Mozilla Will Nearly Double SF Office, Add 125 People In Early 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Will Nearly Double SF Office, Add 125 People In Early 2013

techcrunch.com

39 pointscpeterso30 comments

They sure appear to need it. I've been following Mac-related Bugzilla-reports during the past year and it seems to be desperately understaffed.

But you don't have to frequent Bugzilla to see that. For example, Firefox on OS X still has the pre-10.7 scrollbars while Chrome got the new ones fixed shortly after the OS-release. That was now over a year ago.

Despite this, Firefox (or Nightly) is still my primary browser for many reasons, including add-ons and the fact that I truly believe that Mozilla want what is best for the web.

That last reason is also why I'm so sad to see them fall behind like this. Without their market-share, they won't have much say on web-matters and should the web be shaped completely by money-driven interests, the users would suffer.

Please Mozilla, get your act together and don't neglect your browser on any platform. Every user counts.

It's not really a matter of neglect, it's a matter of finding people who actually want to do this. OS integration is pretty difficult with Firefox's codebase, partially because it's not really a native app. Parts are real (like the titlebar) but most isn't (including scrollbars). It's hard & dirty work being done by a very small team.

(I'm a former Mozilla employee who added Lion Full Screen support and did some other OS X integration work. If you know somebody who cares about Firefox and wants to work on OS X related work let me know and I'll git in touch with the right people to make that happen.)

This is one area I'd love to work if I end up not doing my startup. The qualifications are pretty steep though. 5+ years Objective C experience :).

Mozilla is actually looking to hire somebody to work on platform integration on OSX: http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/oBuTVfwD

"""Choosing "New Window" from Firefox's dock menu does not open the new window in the active Space""" (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574229) has been driving me crazy every day since I started using a Mac for work.

Many thanks to Josh Aas for fixing this!

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Boot to Gecko (Firefox OS) comes to mind.

When considering the entrenched PC players' scramble to gain relevance in the mobile arena, the move begins to make sense.

Arg, I would love to work on Boot to Gecko.

It is now officially called Firefox OS and Boot to Gecko is dropped...

Got any data to support that? All the major browser market share measurements (Net Applications, StatCounter, etc.) disagree with you by a very large margin.

edit: I see parent deleted their comment. I removed my quote of them.

Spiraling into irrelevance? Care to explain that?

Completely anecdotal, but all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome.

What compelling reason is there to use Firefox any more? All of the reasons that previously applied to switching to Firefox now apply to switching from Firefox to Chrome.

Chrome is faster, more light weight, more standards compliant, more compatible with broken pages, supports more standards/technologies, more actively updated/enhanced, and leaks less memory than Firefox. It's also open source and cross platform.

The one place Firefox may "win" is by sheer number of extensions. Even then, all the "big" ones (AdBlock, Ghostery, ...) are ported over, and I don't think gimmicky extensions are a big influence for most people.

> Chrome is faster

Sometimes, but it depends. For example, Firefox beats Chrome at JSGameBench here (a gaming benchmark including canvas hardware acceleration and JS),

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-fire...

Also, while Chrome wins on most standard JS benchmarks, real-world JS is different. New code often runs faster in Firefox than Chrome. For example, the Linux emulator in JS ran 2x faster in Firefox when it came out, and I can link you to bugs I've filed on Chrome where it currently runs code 10x-15x slower than Firefox.

> more light weight

Many browser shootouts find Chrome to use more memory than Firefox, especially with large amounts of tabs. For example, Firefox beat Chrome at both memory benchmarks here

http://lifehacker.com/5917714/browser-speed-tests-chrome-19-...

> more standards compliant

Definitely not so. First, while Chrome has various standards implemented first, so does Firefox (a few examples off the top of my head: anisotropic filtering in WebGL, Mouselock, various JS ES6 features like WeakMaps, etc.).

Also, Chrome ships with a lot of non-standards-compliant technologies that are enabled by default. For example, WebSQL, NaCl, Flash.

> It's also open source

Chromium is, Chrome is not. Chrome contains a lot of additional closed source code, from a PDF reader to a software shader engine.

Bottom line, there are plenty of good reasons to use either Chrome or Firefox. What is important is both drive each other to do better.

The big one for me was, when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected. In Firefox the whole browser crashes. And no, disabling flash and avoiding it is not an option, not with online video and music playing through flash. One day when flash is gone this won't be a problem but we haven't reached that day yet.

My usage is now 99% Chrome, 1% Firefox (for testing purposes), and keep in mind I was one of those die-hard Firefox fans. I bought my Firefox t-shirt from the Mozilla store, installed it on school computers, supported it from the beginning and everything. Now I'm all Chrome and so is my whole family.

Looking back, the 3 main reasons why I loved Firefox was that was open source, which was emotionally appealing, its call-to-action was to end the tyranny of Internet Explorer, it was standards compliant, and it had extensions. Chrome now does those very same things, some much better than Firefox, and is catching up to the amount of useful extensions. And it looks and behaves better.

I will say this, Firefox has one thing that I really love over Chrome. When you set Firefox and Chrome to remember your last tabs open and load them on each startup, Firefox doesn't load all 80 tabs immediately I open it. Instead it only loads the currently selected tab and leaves the others unloaded, thus speading things up and preventing a system slowdown. Chrome on the other hand loads all 80 tabs at once, so I have to wait 15 seconds before the browser becomes responsive again.

> The big one for me was, when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected. In firefox the whole browser crashes.

Firefox has run Flash in a separate process for a long time now (2 years, I think?) - so a Flash crash only brings down Flash, not the browser or even the tab for that matter (the rest of the web page will still run).

Huh...I have the latest Firefox 14.0.1 and about 2 days ago I had the whole browser just slow down, crash, and self destruct because of 1 tab. I restarted it, reloaded all the tabs and it crashed again as soon as that 1 tab loaded. I think it was a news aggregator too, so it's not like it was an experimental html5 site or anything. I had to quickly kill it before it loaded on next startup. Perhaps maybe it's not flash then?

same for me...i'm using ff on linux, flash runs in a process called plugin-container. you can even kill it, which just kills the flash content in browser pages.

Yeah, manually killing the flash process is useful. If I see my CPU is being hogged for no reason, killing flash generally fixes it (and Firefox keeps running).

when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected

At least in Chrome for Mac, when Flash crashes, it crashes in every tab.

Chrome and Firefox run all instances of Flash, from all tabs, in a single plugin process. I think this demonstrates that sandboxing plugins may be less for security as for protecting the browser from Adobe's bugs. :)

Completely anecdotal, but all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome.

Well, it's only an ancedote. The data suggests something different.

> all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome.

Have you (or they) tried Firefox lately? I made the switch exclusively to Chrome and Chromium back in 2009: Firefox felt slow and bloated, and Webkit's tools and inspector seemed far better and smoother than Firebug.

And then three years passed.

A lot has changed.

Not sure if they still do this, but they used to give each new employee a physical object and say "This is your 1,000,000 users. Try not to abuse them - too much."

Sadly, I haven't received such a physical object after working at Mozilla for 3 years. When I joined though, we did have over 1 million users per paid staff member. That is a lot of responsibility.

What do these "product development and product management teams" do? Is this for the Boot to Gecko project?

I'm quite frankly surprised at the number mentioned. I'm also disappointed that they made the decision to put Thunderbird basically on life support. A self-hosted web version would have made a nice product.

Does anyone have a link to the official announcement? I see nothing on Mozilla's blog and Techcrunch has failed to provide a link.

I don't think that Mozilla wants to get in on the web service bandwagon or they would have before now. In any case, it was abundantly clear that Thunderbird was not going anywhere without some new ideas, so shutting it down was probably the most cost effective move.

Open an Austin office. :)

Even though there's not an Austin office (yet), you should still apply. A significant portion of paid staff work from their homes, hacker spaces or cafes. I worked remotely for Mozilla for 9 months before I moved to the Bay Area.

Check out the Careers page and see if there's anything you like: http://careers.mozilla.org/

That sounds like the GitHub working model. Is GitHub and Mozilla, along with a lot of small startups, the only groups that practice it? It sounds so convenient for recruiting from a wider pool of talent.

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