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.
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.”
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.).