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.
That said, I doubt the executives at Mozilla make north of 7M
When you pay yours executives a modest amount using such a method, it's often very feasible for this to be a massive windfall at the time of maturity (e.g. $1 options becoming $6, etc.).
All these senior leadership people seem to be straight from the management track. Doesn't seem like they showed their excellence in another discipline and were then misplaced as CEO.
None of these people show some kind of original standout excellence in a different field that was lost in their transition to Mozilla leadership roles.
But the Peter principle, doubtful if it even can be taken seriously, doesn't say anything about this specifically.
I don't know anything about Eich, but I don't really see how he would have been bad for Mozilla as a CEO. He had some controversial views as some have reported, but I don't really think that would have been very relevant, especially if so many people disagree.
All that aside, that the execs at Mozilla get millions and they still lay off 70 people is bad leadership. Really, really bad leadership. And the recent focus seem to underline that failure in my opinion.
Mozilla has done incredible things for the net and technology. Sadly, I think this is subject to change.
I know Mozilla Corp/Org are technically split, but if one head of Cerberus ate all the food surely it doesn't still need feeding.
The money you donate only goes to the foundation, which does not pay the exec, so any donation does not actually go to exec. The donations are required for the foundation to function at all, regardless of how well the corporation does.
to be honest, the whole thing is a bit of a hack though, because really mozilla functions 100% like a corporation even if they had a real foundation inside. its just a way to ensure that the board is Mitchell Baker - not a bunch of people who want the company to profit. this has good and bad sides, and right now we're definitely seeing the bad sides: exec get paid 800k to 2500k (Mitchell), senior devs get fired for making - i bet, 100k to 300k.
foundations are made to be places where you make the world a better place without having the "i want to make money" motto and that's not what Mozilla does. Mozilla wants money to pay execs and keep on surviving. Many other foundations have similar hacks (or arguably, scams!). The other advantage is that the foundation side does not pay tax of course.
As far as I know, he never expressed what his “views” were. People just found he donated $1000 (which was .002% of the total funds raised) towards a proposition opposing same-sex marriage. There didn’t seem to be anyone who had worked with him, regardless of orientation, who felt uncomfortable with him, or were even aware of it. His contributions having an effect were gated by a democratic vote, and his financial contribution was so small that I can’t imagine it having a substantial effect on the outcome.
To me the fact that he had the maturity to restrict his political discourse to the same means available to any other voter, to his private life, and was discreet enough that nobody knew about it for years, made him look better. Mozilla is supposed to be making the internet accessible to everybody, even people who hold conflicting views.
The quote comes to mind:
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
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.
Production-quality browser engines are not basement projects. Even Google waited until they were the big kid on the block to undertake the project. Per Wired at [0]:
> "The browser matters," CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. "When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, 'We should build our own browser,'" Schmidt says. "And I said no."
> It wasn't the right time, Schmidt told them. "I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war," he says.
Piggy-backing on Google's engine for the time being is effectively turning the Goliath's momentum against itself. If Brave gets a sustainable revenue model and good-enough market penetration, I'd have every expectation that they'd feel liberated to take more direct control over the platform.
My theory: browser of the future will need to support wasm and webgl (well, not webgl, but something similar, providing fast and safe interface for GPU). Of course along with smaller standards like fetch api, but that's manageable.
Most of the useful websites will utilize those tech to build their UI from scratch without using of HTML, CSS or JS.
And HTML, CSS and JS engines could be just another wasm blob. For example parts of chromium engine adapted and compiled for wasm. So it's like jQuery.
It seems that keeping Gecko up to date with the web standards is the only way to have an concurrent implementation for mid-term. This will get more and more difficult to do the more marketshare Blink gets, since it gets easier for Google to shoehorn whatever they want in the web standards by first making it a "de-facto" standard by implementing it in Blink.
The only reason you are even able to fight this battle is because of the existance of Firefox. All of the Chrome based browsers are toothless tigers without Mozilla.
But Google is a monopoly now and has tied its browser to its other products to take over adjacent markets, or buy other companies that pioneered such markets. Mozilla depends on Google for most of its revenue, and on a declining (traffic) basis. Reality requires acknowledging my and others work on Mozilla but not dying on that nostalgic hill. Especially not with such arrant mismanagement as is going on there now.
PS, thanks for saving the Web when you did. It seems genuinely heroic to me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/opinion/facial-recognitio...
If you want to boil the ocean before helping people in an important segment of the population, good luck. Or were you just being defeatist?
I would have given Brave a more serious try if it weren't for that.
(although I very much dislike the payment system, presented as an alternative to the tracking privacy nightmare the web has become. I'm not paying for the difference, that's ridiculous. I saw what they did to the web, I'm not paying to keep them away)
You have “who pays” exactly backwards about optional Brave Rewards in your closing parenthetical. We pay you, we do not make you pay.
Mozilla's FF was once a viable alternative to FAANG privacy monetization, but they're flailing around like their leadership doesn't know what to do but fire engineers and re-organize the deck chairs (org chart) on the Titanic.
What do you suppose will happen when the entire web runs on the Chrome engine? No good things.
Even if it did, what can we do?
Giving Chrome more market share gives Google more power to shape the future of web technologies, controversial stuff like Manifest v3 and AMP that HN loves to hate.
Personally I'm rooting for Firefox and Mozilla, not out of being a fan of them, but because I'm afraid of the alternative.
A field that should be an ideal, inherently good space for knowledge and humanity to expand is in fact a cesspool of greedy assholes chasing grants and prestige, reflected in the circumstances around journal publishing.
Egos first, then comes science. If your priorities are the other way around, then sincerely good luck to 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.
At this point I don't know who was affected.
https://jobs.lever.co/kraken/4c864c8f-bde6-443d-b521-dd90df0...
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 :)
Good luck with your next adventure and thanks for your work with Firefox!
Yours,
An appreciative Firefox user.
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.
Mismanagement of funds/personnel not withstanding.
the current model really is: Google needs Mozilla to survive so that they have less chances to get split due to monopoly in the browser market
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was a point of nerd pride on Usenet how well your operating system could handle a Netscape crash back in the day.
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.
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.
Given that the embedding API would have had to change dramatically due to e10s pretty soon after 2010 (and maybe again due to Fission), I think 2010 was probably a bad time to promote a stable embedding API.
Embedding doesn't rank high on my list of Mozilla's mistakes.
One contribution we can always use is people writing and talking about rr. One of the biggest things holding rr back is so many people just don't know it exists (or they know it exists but they don't appreciate what it could do for them).
Elsewhere in these comments people have estimated that Google pays at least 1000 people to work on Chrome. That's about the size of all of Mozilla, and a lot of those Mozilla staff are necessarily not working directly on Firefox --- you need HR, accountants, marketing, etc. Also, Google pays its developers significantly more than Mozilla does, on average; Mozilla developers tend to get big raises when they move to Google.
And that's just direct spending. Historically Google has done a lot of Chrome marketing on its Web sites, which is prime advertising real estate that would cost astronomical amounts of money if it was for sale. And historically Google has paid hardware and software vendors to preinstall Chrome, which is also expensive, though I'm not sure how much that happens these days.
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 would love someone to estimate an actual figure for total Chrome marketing spend including in-kind. I'm guessing it would be well over $10B.
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.
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.
FF -- fix text sizing. As an example, old-style Reddit renders wonderfully on Brave and terribly terribly small on FF mobile. Another tester site is BOFH.
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.
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
<1% mobile only
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
Given all the UA-sniffing and purposefully sending broken or degraded sites to various browsers going on nowadays (including on Google properties), no, it's not.
Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world, and incessantly being featured on the front page of the biggest (90%+) search machine in the world.
> Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world
Yes, this is the reason why it became the best. It had loads of talented developers deployed on it for years and years. You can either complain about it or be happy that it happened and you have access to the fruits of this labor for free.
This is a total non-response. They're not actually under an obligation to report a bug and use their time - Mozilla, however, is obliged to make their browser work properly, and to ensure the team that's working on it is properly staffed/resourced/competent.
Your response is downplaying someone's actual concern by acting like it's wrong that they don't spend their spare time participating in open source software development.
Furthermore, this "browser monoculture" argument is ridiculous. WebKit and Blink are both open source, and Mozilla is increasingly becoming what Opera was back with Presto: a lone engine with quirks that nobody wants to waste their time working around.
If Mozilla gave up Gecko tomorrow and forked WebKit (a la what Blink is) I don't think I'd bat an eye. This is like what junior programmers wind up learning at some point - nobody cares what the code looks like, just that it does what it's expected to.
I say this all as someone who's contributed to some Mozilla repos, has a massive personal investment in Rust (and has read a good chunk of Servo, and liked it), and has been a fan since the Mozilla Suite days.
Anything that broken would be fixed, almost instantly, had they reported it. I am not very amenable to people who discuss their very extreme personal anecdotes that they have failed to even put even the basic (some may even say courteous) amount of help and instead talk about their experience like it's typical.
> Furthermore, this "browser monoculture" argument is ridiculous. WebKit and Blink are both open source, and Mozilla is increasingly becoming what Opera was back with Presto: a lone engine with quirks that nobody wants to waste their time working around.
Open source does not ensure that a monoculture will not develop; both WebKit and Blink are financed by billion (trillion?) dollar corporations that have almost complete control over what will or will not be worked on or merged in. Every engine has its own quirks and slant on how it interprets the web standard: if WebKit was the dominant browser today we'd all be even more hesitant to roll out WebM or WebGL 2.
> If Mozilla gave up Gecko tomorrow and forked WebKit (a la what Blink is) I don't think I'd bat an eye. This is like what junior programmers wind up learning at some point - nobody cares what the code looks like, just that it does what it's expected to.
Who exactly are you likening to "junior programmers"?
> I say this all as someone who's contributed to some Mozilla repos, has a massive personal investment in Rust (and has read a good chunk of Servo, and liked it), and has been a fan since the Mozilla Suite days.
And you know my personal history on this pretty well too, but you'll notice I'm advocating for Mozilla in this case.
Doesn't mean much since Google controls what features are planned, implemented and included in Chromium.
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
I hardly ever have more than 10 tabs open, and aggressively close everything I am not working with. I also shut down my browser twice a day (2 working locations) and never restore the previous session. I do bookmark some pages, but as a matter of fact I notice that I hardly ever refer to my bookmarks. I don't have the feeling that I am missing out on anything.
Fail to go back and clear them out, mostly. Most were left open because of something relevant at the time, so I mostly need to spend a little time going through and nuking or nothing. There's been little friction due to leaving them open so it hasn't been a priority.
Pretty much the same thing that leaves some people with tens of thousands of messages in their inboxes (I deal with someone who does that and it makes my teeth itch, so my inbox isn't so bad).
As a programmer who has spent significant time with performance work, having useless tabs in a browser would hurt me. But that Google has to search through a bit longer list of messages I can accept as the typical wastefulness of computing these days. (I am old enough to have done time-sharing on 4 MB with 11 other students on their VT100)
It has a fantastic FF extension.
Type '%' (no quotes) followed by parts of the URL or title or both in the URL bar. Searches only your open tabs. I can usually find exactly what I want quite quickly.
I must be quite an outlier, because even 10 tabs open at once sounds like a distressingly high number to me.
Sadly, the sites out there have changed far more than any of the browsers have, and not for the better. They load a ton of crap that does not contribute to the value delivered to the user, but instead contribute value to the site owner and the dozen layers of intermediaries in between user and site owner.
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.
Sadly, one of the drawbacks of opensource is that people can take your code and butcher it, and users will blame you.
Some mornings I'm beachballing for my whole first coffee. Eventually I just wind up power cycling the mac if I can't open a shell prompt with which to `pkill -9 plugin-container`....
> pkill -9 plugin-container
Ahhh, ok - that's not FF, that's a crap plugin (likely Flash). It's the browser equivalent of blaming Windows when a crap taiwanese driver gets it stuck. You could try uninstalling all that crap.
Firefox often appears to use large amounts of memory in top / htop, but I believe that's just reported address space allocations. The RES column gives a more accurate depiction of memory usage.
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.
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.
One is a layout engine, one is a JavaScript interpreter.
"...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.
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.
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.
Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review? This reminds me of the xkcd comic about the bots starting to have constructive messages to avoid spam filters. Mission fucking accomplished.
But what tends to happen with stack ranking is that people only do what their direct manager values and rewards in the short term, and avoid other work that really needs to be done, or what the actual customer wants. Your boss becomes your only customer. You invent redundant new shit because that's more impressive than fixing your existing shit that's broken. This can be incredibly damaging to the quality of the product, and also to the careers of anyone the boss just doesn't personally like for whatever reason. It creates a monoculture of like-minded, demographically similar people who suck up and shit down.
You even can see pathological behaviors like managers purposefully recruiting low performers as sacrificial lambs to offer up at the next review time.
Companies got rid of the rank-and-yank system in the last decade or so for a very good reason.
Nope, because incentives are not aligned to that extent. The whole point of a company is that it's not a pure market where incentives are everything by definition; it's a rather more complex organization and these often rely on "soft" constraints as better sources of drive, guidance, cooperation/coordination etc. If you're relying on "hard" incentives (like firing the 'worst' 5% no matter what) you'll invariably distort behaviors in ways that are hard to even predict, and are almost never what you really want.
If only life were that simple.
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.
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.
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.
Personally I'd like to see them roll out paid privacy products. Like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. I currently pay for that, and if Mozilla rolled out a similar service across the Firefox ecosystem I'd gladly pay for that too.
But let me second-guess the marketing team: wouldn't all that money be better spent marketing to potential customers rather than things like SXSW?
Lone gone are the days where SXSW was a bunch of grubby hippies listening to a bunch of crappy bands. Now it's a bunch of hipster drones listening to a bunch of crappy mainstream pop artists.
Why does that sound like a good demographic? Sure, cover that group, but not at the expense of the much, much larger demographic of "ordinary people".
"Ordinary people" earn you nothing unless you vacuum up their personal information.
Nothing changed. People are the same.
The competition (chrome) is just enjoying the runaway success of being the household name for over 10 years, simply by being a better product than firefox was 10 years ago when the market shares were much closer.
If firefox wants to enjoy this runaway success that chrome has, mozilla should steal the playbook of being the contrarian option for tech minded people just like how chrome was the foil to IE and Safari a decade ago before it became the dominant web browser. The focus should therefore be on dev tooling, not marketing, and the rest of the user base will follow the devs.
(I use Firefox now)
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.
If Mozilla were throwing resources at a legal battle against Google, I'd be skeptical but interested. But marketing? I've never seen a paid advertisement for Firefox. Where the hell is that money even going? They should have purged their entire marketing staff after that "Mr Robot" advertisement debacle, but instead there was little other than half-hearted apologies.
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.
Sadly, I agree.
I find it sad because I haven't personally found any modern browser that I'm happy using.
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.
IBM can't even be bothered to try anymore - they sold off the carcass of Lotus a while back.
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.
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?
And yes I know that Rust does receive some corporate funding from other entities, but it is still a Mozilla product.
It is heavily used at and funded by Mozilla but they have almost zero influence over the direction of the language.
Actually, this kind of perception is the reason that they have been recently talking about forming a Rust Foundation.
http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2020/01/09/towa...
And yet from your own citation:
> Mozilla has from the get-go attempted to create an independent governance structure and to solicit involvement from other companies, because we know this makes Rust a better language for everyone.
It seems like they have a lot of influence over the language, and other things. Like, whether there's independent governance or not. I'm happy they're looking for collaborators, but lets not pretend that founder status comes with zero influence.
Would Rust be where it is today if it wasn't for Mozilla's clout?
I think starting Rust, not Firefox, will be what Mozilla is remembered for in 50 years.
How big do you think the Chromium team is?
Wait, that was my question...
git log --since=2019-01-15 | grep "^Author:" | fgrep chromium.org | sort -u | wc -l
If I git clone https://github.com/WebKit/webkit.git as of today (rev ba925cdbc8c3f2dff44cdcb92d9a374816b0215b) and run:
git log --since=2019-01-15 | grep "^Author:" | fgrep webkit.org | sort -u | wc -l
If I hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ (the repository for Firefox) and run:
hg log -d 2019 | grep "^user:" | sort -u | fgrep mozilla.com | wc -l
Note that we may be undercounting QA here, since not all of them might commit to the main repository.
On the other hand, we might be counting one-off contributors who are not really on the "browser team" per se, especially for "apple.com" and "google.com". We're also overcounting somewhat depending on how much churn there was over the course of the year (people leaving, new ones joining).
But pallpark, I suspect an unrealistic lower bound is 100 and a reasonable lower bound is 150-500, depending on how much of the tech stack you want to delegate to other entities. The Chrome team is a lot bigger than any of those numbers, of course.
https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/become-a-committer
You do need to be a bit more involved than a few drive-by contributions to get a chromium.org email, as far as I can tell.
I'd say 50 or so people would be fine.
>How big do you think the Chromium team is?
Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).
With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Not nearly a browser :(
> Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).
That sounds like a really, really vast underestimation. To the best of my recollection Chromium embedding teams inside Google that are 30+ developers (again, let's forget managers, UX researchers, etc.). I know that there are at least 4 such teams at Google.
I would be very surprised if Google didn't have at least 1000 developers working on Chromium.
Safari does those two specific things with a quarter of the number you mentioned. The entire team is nowhere near a thousand people.
WebKit runs on macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS across Intel and ARM architectures.
WebKit provides the web views for countless 3rd party apps, including Mail, Calendar, iTunes, etc.
Apple certainly has fewer people who get paid to write code for Safari/WebKit than Google has on Chrome/Blink. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla has more people too, especially since they’re rewriting pieces of the browser engine at the same time.
Not so sure. I remember the Webkit guys being a very small team (and they basically did the whole of Safari). There was some such mention on Dave Hyatt's blog at some point.
And, as far as the "chrome" part (UI, settings, etc) goes, wasn't Firefox at first the work of a couple of people, who forked their own UI version of Mozilla? And still it got to be the most popular browser at the time.
Not to mention how whole OSes and other challenging things have been done by smaller teams...
This list has 400 pages of contributors (~8000 people). Even with a very conservative assumption in that only 10% of them are full time developers, it's still 800. This doesn't even include other derivative projects and non engineers.
Just writing a javascript runtime alone isn't just a "handful of engineers." WebGL stack? WebRTC? Layout engine/compositor? Notifications? You're kidding me, there is no small team in the world that could ship a browser stack end to end.
But it is. You can verify it yourself: https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/commits/master/Source/JavaS...
> You're kidding me, there is no small team in the world that could ship a browser stack end to end.
https://webkit.org/team/, ⌘F "Apple". Balance the people on that list who have left or are assigned to work on something else with those who aren't listed there.
They've managed to actually get GMail to render - a not insignificant task: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-ro...
The timeline on this page alone is in years: https://www.ekioh.com/company/#team
From what I understand, that team is relatively small in comparison, but actually does have this widely-ish deployed. So it theoretically could be done with less... but it's still insane to even consider. This isn't simple, and anyone who's trying to imply otherwise is wrong.
The other commentator you're responding with also never discloses they worked with Apple previously, while pretty much endlessly pumping up their work here. shrug
Opera's long gone, now it's a chromium fork. Internet Explorer is gone, now MS uses a chromium fork. The hype new browsers like Brave and Vivaldi are just chromium under the hood.
It's like the difference between making a Linux distro and maintaining a full OS.
>Other browsers do just fine with significantly fewer engineers
It implies that you have any examples.
FYI, WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple (which would be roughly similar to Blink). And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase. Thus Apple is investing a comparable amount of engineering resource into Safari. Where are "Other browsers"?
WebKit does not have hundreds of Apple assigned to it.
> And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase.
Not really.
Well, it's close to 100, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059393 ? You can bring up with other numbers to refute this.
> Not really.
Please don't assert this so lightly unless you have any evidence to support it. A rendering engine is just a tiny fraction and you gotta take care of literally thousands of other components to build a modern browser. This applies to Chrome, Firefox and even old good IE. I don't expect any valid reasons why the same logic cannot apply to Safari.
Risk... companies that make too much revenue from one product or too much from one customer risk death.
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?
- ftp uploads - email - nntp
It also launched javascript, but I think we can agree that isn't bloat.
But you're right, I totally forgot about the time in which Navigator was sold, rather than given away[2]. Please forgive me, this was a time before the PC in my childhood home had TCP internet, so I was more reliant on libraries and school labs at the time.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator_2#Features [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20141102052346/http://news.cnet....
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.
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?
Infinite this.
Google shouldn't be allowed to deploy their browser to their OS that defaults to their search engine and locks you into their paid app store. That's anti-competitive af.
Microsoft was skittles compared to what Google does today. And MS' telemetry has nothing on Google's pervy panopticon.
Google shouldn't be allowed to do browsers.
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 ...
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.
They also bought up a significant fraction of the Firefox core devs -- there's a lot of "crushing the competition" you can do when your money pit is basically bottomless.
Those devs weren't leaving Mozilla because of money. They left because they were being given a nearly blank slate on which to create a browser they felt would be much better.
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 CEO (Mitchell Baker) made around $2.3M in 2017.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo...
Check out page 7.
For instance, I would have considered paying for some premium features like additional privacy-related functionality or a VPN.
I don’t mean to imply that it was absolutely nothing, but the day Mozilla gives up launching new money making features because they’re terrified of the backlash from an absolutely tiny set of vocal users is the day they should give up trying to make money at all.
Speaking of Pocket, the Pocket you see on the fresh Firefox instance often provided me interesting, enjoyable articles. I went to sign up -- keep this good stuff coming, I thought -- to learn that Pocket demanded the social element, requiring that I link up with other Pocket users to drive my feed. Yet it had done a great job without that, and now had turned completely stupid.
Which of course is by design to drive engagement, and it is absolutely obnoxious. Fuck social as a trend. If the only way a network gains users is by trying to make them pitchmen to other people, the network should die.
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.
With that in mind I think the parent comment is right. Leadership can say what they will but it's ultimately up to the people doing the work that drives the actual strategy.
It's quite literally leadership's primary job to set the strategy and focus of the company. It's what they're being paid to do. If they aren't doing that, they need to be let go.
No, leadership isn't exactly a glorified supervision layer.
I've known of a case where a director refused to promote an employee, the employee escalated the case to HR. The case got investigated and director in his defence said the employee couldn't be promoted as he was doing the same task for months.
To the director's horror he was let go for not seeing why the employee had not automated his work. And why he hadn't proactively worked with stake holders to improve productivity. So as far as the employee was concerned he had done what he was asked to, and despite bringing up his promotion issue in 1-1's the managers hadn't told him anything about his work at all. And instead lauded for the good work and asked him to continue.
The decision was right because the next director who came in got this done.
The job of any who sits at the top is to take a high level view, and move things in the positive direction. Approving leaves, budgets and memos just happens to be a side gig at those levels. The real job is to make progress happen.
Well today's announcement helps remove the 'large company' attribute.
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.
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?
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-...
- @firefox.com email hosting without advertising/tracking (besides advertising firefox in the domain!)
- blog hosting without advertising or tracking
- non-dodgy vpn service
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.
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.
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+.
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/
Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.
Raise your salary, sock some money away, then take a big public paycut now that your house is paid off.
Is it really? The average pay for the CEO of a company of Mozilla's size is somewhere around $800,000 according to [1]. And a pretty large chunk of that is performance related.
Of course salaries may vary a lot between industries, but given Mozilla's performance, their CEO's salary appears to be on the high side.
[1] https://chiefexecutive.net/ceo-and-senior-executive-compensa...
I think that has become less true over the years, but it does tend to inflate salary or salary+bonus numbers unless you compare to total comp elsewhere (including parachutes and other bonuses that may not make these sheets).
Also, Mozilla is a rather unusual tech company in many ways. Leading Mozilla comes with unique opportunities not easily found elsewhere. Monetary compensation is not the only incentive for people.
This is a dangerous limb to go out on an HN, but what if they just didn't have a CEO? Do you think the quality of the resulting product would be significantly worse?
If someone said I'll do full-stack dev for 150k instead 400k at google, how would you take that question?
Think about that the next time you're thinking how much of a paycut you'd be willing to take if it meant you didn't have to talk to that guy every week.
That argument is about "how hard/bothersome" the work is. That's not how compensation is set, however.
I, and most developers I presume, also don't like sweeping streets or cleaning gas station toilets (much more than business trips and tons of customer meetings), but nobody would pay millions to some gas station toilet attendant.
You see, I'm fine donating money to a lot of places because I feel like I earn a lot (and I earn about 50k/year, not 150k and I never expect to earn 400k). The Internet Archive, Climeworks, OpenStreetMap, a local hackerspace, random sites or tools that I found useful, etc. But when I see that we need a hundred thousand average-sized donations to cover the cost of a single employee in a non-profit (what is even the definition of that word if not to not turn out profit to its owners?) then we're all just financing a pretty face instead of the product we love. One can argue all one wants about it being the market value or competitive offers or whatever, but if you are only in it for the money, Mozilla should not be the company for you. I'm not financing that. This is also why I don't donate to Wikipedia: the money doesn't actually go to Wikipedia the platform.
Just because someone has a CEO label doesn't mean they have to be paid extreme amounts of money.
There are 2 parts to the job of CEO:
1. Sales
2. Incentive engineering (overcoming Goodhart's law)
There is very little about software development expertise that will help with either of those endeavors.
Good point, we can pay them much less than developers. Having a warm smile and making informed decisions about ~things is something my mom can do and I assure you her hourly wage is less than a developer's.
Says only someone who hasn't seen what happens when the average IC is forced into management.
You have to find a person with a relevant experience. That's the real bottleneck. Number of people available who have enough track record to be considered to become CEO in a tech company with half a billion in revenue and over thousand employees is small, those who are willing to work for less pay is really small.
[1] https://chiefexecutive.net/ceo-and-senior-executive-compensa...
We were and are in the Bay Area, which is every year more expensive, but not 3x more.
It could be the 2.5m/year is justified, but not by market share up, new revenue lines, or both. What else? Competition? No, it is a custom fit job, chair of both boards and now even acting CEO. No competitive recruiting or chance for others to get the job, no real oversight.
is this ceo really worth that considering they aren’t making their goals (who’s responsibility would ostensibly be that of the ceo?)
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.
That's an interesting (and ridiculous) way to spin the numbers.
One doesn't have to work x times harder to bring x times more value to a company.
Another CL and technical debt.
Coal miner's job is hard and deadly. programming is differently hard and not very deadly (arguably working at a desk, wreaking your brain 70h a week with 10 days off a year is somewhat deadly). i'd take the programming job any day as long as I get a bay area salary, granted that I can program.
However, i can tell you most programmer jobs are much harder, take much more hours than many lower paying jobs (not even mentioning the fact that you need to be somewhat smart and learn it for years before you can do anything).
Say drive a bus? Yeah its boring. But its not hard. Hold a 2 pers. shop? nope, not hard, and you do less hours. Etc. Heck even driving the trucks to the coal miners pay very well for a somewhat hard job.
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?
Can you see how that it can be perceived in less than charitable way?
It's not treated as a non-profit in any way, which is why it could do multi-million dollar partnerships and pay competitive tech salaries without the kind of scrutiny or restrictions a 501(c)-anything would have.
As I just noted in my last reply, this is abused via double-think to defend Mozilla as a "non-profit" when that wins social status, and denied (as you do) when trying to spiff Mozilla as a commercially-savvy for-profit. Sorry, you cannot have it both ways.
One thing I think is clear from its history, including when I was there (but not based on any NDA'ed info): Mozilla has not been able to act aggressively as a commercial player. Just one example: KaiOSTech is the lineal descendent and successor to FirefoxOS, going to 200M+ smart-featurephones globally, even winning a Google investment. Mozilla dropped FirefoxOS (twice, painfully).
I am just speculating here, but would this involve significant compromise on Mozilla's core values - specifically privacy? For example one of their investors and partners is Reliance Jio (the reason why KaiOS is the second most popular mobile OS in India) who brag about monetizing the data of their subscribers as a fundamental business model and strategy. The reason i was excited about FirefoxOS was that i was hoping that they would do the same for mobile operating systems as they did for the World Wide Web. Personally, i trust KaiOS devices even less than Android in that regard.
The browser market is worth around 5 billion, but that is only if you count bribe money from Google. You could double that number from showing ads directly. But you could make two orders of magnitude more if you had an actual business model (that did not resolve around ads, although ads can be used as a complement). Quick hanging fruit: Micro transactions, in (web) app purchases... Instead I have to walk around with a plastic card with numbers on it, the only security is the last 3 numbers, that are also printed on the plastic card. There is no encryption, no digital signing, freaking ston-age! And we pay 2-5% plus a monthly fee to use it, wtf!
The cloud business is a slow growing market, but I expect it to explode in maybe 10 years or so. Other companies, like Microsoft also thinks so, and are investing heavily in the cloud. But what is the main UI to access "the cloud"!? The browser... With "the browser" you become a middleman between the platform players and the content providers.
Normal users don't care what stack they are on, it's just that the native UI elements are better then the browser components. So native apps usually performs better then web apps. And are nicer to use.
Browsers are not just for documents any more. (most corporations still use word documents and pdf, sigh). Ever since browsers got scripting capabilities developers want (including myself) to build apps in the browser. Just look at electron. Developers want to build front-ends using browser technology! Just like gfx cards give the developer the ability to draw triangles, the browser gives you divs. But a gfx card can paint billions of triangles per second, while the browser can only handle a few hundred DOM elements.
Another low hanging fruit are app to app integrations. On a native platform you can copy content from one app to another app, you can save a file in one app, and open it in another app, but not so much in the browser. Although modern browser can make use of the system clipboard, data is sent from one app -> to the device -> then back to the other app. It should instead go directly from (cloud) server to server.
Sorry for the random ramblings, I'm just a web developer trying to re-invent the wheel. (I'm also looking for a job where I can play with this crippled browser tech, or a PO role where I can just point in the right direction and smarter people take care of the execution)
You can't have it both ways: either it is subject to Foundation=good presumptions as defenders invoke, or it is not. If not, then its comp may not be excessive at the top, but it sure jumped in 2017 while market share dropped -- and anyway, if it is a for-profit, it needs to act like one to make more money and avoid layoffs!
The double standard here just stinks. I am bound by NDAs from when I was at Mozilla, but since then I've observed and heard enough to call bullshit, and I am.
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.
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.
Like what? The wiki page doesn't tell.
You are making it sounds like she created Mozilla & products herself, rather than an admin/exec role throughout. And also making it sound like her presence alone is what is bringing in ~$500 million.
Is there some connection you would like to disclose?
by the way, I'm not arguing her position.i'm arguing her compensation. nice chart from brendan eich (formerly of mozilla) https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584
You're not allowed to post insinuations like that to HN. It's nearly always imaginary and poisons discussion badly. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you make a claim like that, you need to provide some evidence or citation to back it up.
She has really done anything for the internet besides working for Mozilla.
[1] https://paddockpost.com/2018/02/03/executive-salaries-at-goo...
[2] https://www.peta.org/misc/how-much-money-does-ingrid-newkirk...
[3] https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2017-TorProject-For...
I'm inclined to agree with you, but I think there must be something missing here. Are they receiving some other form of compensation? How much does the median PETA employee make? More than that, I hope!
> Thirty-seven percent of PETA’s dedicated staff earn between $30,000 and $44,999, including President Ingrid Newkirk, who made $31,285 during the fiscal year ending July 31, 2016. Seven percent of PETA’s dedicated staff only earn between $16,000 and $29,999, and the remaining 56 percent make more than $45,000 per year. Most staff members give a portion of their earnings back to PETA’s lifesaving programs through payroll deductions.
https://www.peta.org/misc/how-much-money-does-ingrid-newkirk...
> the remaining 56 percent make more than $45,000 per year
So the median is more than $45k. I would say the difference between $31k and $45k is pretty significant, at least depending on where you live. In San Francisco that would likely not be enough for someone to live comfortably alone.
https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...
While that doesn't excuse the "obit" Baker posted, I'm sure it had some effect on her thought process. Common decency is apparently not valued above political homogeneity in the tech industry.
[0] http://archive.today/2020.01.16-002922/https://twitter.com/c...
You are subtly advocating for exactly the thing you are snarkly accusing the entire tech industry of.
I would feel deeply uncomfortable if my boss were to post an obit like that about a deceased coworker, even if I had hated that persons guts. It just isn't something you do, as you say it violates common decency.
That being said, I sure as hell wouldn't write that obit, even for someone I hated. If I didn't have anything positive to say about the person, I wouldn't write anything. There is no upside to this kind of handling of the situation.
About 15 years ago it was perfectly normal for this exchange to take place: Your view of marriage is a faith-based promise to your deity based on millennia of tradition and completely different from my view of it as a legalistic civil affair that is even less serious than renewing a recreational boating licence? Not a problem, let's go back to work now.
I'll take today.
I wouldn't say this is how I would like somebody to be remembered after his early death:
> Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.
Up until the last sentence Gerv probably would have been nodding along happily. If he did butt heads with the wider Moz community over those issues, the last sentence would come as no surprise.
> ..that his interpretation should be encoded into law.
Law is dangerous, as it ultimately falls back into the (justification of the) usage of lethal force upon those who defy it.
So I imagine that directicy and strictness was related to him, and so, then, I imagine that it is respectful to respond in a direct and strict way, which I suppose is what she did.
(but this is just a reaction based on imagination and my own personal experiences with other people, ofc)
Yes, to the person, in the same arena (maybe, consider that carefully).
LPT - don't scathingly attack an employee in an obituary after their recent early death. You can say you found then difficult to live with, etc., you don't have to try and crucify their mortal remains.
Saying things like--
"Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult for people to participate.
...
Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.
Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.
...
To memorialize Gerv’s passing, it is fitting that we remember all of Gerv — the full person, good and bad, the damage and trauma he caused, as well as his many positive contributions. Any other view is sentimental. We should be clear-eyed, acknowledge the problems, and appreciate the positive contributions."
I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief.
David Anderson articulates some of my feelings on the obit better than I can.
I guess she's learned you've really gotta CYA in the Valley these days. Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier. The matter was made an issue by so-called activists trawling the legally-required logs of political contributions and intentionally setting out to destroy Eich, if not Mozilla generally, merely because they disagreed with his political leanings.
If you can get flayed for that, I'd guess there's a substantial chance that you'd also be on the hook for failing to lambast the beliefs of a deceased colleague.
It would be nice to see Baker stand up against that, but one can only assume the thoughts of "Am I going to lose my job if I fail to call out the deceased's quote-unquote bigotry?" crossed her mind. Bonus consideration for Mozilla's top brass: "are we going to trigger another widespread blacklisting of the Firefox UA if we upset the mob?"
It must be terrible to live under those auspices.
Minor correction: Prop 8 was supported by the majority (52%) in California.
In fact, Prop 8 (which Brendan Eich donated in support of) passed by 600,000 votes.
> I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief.
Well, maybe - you'd have to ask them. Quite likely they share Gerv's faith and outlook and possibly don't see anything negative there.
But the point of the piece was obviously not to comfort the family, it was a message to the wider Mozilla community. And if he was the divisive character that he appears to have been, this sort of "he was a good person with some failings which he acknowledged and worked on" is just the sort of thing that prevents the truly ugly and grotesque internet pile-on that we are all so familiar with by now.
Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity and that she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance.
So even if the explicit condemnation of his private beliefs had been omitted, the post is still self-righteous infantilization. Baker did a terrible job hiding her contempt. Tacking on "something-something-whole-person" is transparent self-justification and it doesn't do anything to change the fact that she just spent the whole post talking about what she perceived to be his inadequacies.
Baker could've talked about basically anything -- the ability to identify the humanity in your ideological opponents is crucial to civilized discourse -- but instead, she boiled it down to "Gerv couldn't understand middle ground, except for the tiny bit I was able to finally pound through his head, and his refusal to shut up on his personal blog caused a lot of damage here."
I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.
"Gerv’s work life was interspersed with a series of surgeries and radiation as new tumors appeared. Gerv would methodically inform everyone he would be away for a few weeks, and we would know he had some sort of major treatment coming up."
> or his fervor for free software. She could've talked about the actual work product he produced over 20-ish years at Mozilla and how it helped move the platform forward.
"Gerv was a wildly active and effective contributor almost from the moment he chose Mozilla as his university-era open source project. He started as a volunteer in January 2000, doing QA for early Gecko builds in return for plushies, including an early program called the Gecko BugAThon. (With gratitude to the Internet Archive for its work archiving digital history and making it publicly available.)
Gerv had many roles over the years, from volunteer to mostly-volunteer to part-time, to full-time, and back again. When he went back to student life to attend Bible College, he worked a few hours a week, and many more during breaks. In 2009 or so, he became a full time employee and remained one until early 2018 when it became clear his cancer was entering a new and final stage.
Gerv’s work varied over the years. After his start in QA, Gerv did trademark work, a ton of FLOSS licensing work, supported Thunderbird, supported Bugzilla, Certificate Authority work, policy work and set up the MOSS grant program, to name a few areas. Gerv had a remarkable ability to get things done. In the early years, Gerv was also an active ambassador for Mozilla, and many Mozillians found their way into the project during this period because of Gerv... As Gerv put it, he’s gone home now, leaving untold memories around the FLOSS world."
> Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity
"He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me."
> she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance.
Where does it say this?
> I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.
I guess that would depend on whether they skipped over the same parts you did.
I read the whole post.
The parts you've quoted are rote recitations of assignments and employment history. They could've been derived from an HR file.
A list of assignments is not a discussion about how his work product helped move the platform forward.
Stating that Gerv had to go to the doctor sometimes and that he was good about giving notice is not talking about the resilience inherent in maintaining a productive career and an apparently-happy family while simultaneously battling a terminal illness for 18 years.
> Where does it say this?
You quoted the last sentence of the paragraph above. Here:
> > Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.
Baker lists 5 things Gerv did and you quoted only the last one. 3 of the things are definitively negative: "challenged", "infuriated", and "enraged". One is neutral: "surprised". The only positive one is "impressed", but she immediately explains that she was impressed re: his "greater ability to work with ambiguity", which she had mentioned "work[ing] with him to ... better appreciate" two sentences earlier, i.e., she's impressed that some small portion of it appeared to finally stick.
Then, in the next paragraph, she immediately caveats her impression over his improved grasp of ambiguity with: "Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw." and "He was adamant that his interpretation was correct[.]" At least to my ears, that sounds a lot like "So I just said I was impressed, but I wasn't that impressed; he just wasn't smart enough to grasp the ambiguity that would've made it obvious that his personal beliefs were invalid".
You can watch some videos she put up for the Thanksgiving event they held 9 months after the funeral. https://vimeo.com/user97457269
What I am saying is that he was a divisive character, and he knew that, accepted it, apparently tried to modify it a bit but basically carried on with it in an organisation that he knew was at least mildly hostile to his beliefs.
And the depth of emotion that he inspired (deserved or not) could have lead to a very ugly pile on after his death. Maybe that happened anyway. Instead of taking it as cheap sniping, a better-faith reading of Mitchell's eulogy would be as a call for peace - acknowledge the critics but also point out the valuable contributions that the guy made in the hope that all the emotions surrounding his death don't spill over onto twitter or somesuch stupidity.
Nobody's perfect but he definitely never looked like Mitchell's description in my day to day interactions.
Let me break this down for you. This isn't about you and an obituary or eulogy isn't something written to the dead: It's written to their family, their coworkers and friends, and for those who may have never really known the deceased.
No leader should write in such a way that would insult the families of the dead and their belief systems. Reminder: This is a non-family relative of the deceased using their death to make a statement. This is that same leader telling the deceased's family that their relative was 'traumatic and damaging' while alive. What in the actual fuck?
It is obvious that the deceased's contributions outweighed their perceived transgressions, else they would have been terminated.
So yeah, it's disgusting and not being able to see why it would be such a vile thing reflects an inability to grasp or visualize other people's perspectives. These failures in leadership build the types of toxic culture full of intolerance that they claim to preach against. It's better to write nothing at all about controversial individuals or ideally give a generic nod to the deceased's contributions with the company and well wishes to their family in their time of grief. Pay a damn PR person to write your obits if you lack empathy, shit.
[1] https://rationality.org/about/staff : "cofounded an emotional intelligence and communication training organization"
Possibly. Another possibility is that no one wanted to be the one to fire a man with terminal cancer who presumably depended upon the health insurance provided by the company.
I have come to a place in my life where I crave more honesty all around, and I'm willing to pay for it with emotional pain. And it's not just a selfish sort of myopia--like, I can imagine you reading that and thinking I have some autistic flavored honesty fixation and I am projecting that onto everyone without considering their feelings. It's not that. Actually I believe that we as a society would better if we set the baseline somewhere closer to what she wrote than to perfunctory respect and polite platitudes. And I believe the various negative emotions that would come with that new baseline are both real costs dearly paid AND worth paying all the same. I know my perspective on this isn't popular.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about at least one thing: she probably wasn't the person who should have written this, even if we take as a given that it should have been written at all. If someone wrote something similar about me, I'd want them to be someone I loved and who loved me--the kind of person who could say something profoundly true about me, as a testament to the real effect I had in the world, both good and bad.
Edit: Oh, and since it obviously doesn't go without saying, I'll say this too: I am not offended by the obit she wrote, and I would want a similar thing for myself, but I nevertheless think she did the wrong thing by writing it. I might have a fantasy about what I consider to be a better world in which what she wrote was fine, but we don't live in that world and she clearly violated dearly held norms when she wrote that.
That was part of my context when I wrote the post that started this conversation, but I didn't make it clear at all.
This nor my last post was written to suggest autistic perception, but rather that not everyone thinks from others' different perspectives naturally (wherever they sit on the spectrum). I will indulge in your stated interest to receive honesty. You don't write like someone that thinks by putting themselves in other's shoes and thinking through the lens of their values. Rather, the internal value systems you have becomes a framework to apply externally in your life. 'I believe' 'I think' 'I agree', checks upon those value systems you have logically/emotionally and your writing and actions are built upon that. Those with this line of thought seek to change the world to fit their value systems, not harmonize the chaos of different value systems by speaking inside them.
As one interested in emotional intelligence, I'm telling you this because it might actually help you, but more importantly help those you're trying to help. For what it's worth most of the people I chose to work with are more like you and don't think through others' value systems naturally. It 'feels' more authentic to see people's clear and consistent values than try to peg down the chameleons that constantly lens through systems.
>Actually I believe that we as a society would better if we set the baseline somewhere closer to what she wrote than to perfunctory respect and polite platitudes. And I believe the various negative emotions that would come with that new baseline are both real costs dearly paid AND worth paying all the same. I know my perspective on this isn't popular.
You're alive, you can write posts in response to criticism. The deceased cannot. An obit isn't a performance review of a person written while they are alive; it's a final send-off written to tell a story about someone's life and comfort the living.
I understand why you'd believe it's ok to have things written like this about you (this is directed to you) in your obituary, but you should be aware that it may cause pain to your friends and relatives, that they won't understand why people spoke of you in these ways. Everyone makes mistakes and values can change as we grow older and move between social groups. The 'you' that you see yourself as-is always going to be different from how others see you. It will never match your ideal. This is an inescapable fact.
The issue at hand is that you, whether or not you're consciously aware, are seeking to project your own value system onto those that won't share that value system. I'm not asking you to share in their values or even to fully understand them. I'm asking you to acknowledge their presence and understand that an obit isn't written to a party of one.
Consider this example: People feel pain and sadness after their relatives die. Even if Mitchell wanted to say she didn't get along with Gerv, she could have made her narrative something that would have respected his values that didn't match her own. There's a way to say something like: 'We did not always agree on matters, but Gerv's dedication always impressed me.' (Which is sort of what the totality of her post could be taken as) Rather than inform his family that he caused distress inside the organization, she could still try the express the totality of Gerv by not showcasing the pain he's caused.
It's a little disorienting to have you relating to me as though I'm deficient in perspective taking, mainly because perspective taking (and teaching others to take perspectives) is literally my profession.
My best guess is that your main point in the last thing you wrote is that I am not thinking of my own relatives and loved ones when I say I want a warts-and-all style obit for myself--that if I took their perspective, and realized it would hurt them for me to receive what I want, then I might change my mind, particularly on the grounds that the obit is actually for them, not for me. Let me know if I got that wrong.
Never claimed you were deficient. I claimed it appears that you do not naturally think this way and it shows in your writing.
>My best guess is that your main point in the last thing you wrote is that I am not thinking of my own relatives and loved ones when I say I want a warts-and-all style obit for myself--that if I took their perspective, and realized it would hurt them for me to receive what I want, then I might change my mind, particularly on the grounds that the obit is actually for them, not for me. Let me know if I got that wrong.
That's the gist of what I'm trying to convey. I can understand though that some, maybe you, would rather risk some distress to those around them in hopes others will have a better acceptance/understanding of who they really were.
If you feel I'm really off-base on my comments about you, I'm actually making a point with that too. If I were you wrote an obit about you, you'd obviously disagree with claims being made (yes, I'm aware we only know each other from a series of brief posts back and forth). It's the same way with any acquaintance doing it, they only get to know parts of you and the parts you think they know might be totally at odds with the values/image you tried to convey about yourself.
>Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. //
So Mitchell's response is to publicly judge him in politely stated but damning terms, whilst simultaneously making an employee's obituary about how they - the obituary writer - were the only thing that moderated the person's overly judgemental nature.
Wowser.
It's like Mitchell realised people would be applauding his work at Mozilla and decided that couldn't be allowed.
It sounds like you're saying his actions at work were abhorrent; or was it that his beliefs were incompatible with yours?
We have a common boundary agreement (that's what the CoC lays out), but other then that, you'd be surprised of the number of opinions you'd see.
Granted, some of the very public figures are very progressive/leftist, but they also do their legwork for it and generally keep that on the side when they speak with their Rust hat on.
As someone who doesn't know anyone involved the suggestion I would make would be to acknowledge controversy upfront, directly and exactly once and then state that you will not address the most controversial points from there on out, in acknowledgement of the deceased and their loved ones. The fact that she waffles back and forth between praise and condemnation in such tight space makes it seem like she simultaneously doesn't stand for much and doesn't forgive even after a person's death.
Even when we find someone's behavior or opinions abhorrent, there isn't a lot of point in holding grudges against dead people. Maybe she could have said that.
Anyway, I also disagree in general. If a person brings so much value, than why not compensate that person adequately?
The "only" thing that is bothering me with the insanely high salary of CEO's etc. is that they quite often seem disconnected from actual success. Like in this case:
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584
The market share of Firefox goes down, yet her compensation goes up. Why???
(Also, in a ideal world, I think the biggest compensation for a technical product should be for the technical people. And not the lawers.)
Obvious: because she has to make bank before the ship sinks for good. I'm sure she would put forward a lot of arguments for it (all the extra time she spent over the years "underpaid" etc etc).
Baker has been more than "a lawyer" to Mozilla, for a very long time. She shouldered a lot of decisions - some good, some bad, some terrible. It's not surprising that she might be reaching for the money (most execs will, at that level), but rather that nobody at the corporation or the foundation is willing or able to stop her anytime soon.
The question isn't only if the person brings that much value, but also - is there any other person who would bring as much value, but would work for less salary?
I'd be very interested to learn how a CEOs worth is evaluated, I cannot imagine it being a fair process that truly demonstrates that they deserve this much money.
doctors without borders / msf pay their execs org non-profit salary. Chief makes less than 150k. 9 next highest paid makes around 100k.
https://www.charityintelligence.ca/charity-details/81-doctor...
Compare that to red cross or others.
More prestigious the org is, the less reason there should be to pay egregious salary.
This statement is a fabrication. She was trained and worked as a lawyer. She went to Berkeley, not to study computer science or electrical engineering, but to study law. She graduated and went to a San Francisco law firm that specialized in intellectual property and had many clients in Silicon Valley. She eventually left and worked for Sun in the legal department. Netscape recruited her to help set up their legal department and that is how she became an executive at a technology company. She stayed at Netscape when it was bought by AOL to work on policy issues, but was eventually fired during a series of layoffs.
The only "foundational" piece of Mozilla she authored was the Mozilla Public License.
Any company that lost that much market share would have fired their CEO. At a minimum, she should take a deep pay cut and her compensation needs to be tied to performance.
"Mitchell has written the key documents that set out Mozilla's enduring mission and commitments – the Mozilla Public License in 1998, the Mozilla Manifesto in 2007 and the Mozilla Manifesto Addendum – also known as the Pledge for a Healthy Internet – in 2018".
Each worker gives the same, ultimately, an hour of their precious life each hour they work.
The ceo is responsible for those macro goals. Those macro goals are failing, ergo while most works should be receiving increases in comp, the CEO should be seeing a decrease.
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...
I agree that something changed at Mozilla, but I've seen it get justified at other previously reasonable organizations with excuses like "everyone else is doing it," or "This is still below-market rate for C-level talent." The fact that it's happening everywhere doesn't make it less nauseating.
[edit]
Mitchell could drop her salary to a "mere" 6 figures and lay off 7 fewer people, but you hardly ever see executives do things like that.
There’s no need for aspersions.
1. The increase was in 2017, reported per IRS regs in Mozilla Foundation's Form 990 filing (which must list all comp to board members even if they work for the for-profit Mozilla Corporation subsidiary).
2. The "one guy" is Mitchell Baker, and she is chair of both foundation and corporation boards.
But nice try attempting to pin blame on market share slide these last almost six years on me.
Ooh, "scurrilous"! I'm struck where I stand! If only I had actually said you were to blame for the last 5-6 years, you might have something. I said Mozilla continued its downward slide from when you were there, not that you were to blame for that.
> even accelerating decline
Your chart doesn't show an accelerating decline in the last six years, so you don't have much to go on there either.
In fairness to you, you did say "top job", and I quoted you as saying "chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive", which is what dman said at the top of the thread. Baker was not the highest paid executive for the duration of the chart, but I shouldn't have claimed you said that. So I do apologize for that. I also apologize for misgendering Baker.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR2HoMXrWo3H...
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 multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO.
For example, one of the major considerations when doing UI design is creating elements that have a cohesive style (regardless of which aesthetic style that is).
None of that happened on that god forgotten alert. It's probably the first thing that someone came up with in a rush, in a style that no other UI element of FF shares, and it has stayed like this probably because nobody cares.
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.
I write in 4 languages so it's quite annoying to do that every time. In Chrome there is multilingual spell checking even when you mix languages in the same sentence.
The polish of developer tools has exactly zero to do with a browser's popular marketshare.
All the people I know, who left FF, myself partly included, did so for this reason. Quite some sites did not work anymore on firefox. And the normal user does not care that this is because of vendorprefixes which are not standard. They care about that their website does not work anymore.
Keep the webdevs ... keep your users.
It's probably the only reason that I stick with Chrome, its dev tools are fantastic and often gets new incredible features.
I switched to FF about 2 months ago. I made a FF Color theme [0] that matches Chrome's colors to help ease my transition. Only color I wasn't able to adjust with FF color is the tab onhover color.
[0] https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAIWAQAAAAAAAABBKYhm849...
https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAITAQAAAAAAAABBKYhm849...
Firefox is by far my least favorite piece of software that I regularly use and I've considered throwing my computer out the window because of it.
It's an issue that affects anyone that writes in multiple languages. This accounts for the majority of internet users in the world since they write at least in their own language and English. This is not an edge case that affects 10% of users.
Like I already explained, it can't be solved properly with an extension. The ones that try to solve it slow down FF. This has to be solved at the native level, not in JS.
I documented it, proposed a solution with my own justifications for why it would be better, and submitted a bug report.
Feedback from Moz, the work done on it, the patches created, and the release plan for it were all done in the open and I could track it.
The change I suggested was implemented and is now out.
Be the change you want to see... only Firefox/Mozilla would do this in such an open way.
The multilingual thing sounds like a big problem for people that rely on that.
My comment was directed to your other complaints about UX quirks.
The English spell checking is pretty bad, too, giving me at least an order of magnitude more false positives [1] than Safari or Chrome on my Mac, and Edge or Chrome on Windows. Same when compared to things other than browsers, such as Word, LibreOffice, BBEdit, Pages.
What's baffling is that Firefox, LibreOffice, and Chrome all use Hunspell [2], so presumably the reason Firefox spell check sucks compared to LibreOffice is they have a terrible dictionary.
So why doesn't Mozilla just take the LibreOffice dictionary?
[1] In case I've got the terminology wrong for spell checkers, by false positive I mean where the spell checker says that a word is spelled wrong when it is in fact spelled correctly.
It's horrible on all platforms ;) . The way tabs are handled is by far my biggest complaint, you can't fit as many tabs in as with chrome and since they "upgraded" the extension system the vertical tab extensions don't work well (can't remove top tab panel).
I wish they'd just make a native UI for each platform, their cross platform one has always been a train wreck but it's especially bad since they dropped XUL.
I’m continually impressed by what people are willing to label “politics”. And by how badly people must hate whatever they understand “politics” to be.
"The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions"
Making a browser was part of supporting FOSS and open web standards.
>but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO?
Whilst I agree that the implementation was horrendous the idea behind it was good. Do you know what I love? I can bookmark something and have that bookmark available at home. I can log in somewhere and quickly do it elsewhere. That's firefox sync. Nobody complains about it because it isn't noticed as such a service.
The main dominator of the web currently is Google's chrome. It goes beyond even that. A lot of chrome's convenience and incentive for use for people comes from providing an ecosystem. Keep, calendar and the like and despite how terrible the limited functionality for addons is they all nicely integrate with the browser by defaault and their mobile versions everyone gets on android. Tried an addon for keep on firefox? It's trash. There's no convenient alternatives and without pushing them they won't appear.
Additionally they're entirely dependent on funding from their competitor who pushes the monopolising of webstandards and implementation that they try to combat.
>facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!
The fuck are you on about. moz literally implemented facebook containers to keep the tracking out and their defined data privacy principles can be trusted. Facebook isn't even a consumer or product focused service business (with some exceptions of course) they're generally in it for your data for advertising purposes given that you don't give em a dime for the privilege of using their social media.
If you look at their own statistics [1], you will notice that (worldwide) usage started declining after the introduction of Quantum (November 2017), and dropped substantially after the April 2019 addons outage.
This would suggest, IMHO, that Firefox loses market share when beloved features - customization, addons - stop working or got worse.
This is unsurprising to anyone who has been using Firefox for a long time: the primary differentiation factor of Firefox has always been customization. Messing with that would always be a risky proposition. Nuking the whole ecosystem entirely and starting over in the space of a few of months was simply idiotic. Disabling everyone's addon's because of an admin screw up was just the icing on the fucking cake.
tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded Brave instead.
That should make it a little clearer why funders won’t touch him (and many won’t touch his new work).
Personally I find it abhorrent that anyone was so quick to rally against Brendan Eich. If we keep going down this path, all we'll be left with are people that change their opinions on a whim and flip flop on issues so quickly that they resemble politicians. I'd rather have a good leader I don't agree with on every issue, than a poor leader who's trying to pretend to be on the right side of whatever political stance is in-vogue.
This has never been true in any field in any place in the history of the world.
Also, "your Views" are different from "your Actions." If I think you're ridiculous, so what? If I think you're so ridiculous that I pay people money to promote a law that would increase what you have to pay in taxes, suddenly everyone cares, and rightfully so!
So, take that anecdotal evidence as you will. But I think I'm not the only one, and a lot of people will disagree with you. We're part of one of the only professions in the world where you can enjoy a very high standard of living in a white-collar profession with little to no expectation of having academic credentials.
As for meritocracy, in the 90s no one cared who my online persona was. My persona was about as eye-grabbing as the one I use here. My contributions, for lack of a better term, were dismissed for being crap, which I eventually understood. I think people miss out on that.
As for your point actions and views, I respectfully disagree. You only seem to separate them, because you dislike his views, the resulting words and would like them not to be translated into action. I can understand that, but it sounds .. convenient? You are free to talk about stuff, but the moment you get politically active you get shunned? It seems very backwards to me.
I don't know who or what your online persona is, either: I'm still talking to you, and it's still an interesting conversation. There are still places to play anonymously or pseudonymously, and they usually have more people than they did during the 1990s. People generally tend to forego that, though.
As for your point actions and views, I respectfully disagree. You only seem to separate them, because you dislike his views, the resulting words and would like them not to be translated into action. I can understand that, but it sounds .. convenient? You are free to talk about stuff, but the moment you get politically active you get shunned? It seems very backwards to me.
Think of it in terms of separation of church and state, right? I can call you a sinner who's going to hell all I'd like, but it's unconstitutional and wrong on many levels to try and take away something from you that I have no plans to stop partaking in. (I think Eich is an atheist so this is just for the matter of example; I don't know why he didn't support it, he doesn't seem open about his reasoning and as such I'm not going to try and conjure up some reasoning for him.)
I'm not passionate about what Eich did or did not support, because frankly I have no idea why he funded what he funded, but if you look at it in terms of taxes, he's a very well off guy trying to increase the tax burden of a bunch of people (his coworkers/later-employees, no less) solely because he disagrees either morally or pragmatically that they should be able to get married. (Tax benefits to marriage are controversial in the first place, but definitely something incredibly beneficial.)
This country was founded on violent response to moralistic taxes; it's in its blood to care about increasing taxes arbitrarily, and the Prop 8 ads his cash helped fund were absolutely aimed at blurring the separation between church and state, even if that wasn't his intention (though he never denied it was, so we'll never know).
It is a little odd. I think I see action as just an extension of speech. This is probably a reason I hesitate when anyone says you can talk about something, boy you better not, say, actually exercise your theoretical right to assemble.
I think I will need to think about it a little more.
I agree with you that many fine people do life-saving or otherwise important work for far less. But facts matter, and I'm here to correct the record.
P.S. I was raised in Pittsburgh and Maryland as much as in the Valley.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/09/business/part-artist-part...
Sir, the last comment was stating that I was trying to avoid implying that it was due to real estate.
> I didn't claim that you were a millionaire because you had invested in real estate
> just that you also had invested in real estate
I'm not accusing you of getting rich off of real estate.
I'm just saying that "investing in real estate" is something that requires a substantial volume of money (as you said, a nest egg): it was a way to show that you were well off, not a way to imply you were a slumlord or something.
...as long as you were a white, heterosexual man in the US.
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 doubt funders care about your opinions on gay marriage, but they do care a lot about the stink the cancel culture raised around him.
The poison seems to be applied externally.
Personally, I think that’s a perfectly good reason for not giving him more money.
“Cancel culture” is many people (many of whom matter to investors in one way or another) stating that they also feel that that is a bad place to put money.
In fact per CA labor law it would be illegal to fire me for "being anti-gay": https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... et seq.
And of course, once I got Brave started outside the valley, we got "funders" in the valley to invest, including many top VC firms (who now constitute <10% of all funds we raised to date so don't switch horses to argue we are VC-controlled).
Having said that - corporations do have a right to hire and fire who they please. But it is important to at least acknowledge "cancel culture" as a legitimate and immature trend that is happening. Often the pressure to fire somebody comes from the outside, not from within.
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 have met plenty of bigots on both sides of politics. But immediately trying to call me out on labeling this man a conservative by saying he is actually a bigot is, ironically, bigotry itself.
Also, I kept working on JS, while doing other things. I worked on JS in both Netscape and Ecma TC39 through late 1997, then co-founded mozilla.org with jwz and others. For mozilla.org I was chief architect, but I still kept working on the Mozilla JS engine, SpiderMonkey, adding features such as getters and setters that became important in 2005 due to use by Microsoft's Live Maps.
Live Maps emulated the IE DOM in Firefox via those same getter and setter extensions that I'd added over the years since 1997. In IE, Live Maps of course used the native DOM. This left Safari and Opera failing unless they reverse engineered the getter and setter extensions from SpiderMonkey in Firefox quickly. It took them about a week, and then Live Maps worked in Safari and Opera too.
This shows how quickly browsers can evolve, based on innovation in just one browser's engine, even in the wake of a monopoly period of stagnation.
Maybe I should delete my comment too...seems a lot of HN members in this thread did the same once you popped in ...lol
As well, according to the same Wiki, "There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid." It would be a bummer to run a company of that size, be dedicated to it for so long, and not have any stake in it. Imagine her opportunity cost...
There are greater goals, especially for a company like Mozilla, than making lots of money.
The jump in comp in 2017, as far as I can tell, was predicated on the Verizon payments being fulfilled. I hear it was also a quid pro quo for Foundation board members who demanded (order of magnitude smaller) salaries for their work as board members. Perhaps they do a lot, but in past, board members (including me) worked for no added comp.
Mitchell may be worth it, but I'd want more of a turnaround in market share, new revenue sources, or both. Maybe that is just me.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-tro...
A lot of these compensation packages are well intended, but they aren't without problems. People who make bad decisions often get performance bonuses regardless.
"CEO earns 10x less than previous year due to declining stock price linked to market share loss" is not a headline to set pulses racing. Performance linked comp works OK most of the time. Sometimes CEOs negotiate deals that are terrible for the company, where they get paid lots even if the firm tanks. My experience has been that this usually happens when the firm is in deep trouble anyway, the CEO knows they probably can't turn it around, but will have a tarnished reputation regardless. Getting experienced people to try and turn the Titanic is expensive and many will want a big reward for even trying.
Also, badly run companies do things like sign bad deals. But it's a circular problem. If they were well run they wouldn't be signing bad CEO deals to begin with.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/business/31pay.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/16b-of-bank-bailout-went-to-exe...
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/banks-paid...
I had to search for this excellent clip from Margin Call, which explains this better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2kGHcdJYU
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.
I'm still happy to use Firefox and want them to not have to rely on Google Search placement for funding but the company has a shaky track record and it's reasonable to view them critically.
FWIW while Firefox OS was a failure I don't actually view that project as a mistake - trying to give mobile phone users more freedom was a good idea, and we've seen how things have worked out. But they didn't do a very good job of it and that largely is the fault of upper leadership.
On the bright side the worst person I worked with there is no longer making decisions for the company, so that's great.
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.
Imagine this: Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos), and cites this as an excuse to close sources. Then, it starts updating it's own websites with specific code that can run properly only in new (proprietary) versions of Chrome.
Of course, outcry in tech press, but average Joe User does not care, he just needs stuff to work. Then, developers say, screw it, we just need stuff to work for users. Just like they did in 2004. This is a very crude model, reality will likely be more subtle, but I hope you get the idea
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 was a healthy ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers then one vendor not playing by the rules would have limited impact.
That's the point: competition is necessary. If Mozilla adopts Chromium, there's no competition anymore. Google can afford to make all the choices.
> [...] > If there was a healthy ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers then one vendor not playing by the rules would have limited impact.
Unless that vendor is also behind ~100% of the development, in which case nobody else gets a meaningful say.
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? They can start forcing their will with their control over Chromium. They make the rules. And the BSD license can't do anything to stop it. That's the point.
And because these other browsers invested into Chromium, simply forking and continuing work on their Chromium version becomes more and more challenging without massive financial support. Only a few companies can do that.
Look at Apple and Safari. Safari lags behind Chrome in many areas. And this is Apple, not some small startup.
Nothing is stopping. In fact, they already do that with Android. Starting with version 5, AOSP barely improves, but they add more and more and more proprietary APIs like Firebase, severely limit background apps, pushing developers to use proprietary push notifications, with each release more and more functions are tied to Google Play Services. [0]
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...
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.