Hacker News Reader

Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely wonder what the Mozilla leadership think when they see threads like this.

Do they just not see them and float above the real world in some bubble where a web browser is some abstract thing that has no intersection with reality? Do they know they exist but pretend they don't? Do they scoff and say "they just don't understand, bless them"? Do they scoff and say "those idiots still think we care"?

How is possible to command generational wealth for the platform: millions upon millions in funding, and the goodwill of nearly all open source enthusiasts, over decades, have the entire community basically unanimous in saying "this is going downhill", see all the metrics agree and still plough onwards and downwards?

For a friend, how can I get a job like that?

View on HN

>I genuinely wonder what the Mozilla leadership think when they see threads like this. Do they just not see them and float above the real world in some bubble

I would have spotted a literal bubble when I was an intern in the SF office, but they definitely didn't mix with us.

I interned in ~2013. I had a boss who took everyone but me out to lunch, forever aggreived I'd gotten an offer prior to Eich being forced out. Despite designing my own research project on short notice that got a lot of good feedback, I was neither hired on nor pointed somewhere in the valley to work...

Meanwhile, I got the impression that my advice to the engineers to abandon "VR" (which danah boyd had pointed out can't even be used by everyone) and the weird firefox os crap to focus on getting ram usage down and browsershare up to build up a war chest, to partner with other search engines than google and to ban said googlers from our events since they kept poaching people...

But I was not heeded, and Firefox instead introduced pocket and did a bunch of other stupid stuff...

Nevertheless, I keep using it, because I love the extension system and the community around it but that summer broke the heart of the abused pre-teen who discovered the web and themselves via it.

The old Firefox, a lean extensible open source browser... is alive if you throw some switches and are selective in your extensions... but they messed up very badly that summer after Snowden and never recovered.

> the weird firefox os crap

I really liked Firefox OS, was an early adopter using one of the ZTE Phones, tried my best to acquire an Fx0 while I was in Japan but they wouldn't sell me one without a phone contract, I also crowdfunded the matchstick that never came to be.

I'm not sure what KaiOS is doing with it now, they're not very transparent.

i'd have rather ppl creates some fork of android sans google trackers.

one issue with open source phones is the divergence of talent means more unpatched vulns, imho.

i don't have the money to experiment like i used to, so i don't like to comment on these matters -- i suspect kai, like many other projects, may struggle financially and go dark in ways that make ppl more paranoid than they should be rather than anything truly nefarious.

if they'd done proper user research they'd have found lots of people wanna just do navigation and calls on the phone then hotspot to a laptop... but instead the os got bloated (imho)

It's a natural trend cycle: things grow beautifully, they stagnate, their corruption load exceeds their productivity and they start declining, then they collapse in lieu of something new.

There's hope for revitalization, but only if it's caught early-on. I feel Mozilla doesn't have much time.

A cliche that may apply here is "follow the money". If your primary financiers are entities that prefer you to avoid competing with what that financier is producing, you're not looking at the interests of the userbase anymore.

Right, but is Mozilla leadership vampiracally extracting the last cash before the lights go out, are they desperately holding out for 00 to come up on the wheel, or are they just sat there with eyes screwed shut going "it's still 2008, it's still 2008"?

Product managers have no idea these threads exist and leadership doesn't care.

It's genuinely baffling that that can happen. If a leading industry forum had an equivalent "Product X is dying, is there any hope left" post on the front page, there'd be quite a to-do in the office on the day after! Hell, we get that after a rude overheard comment at a trade show!

Do you think they have time to look at this stuff?

Maybe on the way back from their latest cocktail party, their secretary can give them a little summary of what's going on on the message boards.

> For a friend, how can I get a job like that?

Ask around inside Alphabet, Inc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com