Andreas Gal is leaving Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

Andreas Gal is leaving Mozilla

andreasgal.com

62 pointshepha197924 comments

The real question is, who is stepping in? Mozilla is very important to keep the major browser vendors honest (beyond being a great piece of software). Seems to me it needs deep technical leadership.

I don't know about the CTO role, but since Dave Herman has been leading Mozilla Research for a while now I wouldn't be surprised to see him take over.

That was my first thought too after wondering who would be the new CTO :)

Hm, this seems discouraging. Brendan Eich, Andreas Gal and Graydon Hoare are all gone and Mozilla's leadership and public messaging seems to be getting more and more marketing-dominated.

Despite some well-publicized departures, I'm still bullish on Mozilla. As javascript becomes more capable, Mozilla's open-web mission becomes more attainable. Public awareness of widespread government surveillance increases the demand for trustworthy communication tools. Concretely, FirefoxOS is quietly reaching maturity, and Servo has a great deal of promise.

I think that Mozilla's strange position, being a non-profit that is at various times either in competition or in cooperation with the world's largest tech companies, makes employee departures all that more press-worthy that the typical corporate churn. I wouldn't read too much into it.

> Mozilla's open-web mission becomes more attainable

That's their mission (allegedly), but things like Pocket integrations, or the Telefonica chat thing (Hello?) really make me think it's not where the manpower is going.

Most of the effort behind Hello was independent of Hello. Hello is based on WebRTC, which is something Firefox needed to support anyway. Hello is just a neat way to use it, and I doubt that it required a lot of effort. ICBW, though.

Same goes for Pocket.

Little effort, but we (eg: the community) don't get anything that's reusable. We just got a bunch of code that interacts with some proprietary system.

Meanwhile, we still don't have any FLOSS implementation for WebRTC-based voice+video.

I can't figure out what you mean here. WebRTC's implementation is totally open source. The only thing aside from accounts in Hello is the STUN/TURN servers, and I think OSS projects exist for running those.

In other words, everything is reusable and is being used by tons of new startups and projects doing video conferencing.

The whole thing will even use free codecs if both sides support it.

You are very optimistic, unless Mozilla gets really innovative, I don't see how Mozilla will survive in the long run, or at least be relevant enough to put pressure on competitors. I don't think your two reasons are good enough, most users don't care or know about the surveillance issues, and while servo maybe prove to be a technically superior browser, that's not enough.

Technically superior = faster/less bloat, and that could mean a lot.

People moved to firefox because IE was slow and sucky. They moved to Chrome because Firefox was bloated. Now some are even moving back to Firefox because Chrome guzzles RAM. Servo would be an ideal next step; a large architectural change like that is perfect for gaining lots of traction.

Firefox beat IE on features like tab browsing and popup blocking, not really on speed. Servo should be better than gecko, but there's so much more to a browser than the runtime that it's hard to do a fair comparison yet.

Why does open-web mean Javascript?

I really hope Servo & other real innovations (i.e. not Firefox OS) can turn Mozilla around. The open web needs them to matter!

Yep. If firefox and IE together dip below 20% or so, we'll see more and more of the horrible "This site only works in Chrome".

> we'll see more and more of the horrible "This site only works in Chrome"

There is still Safari/WebKit to provide some balance.

Sites could move to a native app with bundled WebKit. If you're going to support only one client, make it your own client.

He was the CTO for less than 1.5 years, I guess he didn't like having that position at Mozilla if he left so quickly?

7 years at any organization is a long time, and with so few rungs above him on the ladder, it is only reasonable that he'd move on to something else.

Nah, that's a sign of an organization going in the wrong direction to me. When you reach the C*O level, you should pretty much be there for life unless you have serious doubts about the sustainability of the place/get kicked out/have a major life event that takes precedence (eg sick spouse).

You should only be in a position long enough to a) learn enough to move up to the next position or b) effect the change you want to if you're C-Level.

If you're not learning anymore, it's not fun anymore, or you're not having the effect you want to (or any combination of those), its time to leave.

This. I think most Mozilla employees approach stuff this way. I've seen folks leave to form a startup other times too, and that's not because Mozilla is bad at keeping them.

I (non employee; student+volunteer) certainly do this. I've drifted between open source projects and communities, reducing participation drastically when I find something I learn from more. Im pretty involved in a couple projects and I really want to stay because they're awesome, but it's quite possible that in a few years I'll be somewhere completely different. At the moment, I hope not. But only time will tell.

Yeah, you're not disagreeing with what I just said. If he couldn't effect the change he wanted to as CTO, then Mozilla is probably in a very poor position.

Mozilla lets cabals on Twitter call the shots over tech brains.

Mozilla doesn't need to survive as a corporation after that blunder. They should downsize and just provide the browser and thunderbird as open source projects.

Rescind what you did to Eich, Mozilla. Stand up for your employees rights and the ethics and people who got you where you are now.

>Related: Technical Leadership at Mozilla - Today, I am starting my role as Mozilla’s new Chief Technology Officer.

This is amusing.

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