Mozilla Fires Servo Devs and Security Response Teams
twitter.com
twitter.com
The source for this is an unsourced tweet. I'm going to flag it because HN does not seem like a good venue to hash out rumors.
1. https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-cor...
"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
No self awareness that rather than getting rid of people building interesting products, they don't realise that they should get rid of themselves and other executives.
Firefox has been on a downward trajectory in marketshare for the last 5 years. And they've struggled to reduce their reliance on search engine deals by creating other revenue streams.
They're all failures and have no self awareness.
Effectively answering: We've all got ferraris and McMansions to pay off
Considering the companies performance, she should have been put on a PIP a long time ago, even considering the so called 80% discount. Never seems to happen to CEOs though.
Management is out of touch with reality if they think they deliver any value here.
edit: he to she, thanks!
It's entirely plausible that when saagarjha loaded the page, the first correction hadn't even been made yet.
// just kidding of course.
Why should a nonprofit's CEO be paid that much? Why the hell? I can't grasp this. I don't even understand why they'd make more than a few times what the typical programmer in the organization makes.
Marissa Mayer
Susan Wojcicki
Elisabeth Holmes
Edit: in case you missed my username I'm a female myself.
Is there any non-sexist reason to have a list of "terrible female CEOs"?
EDIT: on the other hand as an immigrant (really my only "discriminated against" feature) I wouldn't search for immigrant CEOs as role models, so I'm not sure if it's worth it to look for women role models as a woman.
NGO CEO just sounds like an oxymoron to me too. CEOs make me think of revenue increase, while I assume NGOs have very different goals - or at least they should have. It just seems like a fundamental misalignment.
From Mitchell Bakers blog https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva... “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.”
From http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/29/gerv.html
“I bring up Gerv's open-mindedness because I know that many people didn't find him so, but, frankly, I think those folks were mistaken. It is well documented publicly that Gerv held what most would consider particularly “conservative values”. And, I'll continue with more frankness: I found a few of Gerv's views offensive and morally wrong. But Gerv was also someone who could respectfully communicate his views. I never felt the need to avoid speaking with him or otherwise distance myself. Even if a particular position offended me, it was nevertheless clear to me that Gerv had come to his conclusions by starting from his (a priori) care and concern for all of humanity. Also, I could simply say to Gerv: I really disagree with that so much, and if it became clear our views were just too far apart to productively discuss the matter further, he'd happily and collaboratively find another subject for us to discuss. Gerv was a reasonable man. He could set aside fundamental disagreements and find common ground to talk with, collaborate with, and befriend those who disagreed with him. That level of kindness and openness is rarely seen in our current times.”
Here is an article another person who knew Gervase Markham who refutes Mitchell Bakers account https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/ . Worth a read.
Brendan Eich on the jump in executive share since he was let go: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629
Here is Brokedamouth on the two class system now at Mozilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061500 Comment replicated here (it is worth looking at the whole discussion): “I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families - many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic culture, all around.”
Shown here is the trustworthiness of the current CEO, having a go at someone because their opinions disagreed with theirs, this is straight after his death when he couldn't defend himself. The people who knew him have a very different opinion on what he was like compared to her, and it can be seen what changed with how executives were treated compared to the rest of the employees.
I wonder if the people being fired would be sufficiently equipped to do that themselves. Though losing access to the branding may not be workable.
A co-op would make for an interesting business model for a FOSS company. Has this been tried before? Are there any well known cases out there?
(this is just because GPU drivers are so flaky afaict)
Well obviously the most important factor is making sure they haven’t donated money to any of the wrong political causes.
>They killed entire threat management team. Mozilla is now without detection and incident response. >Tristan, Alicia, Lucius, even our new director are gone
https://nitter.net/MichalPurzynski/status/129322057088506265...
I wonder how Tor will handle this...
Just looking at Mozilla, there seems to be a lot of security engineers, who are probably going to have to swallow this area of responsbility.
Thing is that even in very mature organizations, preventive actions are not and are unlikely to ever be good enough to not have any need for detection / IR specialists.
Nowadays, a dedicated, excellent security team is table stakes for a web browser engine.
When it began, the word was that Servo would be the next rendering engine. Some time later the message became that it was a "testing ground" whose lessons would be incorporated into Firefox but that it would never become a production ready engine by itself. If that is so, then essentially Mozilla have cut an R&D project. Whether that is still as useful to Firefox as it was in earlier years is something that only the core Firefox engineers can answers. Regardless one feels that they might kept Servo and let HR or marketing take the hit.
How about the management resigns for 10 years of terrible decisions?
It’s an old story - an organization does good work, allowing it to raise money, attracting administrators, who hire more administrators and take all the money. The same happens in universities and public companies. I don’t know how, but we have to find a way to keep people from latching on and sucking the blood out of our institutions like this.
It's more complicated than that: the current CEO of Mozilla has been involved at a high level from the start:
>In November 1994, Baker was hired as one of the first employees of the legal department of Netscape Communications Corporation. . . . She was involved with the Mozilla project from the outset, writing both the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License. In February 1999, Baker became the Chief Lizard Wrangler (general manager) of mozilla.org, the division of Netscape that coordinated the Mozilla open source project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Commun...
Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending this CEO's recent performance.
Servo is/was cool, and some cool stuff that originated in Servo made it into Gecko, but make no mistake that Gecko and Gecko developers contribute far more to the open Web than Servo ever did.
Do you have source on that?
This is terrifying and I feel powerless to do anything about it.
Are there alternatives? How do I support Firefox-the-browser and the people who make it?
Is there a Firefox foundation I can contribute to?
I don’t want a VPN. I don’t want Pocket. I want Firefox.
“We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands. But COVID-19 has accelerated the need and magnified the depth for these changes. Our pre-COVID plan is no longer workable. We have talked about the need for change — including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring. Today these changes become real.”
The fact that Baker seriously brings up COVID shows why Mozilla has problems.
From a business perspective I get it, Firefox must be expensive to maintain, with no clear way to monetize it when the search engine money dry up. Still, their main focus should be Firefox and finding a way to make their most successful project profitable. Skimping on security seem to be the wrong approach.
What options do we have now then?
Because I'm surely not going to skimp on either of those things.
WebKit is KHTML, and since (as you say) it's the upstream rendering engine for many browsers, it makes sense for it to live in a "neutral" place; it's still an open-source project, and of course at this point it's had many contributions from outside KDE - which is how things are supposed to work.
If you prefer another WebKit-based browser then by all means use it - I've yet to find any that match Konqueror though. Just things like the integrated shortcuts from the context menu are better than anything else offers.
It's a shame this is happening at Mozilla. I was also quite shocked by their recent article to "safely return to shared memory between tabs", which I immediately thought was a bad idea.
Lo and behold, a mere week after that update, I found that Firefox was eating up my entire memory and making the PC perform poorly.
Shared memory is what made the old Firefox hang so much - I can't believe they thought it was a good idea. I've always believed Chrome's per process tab idea was brilliant, even if it uses a little more memory on average.
I still prefer the security benefits and stability of that architecture over Firefox randomly hanging and peaking in memory use due to memory leaks even if it can use slightly less memory on average.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129086
What many people are (reasonably) afraid of at the moment is a de-facto monopoly of Webkit controlled by Google. So that Google is in a position to shape the web for their sole business benefit and against the benefit of the rest of us.
If FF joined the Webkit camp as an active driver, the monopoly (in terms of control) would be mostly gone and be replaced by what I'd call a standard and its broadly spread implementation. A web-standard implementation followed by all major vendors.
Of course branches are likely to divert after a while, but for brief moment in time, everything in web-land would be rainbows and unicorns.
Um, just calling a monopoly a "standard" doesn't make it so. There are already standards for the the web that are defined by the W3C. It is a win for a standard if there are multiple implementations rather than just one, not the other way round as you are claiming.
WebKit is controlled almost entirely by Apple.
Also i strongly suppose parent was refering to Edge migrating to Chromium.
Ask Edge devs about Google services incompatibility.
Even if they are the same bloody thing inside.
Your point was Mozilla could be a strong voice in WebStandards? There won't be any standards. It will be whatever Google does.
Yes, kind of. One among multiple strong-ish actors. So Google would have the Edge team and Mozilla against them. My reasoning was there would be more counter-weight than with Mozilla doing their thing while slowly being marginalized.
But perhaps I was too optimistic regarding the world's dependance on Google Services (or rather as the worlds perceives it).
Independently of this hypothetical scenario I hope (and still belieive) there are still enough circles remaining which aren't that much associated with Google Services to sustain a user base for alternative products. Rainbows and unicorns again...
<INSERT J Jonah Jameson laughing>
That's like Goliath fighting two baby kittens.
> I hope (and still belieive) there are still enough circles remaining which aren't that much associated with Google Services to sustain a user base for alternative products. Rainbows and unicorns again...
At this point, I think the only hope I have is that EU, basically does a successful anti-trust lawsuit, or if someone invents something else that destroys Google, in the same way mobile destroyed Microsoft's grip on computing market.
Servo is/was kind of a clean slate reimplementation of an engine in Rust. Some parts of Servo have been carved off and implemented into Firefox, though.
But you're right in general. To anyone who thinks Mozilla might build politically neutral products, case for the prosecution:
https://i.imgur.com/FN2L5ed.png
It's obviously very problematic for the CEO of a browser company to have such overt politics. Who can take Mozilla seriously when they claim to be defending openness and freedom on the internet? Their CEO writes op-eds about the problem of online misinformation whilst blaming her own layoffs on COVID. Actions don't match stated principles.
Still, I figured I'd check to see what I get. I can't figure out how to get these "Recommended by Pocket" sites on my Firefox new tab page, but I only just signed up, so perhaps it takes a while to appear.
The Pocket Discover tab on their website seems like the closest thing to it. It has an extremely small collection of sources for its stories and with absolutely no range of perspectives at all. They're all metropolitan left outlets. I get: the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Quartz, James Clear (?), the Verge, Vox, the Washington Post, the Guardian and some Medium articles.
So, pretty good if you live in New York or Washington, I guess. I don't even live in America so this selection isn't so hot. Here's a sample of recommended story headlines:
"The Doomsday Invention: Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?"
"America's gun problem, explained"
"How exercise shapes you, far beyond the gym"
"Buying organic veggies at the supermarket is a waste of money"
"The true cost of being a black teacher"
"A pregnant woman with COVID-19 was dying, with one decision, her doctor's saved three lives"
"The rise of American authoritarianism" (it's about Trump, of course)
"One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgement of the child-free"
There are a few stories that might interest me here that I didn't cite, like "How vulnerable is GPS" (in the New York Times, of course). I personally seem to get more self-help and less woke content than in the screenshot I posted. But you get the idea. If you hate Trump, love any publication with New York in the title, eat quinoa, capitalise Black, and think children are a burden, you'll love Pocket. If you aren't like that, it has nothing for you.
Oddly, Pocket seems really buggy. A lot of recommended stories under Discover that come from Medium don't seem to have scraped the title correctly, so the title ends up being a raw HTTPS URL, complete with fragment specifier. One recommended story is just "Redirecting..." so they don't even follow redirects properly.
It feels like this experience sums up Mozilla under Mitchell Baker.
Mozilla has two major problems though. Firstly, it largely relies on what is eventually advertising revenue, in a time when users are increasingly using ad-blockers etc and privacy laws reduce the value of targeted ads. Secondly, it has little traction on mobile, where iOS basically just has Safari because of Apple's rules, and Android comes with Chrome very much set as the default (and few people change it).
I don't really buy that COVID has made much difference. I think that, ultimately, the two problems above are the issues, and I'm not sure what can be done about them.
Even if Firefox were replaced with a shiny-new brilliant FLOSS browser, we still need an organisation behind it that drives web standards in the right direction (and I think they do need to have a major browser to do that as effectively as Mozilla has), and it still needs the funding to do it, so would still face the same issues as Mozilla, even if it weren't Mozilla.
Someone should be taking Google and Apple to task over bindling their browser and not enabling proper choice on a fair basis, as the EU did to MS (and actually MS has stopped offering a fair choice of browser too, where you choose a default and it is installed, rather than have a default you have to change, that they keep changong back in updates).
With the recent layoff decision, I feel Mozilla CEO is pulling another death from the inside like Marissa Mayor did to Yahoo. You can't abandon the one thing that people actually like Mozilla for and chase a shiny egg.
Sure but I don't think Pocket has had a meaningful update in years.
Changing browsers only hurts Firefox.
The management obviously doesn't care, and it's probably matter of time, before Firefox moves to Blink.
Mozilla’s leadership is clearly motivated by money. I will gladly pay them for Firefox.
I like Firefox too, but unless you have a spare hundred million of USD lying around, the easiest way to maximize revenue is to minimize workforce. By moving to Blink.
Google doesn't need Mozilla to increase their search marketshare. People who care about privacy switch to things such as DuckDuckGo. When Firefox had Yahoo as the default search engine, many users switched back to Google.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...
https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/Microsoft-Edge-Ex...
You should rethink that.
>"We find that the browsers split into three distinct groups from this privacy perspective. In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-professor-says-edge-is-the-w...
The surprising thing about Edge is it actually starts and is interactable faster (~1s) than Win10's Photo Viewer (3-5s)... on an SSD.
My basic thought was: I essentially always have my browser open. What do I care about a few hundred milliseconds, or even a few seconds, on something I do so rarely?
It's hardly the first time that Mozilla has screwed up royally, but in general I have tried to defend them against most criticisms in light of the circumstances around browser competition (or lack thereof). But I'm not sure I can do that anymore though, because this is such a bad sign. This CEO and her administrator underlings are useless and expendable in comparison to the people who have actually make Firefox, and I hope they know that.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-scraps-thunderbird-dev...
> Mitchell Baker, the Mozilla Foundation's chair, said on Friday that Thunderbird 's users seemed happy with the program being the way it is.
A pattern seems to emerge.
Spoiler: the only other privacy game in town is Safari. Brave has been caught doing some controversial things and Chrome is the thing everyone was running away from in the first place. Edge was found to have one of the worst possible telemetry from all browsers.
• No Dark Mode support
• File Save dialogs not remembering the last folder
• Download prompts constantly asking for what you want to do with the file
• Infuriating Preferences UI (count the number of clicks it takes to delete specific cookies, and no way to add new file types to make them always get saved or opened)
Bromite: https://www.bromite.org
Ungoogled Chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Few days ago the mobile firefox upgraded itself to new version that doesn't support most of the add-ons anymore except few of the big ones - "The recommended plugins" so most of the things why I wanted to use firefox is gone.
Now I hear that they have fired both the security response team (really bad on the mobile if the security is not there) and the next generation rendering engine team (really bad if the speed is not there).
Time to go back to Brave and not look back. The management should be fired, they have majorly fcked up the browser I would really want to use.
Until then, the Firefox container tabs feature is invaluable for software development, software testing and privacy.