Brave layoffs
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User Story:
As a Private Citizen and Engineer, I want a graphical multi-input interface to load, view, interact with and post documents to remote and local HTTP servers ("web-browsing") on any personal computing device. I want web-browsing to have out of the box default security and privacy guardrails that are well documented can be disabled or modified by me the user and only me the user. I want this software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible (aka FOSS). I want this capability to be free at the time of use with no restrictions on amount scope or scale of use.
I think the above describes the product that everyone wants
It sure sounds a lot like Firefox to me
Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever?
edit: Oh I didn't realize that Brave totally abandoned their model and started taking Venture from RGA and Page One in 2019. Game has been over since then at least: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software/compa...
Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. It's a shame. Giving money to the Mozilla Foundation is the same as throwing it to a black hole.
I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches.
Is this a hypothesis that we can specify and test? Is this how we would approach this problem?
It sounds more like a cynical write-off, not a actual strategy
>I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches
Cool, but that strategy clearly isn't working.
I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out
Nothing is perfect, but at least it's got some of the hardest parts right: Organizational momentum and distribution. Technical stuff is easy to change compared to that.
The challenge now is finding competent people who can actually put the effort in, with no compensation, to make it work and that might take convincing the Mozilla folks to do something differently.
Having done this kind of thing a few times, that sounds way easier than trying to totally start over from scratch though.
There is nothing to test, it's why I stopped using Firefox. Check the Mozilla foundation page for all the crap they fund instead of the browser. Look how much the UI looks like Chrome, even little things like clicking the searchbar expanding it outside its bounds.
> I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out
They don't listen to feedback. When Apple (the company known for telling people they were holding their phones wrong) introduced the safari tab-redesign that merged tabs with the searchbar, it was nearly universally disliked and they backtracked on the change. Apple of all companies backtracked on a bad design. Mozilla? They just keep on going.
When Nintendo was struggling due to the failure of the Wii U, Satoru Iwata took on a massive pay cut to avoid firing people. Mozilla? Fired the Servo team and raised executive compensation.
> In 2020 Mozilla announced it would cut 25% of its worldwide staff of nearly 1,000 to reduce costs. Firefox has fallen from 30% market share to 4% in 10 years. Despite this, executive pay increased 400%, with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s top executive, receiving $2.4m in 2018.
[1]: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-bylaws.pd...
[2]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/leadership/
Notwithstanding that, they still put out firefox. And Firefox is a far superior browser to any of the alternatives if you care about user-centric control and privacy. So to anyone who cares even a little about being able about these things, supporting Firefox is the way to go.
If a mythical even-better browser shows up, great. But here and now, it's Firefox, or completely surrender the web to commercial interests.
Firefox was created by pre-Baker Mozilla which was an organisation focused mostly on - to coopt the terminology used by those who coopted Mozilla later - "software justice". When Eich was ousted (for voicing an opinion he shared with people like Barack Obama [1]) and Baker took his place she set a course towards different goals: Mozilla was going to focus more on social justice because it was not enough to only build software. She clearly did not realise - or did not care - that it was through creating viable open alternatives to proprietary browsers and related software that Mozilla was in fact doing the best it could towards achieving the aim of a more just world.
Baker needs to be ousted, she can go lead some NGO somewhere if she wants to fly social justice flags. Let Mozilla be led by those who understand that software freedom is an integral part of freedom of information access and an open internet which are essential to counteract the tendency towards authoritarianism which has plagued society since the dawn of time.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/33750...
Yes, I'm familiar with the history (fun: I even have an original signed CD of the initial Netscape open source release, handed out at the release party in San Francisco which I attended).
Mozilla of today could perhaps be more focused on the browser.
Nevertheless, they continue to support it, maintain it and release it. If you want a browser today in 2023 that puts out user control and privacy first, this is it, Firefox.
Baker's organisation continues to release the browser which pulls in several hundreds of millions from Google. This money is for the largest part not used to improve the browser or the software ecosystem surrounding it - Firefox sync is withering on the vine, Thunderbird has been spun off, Seamonkey has been spun off a long time ago, Servo has been terminated (the project is continued by volunteers), the Rust team has been let go, etc. The money is used for political activism and to fund Baker (who again raised her own remuneration, from $2.5 million to $3 million) [1] and her organisation.
That Firefox still is being released is more despite of Baker's managerial decisions than thanks to them. Mozilla is kept alive by Google because the presence of Firefox on the market is an insurance against claims of a monopoly. That insurance is getting less effective now that Firefox has dropped to a low single digit market share so it remains to be seen whether Google will continue to shore up Mozilla for much longer.
> If you want a browser today in 2023 that puts out user control and privacy first, this is it, Firefox.
Yes, that is still true because of the work done by Mozilla developers and volunteers. Now imagine how much further the browser and related projects could have been had Mozilla been led by someone who would use the proceeds of the Google deal to further software and ecosystem development instead of what largely amounts to political virtue signalling, "color of change" and other PACs and similar activities.
Baker is not the right person to lead this organisation, she is a political activist [2] better suited for an NGO or PAC.
[1] https://techrights.org/o/2022/02/17/mozilla-salaries/
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
Step 1 is get rid of the for-profit corporation that pays its CEO 2.4 million dollars a year to lose market share. That's 24 well-paid developers, or double that from lower-income countries.
The foundation had a revenue of $441 million in 2020. We know that in 2014 ~90% of their revenue come from its search-engine deal with Google. That means that without Google they'd have ~44 million to work with these days (or more).
That's a lot of devs, before even considering non-search-engine sources of revenue. Personally I don't mind ideas like the VPN. I do mind the stupid grants the foundation does unrelated to a web-browser or acquisitions like pocket.
That's a stretch even if we don't count the additional overhead.
How many years of Google money would it take to support ~500 staff purely for making Firefox in perpetuity? That's maybe ~$50 million/year?
This[1] says endowments target ~7.5% annualized returns. So a very conservative 5% return could pay for ~500 staff with ~$1 billion in Google bucks.
[1] https://www.nacubo.org/Press-Releases/2023/Higher-Education-...
Try > 5.6 million. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
Any suggestion that Firefox do support Tab Groups will be met with ridicule. It just doesn't.
While firefox still uses google, allows google ads and tracking, and just talks about doing something but does nothing
Also chromium is just a superior engine, in security and speed, using firefox won't change Chromium dominance at all.
That’s bad, but not nearly as bad as what the parent commenter described.
They didn't do this either. There was an omnibox site suggestion that included an affiliate id. Nothing got appended and people were able to see the affiliate id before hitting enter to visit the site. These site suggestions could also be disabled in the settings.
That isn't really what is happening. It shows a preview for news.ycombinator.com and hitting enter confirms that option. The distinction is one is clear to the user and the other is a modification that happens behind the scenes.
[disclaimer: former Servo team member]
Mozilla had a chance to advance browser tech with Servo and fumbled it.
Chrome, when it came, was stupidly faster than any other competitor, including Mozilla Firefox.
What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users, beyond ideology and fun work for its developers? (Ideology doesn't sell software, as opensource efforts have proven repeatedly over last 3 decades).
The biggest advantage would be having a memory-safe browser engine.
Only social initiatives get feel good money to waste on nice to haves. This "Servo" thing does not sound like it.
Even granting that some of them come from dependent libraries, if the world's arguably best funded software engineering organization can't keep C++ footguns out of an application that runs untrusted code on the regular ... one may want to have a think about whether C++ is the best tool for that purpose
I'm delighted to hear that you (and I) were not personally impacted by those but to say "I didn't get in a crash, who cares about seat belts working" is comically misguided
Also your "for Chrome to autoupdate" perspective makes me wish I could search for every single red Update screenshot I've seen in presentations or Zoom meetings
So what feature would full memory-safety actually enable? I suspect that's the bit that the Servo folks couldn't articulate well enough.
Servo was a much more modular effort.
1. we would get a lightweight (modular) electron alternative. This would have helped rust gui ecosystem a lot, just like wgpu helps rust gamedev scene.
2. Probably have more variety in browsers as everyone can now reuse servo components to make their custom version of firefox. Imagine all the linux distros which reuse gnu/linux, but have their own philosophy of package management, updates, mutability etc.. We could have had the same sort of varieties in browsers for different usecases.
Wasn't it just using WebKit initially? IIRC you could actually use Safari on Windows back then.
Although I think I agree with you, if your “so that” is so you can visit a particular website, those features you are specifying may demonetize and eliminate the website you want to go to causing it not to exist.
There are many non-aligned efforts with various directions, some focused on privacy, some on UI config, etc. maybe getting these people together to create something common where something can be integrated into one.
Just to keep rambling, I'd add that maybe a online conference independently run to get some important conversion going in the community, with the various firefox-fork maintainers and other important contributor, and try to layout some common roadmap, outline the main issues and get people exited again about the product would be a relatively low-hanging fruit to this started.
Try to actually compile that bloody thing, before you write "software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible"
Even Ubuntu team gave up on compiling their software, and are serving mainstream binaries from Mozilla!
Brave has some shady stuff, but that is easy to disable in configuration. And under-hood they follow security patches pretty well, have good security and stuff like 3D acceleration just works!
And you do not need 10 browser extension from some shady authors, that has full access to your browsing data!!!
Mozilla had process based isolation (mainly due old code base). That is far less effective. Some things like GPU access are not sandboxed at all!
>Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 for an estimated $400 million to $450 million per year.
Mozilla is a multibilion corporation. They DO have resources for proper rewrite in Rust. How they spend their money is another thing!
Old code base was good excuse in 2016! Brave Software Inc is much smaller company, and they do advanced stuff like their own search engine!
Which extension authors are shady? I am mostly sticking to ublock origin, but this is the first time I hear that accusation.
Plus several extensions were just sold to highest bidder!
Ublock Origin installed from Firefox Extension Web Store. I have no idea how this was verified and distributed. I do not trust webstore as a channel. Also user may easily click on "Unblock" or "Unlock" and get something completely different.
If this extension came from my Linux distro package, or bundled into Firefox binary, I would trust it.
With Brave I have no need to use extensions. Everything is bundled and can be enabled via about:flags.
Mozilla has defunded Firefox, allows for no way to directly donate to Firefox development, and now writes activist blogs.
We know what Mozilla will do with it - not ideal but it's the devil we know
We have no idea what Brave will do with it
My personal heuristics around VC backed companies (Having been a CEO with venture backing, an LP in a venture fund, a director in a publicly traded company etc...) is the following:
There do not exist PE backed companies that will take actions that conflict with an even theoretical reduction in potential ROI.
Leaders lose long term control of their companies to VC the moment they sign the term sheet
So I have zero faith that anyone who aligns themselves to profit making, will not harm either the customers or the employees that are involved in favor for the people providing the capital.
Gervase Markham was a dedicated outspoken fundamentalist at Mozilla until his death and was very influential, but he wasn't in a leadership position. Big difference.
ah yes my favorite important improvements that I totally use daily like adding crypto tokens to chrome and crypto spam notifications on android
Mozilla may have forgotten the CTO persona. CTOs can donate engineering hours to Mozilla. Companies can donate money. If companies in the Fortune 500 aren’t using Firefox internally and companies like Netflix aren’t recommending Firefox to users, then Mozilla will continue to struggle to get market share and sustain funding.
One key use case: Firefox used to make it easy to create corporate intranet apps (the apps teams at companies use to do work). However, Firefox security changes started breaking intranet apps by returning the “your connection is not secure” error and giving workers no way to override. This hurts CTOs so CTOs switch their companies to Edge & Chrome.
The specifications are simply too complex to foster any meaningful competition. There's too much ground to cover playing catchup and Google has such a large market share that, combined with their data and ad monopoly, allows them to create new specs and features that focus entirely on growing their business model.
Web sepcifications should be simple enough that it's pheasible for small teams to actually maintain a quality open source browser with modest funding. We've ended up falling into the same trap as many other big systems, we lost sight of what the goals and limitations for the web were and instead chased convenience and shiny new features above all else.
For example, the entire idea that we visit specific websites and manually compare prices when buying things is ridiculous and misses huge parts of the benefits of using computers in the first place.
AI, or more accurately machine learning, attempts to take us out of the process. It isn't separating content and presentation, it's separating content and understanding. The algorithm will read in data, compress it, and save only the patterns it learned. By the time the content is presented there is little connection to the original source and what I'm seeing isn't just a separated presentation layer, it's something entirely different like playing a game of telephone.
We need independent groups of passionate people making sure that the web platform is focused on the best end user experience. We don't always have that today, but that vision is completely dead if the web functionality is decided entirely by an advertising platform.
The browser engine is open source. You can make changes and proposals with your own fork. If you are making a browser for musicians you could try and advance the WebMIDI spec and add new functionality to it and then try to get it standardized. But as a browser developer you don't want to me spending your time implenting specs that other people have already implemented, but rather spending time working on things that improve your browser for your userbase.
What would be the point of open specifications if there was only a single implementation?
I never said there was? When you write the first implementation then there will only be a single implementation, but that's how counting works. 1 comes after 0. Anyone is free to write another implementation.
A robust and reusable browser engine lowers the barrier of entry for anyone to innovate and differentiate. Browser compatibility is close to solved since everyone shares most of the implementation. Better user experience across the board at lower cost.
Specific examples are Brave, Opera, or more recently the Meta Browser shipping in the Meta Quest: very small team now leading the WebXR standard. it wouldn’t be possible without Chromium.
This model of starting with chromium really has nothing to do with building a web browser, it is just building a UI around Google's browser. There isn't much daylight between that and the often complained about limitation of Apple only allowing the use of WebKit on iOS.
It's faster to learn the part of the comebase you are interested in rather than building a whole browser engine.
>and are going to be dependant on staying in sync with chromium to get new features.
Being able to reuse the work Google is investing into th browser engine is a positive.
>There isn't much daylight between that and the often complained about limitation of Apple only allowing the use of WebKit on iOS.
The difference is you can make changes to the browser engine if you need.
Web standards are not driven by one browser or one company. That would still be true if everyone based their browsers off of Blink.
We wouldn't need standards at all if everyone used the same browser engine. Whoever owns the engine, likely Google, would make the engine however they choose and could change core fundamentals of how the web itself works.
Many devs were up in arms when a GitHub issue raised the idea of effectively DRMing the internet. Google can bake that right into chromium if they want to, and if they were the only browser engine they could easily get away with closed sourcing chromium and only shipping binaries so the feature can't be disabled or removed.
Web standards in that world would be an internal discussion at Google, likely driven entirely by their business needs. There's no browser competition there, the open web would be completely dead.
I am not suggesting that people only make UI changes. I am suggesting that there is value in reusing work that already exists.
>The browser experience is what actually renders the web page, not the menu system around it.
Chromiums renderer is going to be fine for most people looking to build a browser. People building a browser should focus onan building what makes their browser unique. Not every browser is setting off to create a new rendel engine.
>We wouldn't need standards at all if everyone used the same browser engine.
There still would be a need for cross industry collaboration on how to move the web forward. If Clang was the only C++ compiler there still is a benefit on having the standards process and working groups figuring out how to evolve the language.
>Whoever owns the engine, likely Google, would make the engine however they choose and could change core fundamentals of how the web itself works.
This is a problem with browser marketshare and not browser engine marketshare.
>and if they were the only browser engine they could easily get away with closed sourcing chromium and only shipping binaries so the feature can't be disabled or removed.
Other browsers can work together on developing on top of the last public release of chromium. This is still less work than all of these browser developers independently creating their own browser engines.
What is a better source of how to tutorials YouTube? What's a better venue of asking questions than Reddit and StackOverflow? What use is the Internet without those?
This might sound crazy, but the primary purpose of a browser isn't to improve search results with a custom API (almost none of which compare to vanilla Google), but to actually improve the browsing experience. Haven't tried Arc, but from what I've seen it seems like they're actually focusing on UX, which is the kind of thing I'm looking for in a browser.
Jumping from Chromium to Chromium?
Maintaining a Chrome fork is already difficult enough on its own, especially with the number of directions where Brave wants to diverge.
Effectively ever since IE broke Netscape's back, every single major web browser has been funded either off the back of other business units (IE, Chrome, Safari), or funded by search engine deals. No customer has actually had to really contemplate 'what is the value of a browser' in like 25 years. No one actually has a sense of how valuable a browser actually is (except through the perverse metric of how many ads can you serve to the user via default search...).
I think it's telling that all of Brave's new revenue streams aren't actually -from- their self-professed mission.
In a way they were ahead of the curve, considering how popular ad-based models with optional removal purchases are these days.
The only decent browser is Chrome, and the ad blockers don't work anymore.
If you need to test in a lot of browsers it's not a terrible idea as you can run both desktop and module browsers.
The "environment" problem isn't economic, but social. It's not new, and it's not about to change:
- Most users don't know that the browser that came with their device can be replaced by something else.
- Of those that know, many don't.
- Of those who do, they want it free; you cannot monetize it. You can't lock them in; they will switch to something else at the sign of any trouble.
The alternative browser user is pretty much the same person who doesn't want to see a single ad anywhere, or pay for anything.
You might as well wrap quartz pebbles in cloth and wait for whey to drip out.
A possible area for an alternative browser might be the corporate environment; employers who want to prescribe some kind of more locked down, security-fortified browser for use within their intranet. The challenge there is demonstrating value, compared to regular approaches: using regular browsers and securing things elsewhere.
Recently there was a HN submission to a story about how scalpers are able to get Ticketmaster tickets before everyone else, which mentioned custom browsers that the use. Someone makes money in that niche.
That's in addition to some anti-Google and better privacy features.
I want a browser which actively fights the enshitification of the web. Brave is the best I've found so far. I'm hoping to find better.
They are oscillating between building their own search engine versus using Bing. And offering their own internal AI named Leo versus passing information to one of the many cloud provider APIs.
For Brave, difficult to claim privacy if they don't do all that in house. But it forces them out of their lane from building a browser to building all these services.
Kind of seems like they are becoming Google, which has always been the foil Brave has claimed to be fighting against.
Building a business who's feature is "We're independent from Google" on top of codebase that is dependant on Googles development effort was always a hypocritical thesis.
I suppose their advertising revenues could be impacted.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-growth-beats-expec...
Really? Sounds bad. Is that official stats?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/217787/unemployment-rate...
The IT sector has a slightly higher unemployment rate 4.3 than the headline rate 3.9. And there is a special note about the IT rate being specifically impacted by the tv industry strikes as the sector covering sound and film engineers makes up most of the IT unemployment number.
The industry that actually has a significantly higher rate is leisure and hospitality at 5.4.
Full time jobs not only didn’t decrease, they increased more than part time jobs in actual terms.
Part time jobs for economic reasons decreased while part time jobs for non economic reasons went up slightly.
The big reported increase came from the establishment/business survey. That survey results in overcounting people working multiple jobs. And multiple job holders (also in table 9) jumped from 8,028 to 8,151, for 123k more people now working at least 2 jobs. So we saw a loss of full time jobs, a gain of part time jobs, and a gain of people working more than one job.
That part should raise serious questions about the validity of this metric.
Any taxpayer-funded or debt-funded government "job" is not a creator of real (in the economic sense) wealth.
Rather, such government "jobs" merely siphon off and consume real wealth generated by actually-productive market participants, and then permanently destroy that wealth.
Even worse, the process of destroying of that real wealth is often done in a way that then impedes the productivity of the real wealth creators, introducing a secondary and longer-lasting real economic loss.
Each government "job" added should be seen as a significant net loss to the overall economy.
Those government "jobs" are in effect just destroying the real output of some number of private sector jobs.
There's nothing overly special about an interstate-style highway network. It's essentially just a large number of roads covering a long distance that are connected together, with emphasis on driving speed.
The private sector is more than capable of planning, building, connecting, maintaining, and operating roads of all types, widths, and lengths.
I don't know where you are, but in Canada the various governments end up having to resort to the private sector anyway for highway-related projects.
It's government interference that prevents there from being more privately-build and operated highways. That's exactly the problem I was talking about in my earlier comment. Government "jobs" are dead weight on the real economy, only inhibiting those who are actually productive.
It exists because the 401 wasn't built with sufficient long-term capacity, even after it was widened significantly.
I wouldn't really consider the 407 a true "private" highway, though. It's more a case of the private sector rescuing the government from a typical government-created debacle, and last I heard, the highway is now majority-owned by the CPP Investment Board (a Crown corporation).
Have you ever actually driven on the 407, by any chance? It's a much nicer experience than the 401, although having to pay a toll while also paying significant taxes can be annoying. Under a proper system, there'd only be usage tolls, and no taxes involved.
How do you imagine increasing private ownership of roads would work? It's near-impossible to ever have true competition in the sector so market forces wouldn't work as they normally do. Where's the incentive to innovate? Where's the incentive to lower prices?
And good luck implementing a "proper" system where there are two tiers of citizens: The rich and the rest. That's just not a good recipe for the cohesiveness of society.
The job market, especially outside of the US, is dead for experienced product leads, and the culture and other factors outside the US can't be changed so easily. I know at least five people now, from the EU, who are struggling hard landing product leadership roles internationally.
With all these tech companies tightening budgets and laying off staff, hiring has slowed across the board. I mean I guess for sure there's still desire for senior PM talent, but the roles are 100% more scattered.
I only know a bunch of people in the EU and don't really have a global picture so how's the product job landscape globally? What regions or companies still have healthy hiring pipelines? Is it mainly US-based companies recruiting abroad or are there other non-US tech scenes continuing to grow? I mean, there must be, but nothing compared to the US.
Maybe the AI takeover should come as soon as possible after all.