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Comment by mch82 | Hacker News Reader

Of course.

Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Browsers are the most important software at those companies because most other software runs on them.

The Hacker News community doesn’t seem to appreciate the work Mozilla has done to establish web standards. I’ve experienced what it’s like to be stuck with IE6 and IE11 for a decade, holding back web projects at work. Firefox broke through that inertia and made Google, Amazon, Netflix and other companies possible. Essentially, Firefox made the whole “startup” wave Hacker News rides on possible (though much of that momentum transferred to the App Stores).

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Maybe. I'm glad FF exists, am using it all the time on desktop.

But here's another perspective: FF led an audience towards Google's web of shit. It would've been entirely possible for Moz to have said no to the latest fad; then, by the power of having a dominating browser in the field, the web could've been preserved as a medium for relatively simple text-mostly information. I, for one, am interested in individual info and personal sites rather than thousands of nice-looking content farms with tracking.

I'm particularly puzzled by those CSS apologists always painting a naive creationist story about how much we progressed etc etc. Yet, realistically, CSS is so bad, like consider-your-career-choices bad, that I have a hard time accepting this as a result of so much energy of so many intelligent people. CSS will go down as this generation of web "developers" retire, since it's an irrational, overcomplicated piece of shit only understandable in discourse as it has happened. Why did I put "developers" in quotes? Because the web was a vision for easy good-enough self-publishing for layman, not an "industry".

Saying this as someone who's a sucker for design, and sucks at it, too.

If a camel is a horse designed by committee, CSS is the product of 10 generations of camel breeding by different committees, followed by some rounds of competing evil geniuses creating genetically modified variants.

We should also keep in mind that the use cases have completely and wildly changed.

That being said, it does seem like we are overdue for a clean slate.

"Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google, Microsoft, and Apple."

Not exactly the same. Many are willing to accept less pay, to work on meaningful open source and not for advertisement.

Maybe 10-20% less, but it’s not enough to meaningfully make a difference.

20% less would be already quite meaningful. Add to that volunteers who work completely for free, and this could give an edge and I would argue, that this is mainly what keeps firefox alive. Despite their management increasingly acting like a ordinary company.

"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "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." "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...

> That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.

And she said that while laying off 250 people, imposing a 100% discount on them and their families.

From another point of view, our society has major market inefficiencies around resource allocation that we need to figure out. As a society, we absolutely need a free and open web (modern telecommunications). We also need other things like agriculture, energy, medical tech, sanitation, transportation, and education. Yet we pay people the most to work on ad tech. This is a major, generational problem.

Edit: I think we may be starting to figure this out. Google is slowly starting to charge for more services. Even Facebook is looking to introduce paid products (Quest). People are also learning from Elon Musk how much wealth can be generated by working on major human problems like transport, energy, and space access.

To work on an open source browser instead of apps yes, but how many people would take a significant pay cut to work on Firefox instead of Chrome?

The web was actually better in the days of IE6 than today.

You're talking about the contents, GP is talking about the devices/engines.

They can't compare.

The limitations made the web better.

And much less secure.

Ha can you even see through those rose-smothered spectacles?

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