Hacker News Reader

Comment by dx87 | Hacker News Reader

> The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too.

Two days ago, the CEO said that focusing on technologies like Wasmtime was one of their plans for the future[1]. Now we find out that they're actually getting rid of the team. They really doubled down on the corporate speak for this round of layoffs.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...

View on HN

Wasmtime is so important to our future we've decided to let people work on it for free.

Why call it corporate speak, when it's plain old lying?

Being more charitable, it's possible they changed their minds, rather than they were lying.

That would be really weird. When I think more charitable with Mozilla, I think of "one hand does not know what the other one is doing".

It wasn't a change of mind. This was the layoff blog post. They just didn't mention it.

Tuesday blog post: "Wasmtime is our future!" "We're going to be smaller across the board".

Thursday it becomes apparent that the Wasmtime was laid off on that Tuesday.

"... specifically, a much smaller future ..."

Po-tay-to, starchy tuber of the plant Solanum tuberosum.

Many people consider that synonymous. Hell, if anything i tend to consider corporate speak to be even more damning than a lie.

to me corporate speak is empty platitudes trying to bury the lede, whereas lying is lying (and both are dishonest)

Saying "we care deeply at X" can't be proven to be false since they can say "We care about X, we just care more about other things so we fired the X team, it wasn't a lie".

That is corp speak, they say stuff that can't be proven to be lies even though they almost surely are lies.

It's at least a different, interesting kind of lying, worth naming separately.

The weasel nature of corporate speak is beyond a simple lie. People out a lot of work and, perversely, take pride in their ability to say one thing while sounding like saying another, at best, or outright convincingly bullshit.

It deserves to be labeled as the worse of the two options because it is.

"Corporate speak" is itself an example of corporate speech. It's autological.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autological_word

Firefox is open source and it doesn't need to be tied to Mozilla. Maybe a fork is necessary.

How do you finance its development?

I would start by being better at building goodwill than Mozilla has been in the last few years, and ceasing the bait/switch strategy for funding that torpedoed Canonical.

It is very, very okay that ubiquitous and greatly loved projects do one or two things well.

Goodwill is of course lovely. But that's not a plan of financing the project. No money, no full-time employee, not enough developer-power to keep up with the ever-evolving web standard, and hence not competitive against the chromium family.

And even if this better-will project is formed, and funded, and worked, there is nothing stopping the team from picking up all the bait-and-switch, corporate speak, etc., when they are wearing the same shoes as Mozilla.

In any rate, it's not as simple as someone with better-will to fork the project. I'd rather stay with Mozilla for now, because 1) they are a public entity who cannot commit an evil deed and simply ghost everyone, so they have the motivation to not be hated too much, and 2) they are the only player other than Webkit family and the Chromium family on the browser market, while nobody else has the power to even enter the competition (at least for now).

There are already many forks of Firefox with separate development. See Waterfox, Palemoon, etc. None seem to get the kind of development needed to compete with Chrome/Safari/Edge.

Waterfox is evil! https://github.com/MrAlex94/Waterfox/issues/1406

"Open source" doesn't necessarily mean "practical to maintain." Can an open source organization maintaining a fork of Firefox in their free time in addition to the obligations of their regular job keep up with the hundreds of webcompat issues being filed and over 3,000 open issues on the preview version of Firefox on Android alone?

And there also is a fork of XUL-era Firefox already, called Pale Moon, which various people have declared will soon be unusable with the modern web because there aren't enough people that care about it enough to implement Web Components, to the point where the Pale Moon developers were asking websites to not implement Web Components[1]. Are the developers of those websites going to pay attention to a couple of developers maintaining their own Firefox fork that much less people use than standard Firefox? (And we're talking about Firefox, which itself has a single-digit market share.) That on top of the implications of security exploits being found in such a massive codebase faster than the development team can patch them, given how many features are being added to web standards so quickly, probably with the expectation that companies like Google or Mozilla already have the developer capacity to implement them on a set timeline. There's simply so much source code to maintain, and adding the new features that the modern web is going to require to be usable in a few years on top of maintenance takes a significant amount of effort.

The only way that a program as complicated as Firefox can continue to be improved and used by enough people to be viable is if it gets worked on by people with enough time, and I believe that's only practical if people are spending that time working on Firefox because they're salaried. Yes, that's partially because web standards are constantly expanding in scope and complexity, and I'm not really sure what we can do about the complexity creating a hard dependency on Mozilla continuing to exist because, unlike the source code of Firefox, the forces driving those standards are out of the reach of the average OSS developer.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604070

> "Open source" doesn't necessarily mean "practical to maintain."

Mozilla has certainly done a lot over the past decade that effectively guarantees that neither Firefox nor Gecko can realistically exist without the continued existence of the Corporation.

wow, that sent me down a multi hour rabbit hole of reading a bunch of programming drama.

> "Open source" doesn't necessarily mean "practical to maintain." Can an open source organization maintaining a fork of Firefox in their free time in addition to the obligations of their regular job keep up with the hundreds of webcompat issues being filed and over 3,000 open issues on the preview version of Firefox on Android alone?

Blink (Chrome's engine) was once KHTML. KHTML was maintained entirely by volunteers, so I think it's entirely possible for a team of volunteers to maintain a web rendering engine.

I think most people severely underestimate how much of a modern web browser is code that does things completely unrelated to rendering web content (think telemetry and the like ,etc). Now, telemetry also needs a backend to send data to, and servers to run that backend on.

My point is that many of the people that work on a modern browser are working on things that are unrelated to rendering web content, so their equivalent would not be needed in a volunteer team. You don't need any admins to administer the servers that run the telemetry backend services if you don't have any telemetry in your browser.

web technology, especially widely supported web technology, was moving at a much slower pace during the KHTML days though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com