-engineered but also the Firefox guys thought they were top dog and kept dropping or ignoring Google's contributions for what looked like spurious reasons. Frustration grew amongst engineers who cared about improving HTML and with Page having always wanted to do a browser, now there was pressure from the top and the grassroots. When they got a few key hires who showed they could do a new browser with a much better architecture, and move way faster than cooperating with Mozilla, events were set in motion.
But there's a parallel universe in which Mozilla welcomed the Google contributions with open arms, in which Gecko had been written in normal C++, was easier to work on/better documented, where the app architecture was more conventional and thus more amenable to sandboxing etc. And in that world maybe Firefox would be even more dominant than Chrome. I don't think Mozilla realised back then they either could learn how to work with the Google engineering teams, even to the extent of giving up some architectural control, or Google would wipe them out.
This happened in 2011-2015 when Google was investing looooooooots of money in Chrome and Mozilla was betting the farm on FirefoxOS. Since then, Mozilla has improved Firefox a lot, but it's hard to compete with a company that has a way larger budget on essentially the same product.
That makes me wonder, why did something like BrowserChoice.eu not happen for google?
FF was never really fast. Early versions worked OK but that was because websites were way simpler and user expectations lower.
Chrome was a big step in performance and all that time until FF 57 Quantum was Firefox simply catching up ...
The people let go weren't the people working on the failures for the most part. It looks like each was told "you have to save x% of money from your current operating budget. This can be lay off or by other means"
So layoffs all around,any engineers, some managers, some directors. This means mostly people who are paid more but not essential, hence you see senior people who worked a long time at Mozilla being let go, because most teams don't run services that cost a lot of money.
Note that this directive come from the new CFO and board. Feel free to look em up. When the previous CFO left I feared this would happen (previous CFO had some integrity)
When I returned to Firefox a few years ago initially it felt quite behind Chrome, and few odd things like Pocket etc, but these days I can't see any reason to use Chrome. Love the container add-ons, thew new picture-in-picture works great. The leaner Quantum works better. I appreciate the work they do with Rust and webassembly. etc.
It feels like a better compromise could have been made.
The employees, in all reality, don't have the power to drive the direction and focus of a large company; that's a benefit limited to startups and small businesses.
I hate that layoffs like this can happen, no executives take blame and they continue to make 4, 5, 10x what those laid off made.
The CEO (Mitchell Baker) made around $2.3M in 2017.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo...
Check out page 7.
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).
I don't want subscription garbage, and I don't want Firefox advertising stuff to me.
However, I have no idea how I'd try to fund Mozilla when most of their work is on a product that they give away for free.
I can't imagine that grants from foundations or the government could cover their budget, and I can't really see them being amazingly successful with apps (although I would pay for a bulletproof, high quality ad blocker for iPhone) or hardware (although Purism's phones and laptops seem kind of in Mozilla's ballpark, I doubt they are making much money.) Nobody wants to pay for web services, and it's hard to compete with the many cloud incumbents, so those don't really seem like a good options either. Running a consulting business to fund the browser doesn't seem like a winning idea. Development tools seem to be free from the likes of {Microsoft, Apple, Google} as well, so that doesn't seem like a great business. I can't imagine many people paying for Rust or webasm tools either. Perhaps web game development tools or platforms? Anyway, it's a hard problem.
So HN, does anyone have any actual, serious, good ideas on how Mozilla can make money and keep delivering a good Firefox browser (and Rust, webasm, etc.) for free?
- @firefox.com email hosting without advertising/tracking (besides advertising firefox in the domain!)
- blog hosting without advertising or tracking
- non-dodgy vpn service
I know this'll be an unpopular suggestion (and it's not something I necessarily want), but the elephant in the room is _selling_ Firefox: I would be happy to pay for their browser provided it was more polished than the competition. I would even pay a yearly fee. (Again, not ideal, but I'm just brainstorming.)
Or maybe find a way to sell an "enterprise" Firefox to nontechnical companies who are privacy-oriented? I'm not sure how realistic this is.
The only other way they're going to be able to do this is to find something as creative as reCAPTCHA's business model [0]. With so many users, maybe there's an idea there.
[0] https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/recaptcha-...
Stop all the marketing and the nonsense advocacy, focus on developing a browser, get other companies to fund development. It's in the interest of quite a few vendors to have a good, neutral browser.
Nobody directly depends on Mozilla and or features in their product and so nobody will give them money because of that. (you can argue rust trough kubernetes and such is an example of the opposite but despite their big influence and contribution it's not really a mozilla product) Electron has chromium at it's core, CEF apps have chromium at their core, all the other popular alternatives have chromium at their core and google has nice control. Despite that this dominance is ultimately bad for everyone. Google gets too much control over internet standards and their implementation. It is trash. and Mozzila depends on them too for their funding.
I'd say we even risk that they wouldn't get hit with monopoly rulings if Mozilla and firefox dies despite their competition being utterly dependant on and at the mercy of the direction of their product.
Privacy focused personal zeroknowledge cloud things are needed.
I'd love to have a more elaborate version of Firefox Sync that worked across chromium (and I'd pay for it).
The obvious calendar, mail, etc.
I'd pay for a zeroknowledge hosted Berners Lee Solid service.
Do this stuff and I'll pay well for it.
Keychain support is the only reason I recommend Safari, because password sharing with iOS is so important.
On Windows it's a big mindshare problem. So I'm supportive of their marketing efforts.
Their best bet is to do affiliate selling. E.g. discount Dropbox subs originating from Firefox.
Don't focus on stuff that Google does well, like e-mail. Focus on stuff Windows does poorly, like OneDrive.
So you're right on the money with password sync. Basically nonexistent in Windows. 1password affiliate selling = A+.
Firefox syncs just fine with Firefox on any platform, including mobile. Just use it everywhere, no?
I still use Chromium for garbage web time coughhackernews*cough for example.
All my actual work and projects are Firefox (tons of vertical tabs) and I don't want them polluted with my trash reading but would still like to see history/tabs etc at least browseable across browsers.
Containers are getting a bit more viable to combine work and consumption but not quite there.
edit - and yes I'm actually just about 100% Firefox mobile already
I get that Pocket exists but the whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth -- paying $5/mo to remove ads in a bookmarking service that should just be a built-in feature of sync is gross.
This raises the question of what products Mozilla plans to make that will generate revenue. The article doesn't address this.
I found these after a quick search, all of which appear to depend on Firefox to some extent:
- VPN/password manager called Lockvise
- Pocket recommendations and sponsored content
- Firefox Monitor, "a free service which allows people to check whether their email address has been a part of a recent security breach"
- "DNS over HTTPS" and "Encrypted Server Name Indication", "... both of which we’ve partnered with Cloudflare to test in the U.S. market."
"Mozilla lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue"
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-...
To Mozilla: Let's figure out this monetization thing. Heck, I'd pay for Firefox to keep it as great as it is and independent.
You can also donate your voice here: https://voice.mozilla.org
Mozilla can focus on online related communication and collaboration products. Some examples: email, messenger & audio/video conference, online identity, and security.
Email - make a web-based and an offline version.
Messenger & audio/video conference - can be easily tied in with the browser.
Online identity - people and company pay to have verified online identities and brands.
Security - encrypted communication/email/message, anonymous services, vpn, etc. SSL, domain name, DNS.
But like Tesla, I still want Firefox to succeed. I'm not sure I'll donate again however. They seem to be just fine on their own.
I wish Mozilla good luck although I'm shaken by these news and how far reaching the restructuring seems to be. I hope it's not the beginning of a negative spiral where they end up lacking manpower in development and QA to deliver a stable browser supporting the latest web standards and lagging behind, because then they're truly out. We should see already in a couple of years.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601925
There are quite a few places where the browser makes requests and they are not logged in the Network section of the Inspector.
2. Your worst enemy at this stage is depression/exhaustion. Sport and social life are important to keep this at bay.
3. Brush up your CV, your interview skills.
4. Organize cross-reading of CVs, simulate interviews for each other.
5. You may need to go through numerous interviews. It sucks.
She said part of it was that they couldn’t save money because they were a non profit so all the money they got they had to spend, which caused over hiring.
She-if she exists-is wrong. And I’m doubting her existence because nobody working at an NGO would be able to hold onto such superficial misconceptions for long.
This wasn't exactly a fun moment. I left Mozilla after this. Most of the reason i post all this here now.
I'm hiring a WebAssembly compiler expert. We're an all Rust shop, too. damon@nearprotocol.com
I use Linux as desktop and for me Chrome has been the choice for the last few years. The only thing I use most often from Mozilla is its MDN site, which is absolutely great.
Let me have Rome for but a single eight-hour workday.
2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. nice job if you can get it.
edit: 1 million USD in 2016 and before.jumped to 2.3 million in 2017! pg8 of form 990 available at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-records/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
I understand why people are generally peeved about executive compensation, but this conversation is very rote and this is a particularly flamebait-y framing of it.
Where do you get those executive jobs for relatively unknown entities that pay millions? Isn't there an entire IRS publication about how it is suppsed to be reasonable?
Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.
is this ceo really worth that considering they aren’t making their goals (who’s responsibility would ostensibly be that of the ceo?)
If she's able to increased the revenue or efficiency by just 1% then she's paid off almost twice her salary.
edit: Fixed pronoun, apologies.
Change the number and this will apply to most CEOs.
https://www.glassdoor.com/research/ceo-pay-ratio/
According to these numbers, CEOs work 204 times as hard as regular employees.
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22060372 and marked it off-topic.
From Win98>Win2000>WinXP>Win7 it has been a slow but steady improvement in stability and features.. sure could have been better, but compared to Linux desktop distro's which none of them can barely even fucking match WinXp in terms desktop features and stability.. nvm the power shell extensions and eco system which don't exist. Because that only comes from good API's documentation and community that isn't completely stupid ... I would say that MS had a fairly good team of people up until the release of Win7, after that they seemed to have got a retarded shit for brains CEO Satyan noob tard, and replaced all the skilled people with fellow idiots.
And now Win10 is a stinking pile of broken and bug infested noob trash... it's built on the work that proceeded it, but they sure have done as much as possible to ruin that while doing fuck useful as an improvement in the underlying system let alone the UX/UI which hasn't improved at all its at best worse, they've just tacked on crap everywhere.
Outside of that list, I'd struggle to name a single thing in Windows, that became better. Number of bugs certainly increased. Specifically, search and language switching are the worst offenders.
If Firefox was actually gaining share I'd feel differently, but I'd rather see Mozilla switch tech stacks than fizzle out and die.
If you think that the new browser monoculture would be any better than the previous one (IE5-6), you are horribly, horribly wrong.