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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight. Yes he supported Prop 8 and people didn't like his political views but given the current US climate that seems all very tame in comparison and I'm not sure exactly how that conflicts with running a Web Browser development agency.

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> Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight.

You mean the guy who then did the Brave browser, which inserted referral codes and installed VPN services without users' consent, and wants you to earn monopoly money for watching ads? Yeah, he surely would've been the savior of Firefox.

These are all true but the browser is open source. When they say "we don't do that" (even if the stuff is in the gui) I don't have to take their word for it. I can check it.

And yet the closed-source Safari is less scummy than open-source Brave. "I can check myself" is, for the vast majority of people, a purely theoretical option. Even if you happen to be a C++ wizard, diving into a 65k+ files code base is not done over a weekend.

Under Eich Mozilla mostly abandoned Firefox development to focus on his big bet that failed: Firefox OS. It took Mozilla many years to recover from that technically after it finally killed FirefoxOS.

It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.

While the FirefoxOS brand didn't survive, the technology itself took off as KaiOS and is more popular that iOS in many markets. It just took a Chinese company with some TCL money to manage distribution successfully.

https://www.kaiostech.com

KaiOS is actually dead now; and the market share is now irrelevant - even WhatsApp has shut down their app on the platform, and the App Store is no longer working. Completely cannibalized by cheap Android.

Wow, you're right, last update was in 2022. I still see a lot of devices in use though. I guess the OS updates don't matter too much. Didn't know about the app store. I guess most people I've seen using them just use the preinstalled apps anyway. The last time I used one someone asked me to sideload something, and adb worked fine for it. The website was at least updated recently.

There was a fork of KaiOS called GerdaOS, not sure how active it is:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231216111510/https://gerda.tec... https://archive.luxferre.top/gerdaos

Didn't Firefox OS actually bring various new APIs to Firefox browser itself?

That's what I understood from their postmortem post:

"Engineering — Have a clear separation between “chrome” and web content rather than try to force the web to do things it isn’t suited to. Create device APIs using REST & WebSockets on the server side of the web stack rather than privileged JavaScript DOM APIs on the client side. Create a community curated directory of web apps on the web rather than an app store of submitted packaged apps."

https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-story-of-firefox-os-cb5bf79...

I was SVP Engineering as well as CTO from 2013 January till 2014 April. Your use of "mostly abandoned" is a false statement, knowingly told. You don't say it if you don't have evidence, but the evidence in terms of headcount and budget does not support what you say. I had four VPs under me, and only one was working on Firefox OS. Firefox was fully funded.

It's always a difficult situation. Employees want leaders that represent their values and are halfway competent at being data-driven. I don't know much about his political views or whether internally there was anything other than the Prop 8 stuff going around. However some of his later comments regarding COVID suggest biases in basic interpretation of data.

So current employees want a leader that basically only thinks about said leader's salary, I guess? That is a shared value among many, can't argue with that.

Is this a veiled comment about the interim CEO Laura Chambers? I don't know much about her but some brief googling suggests a worldview quite aligned with the majority of tech workers in the West:

* Focus on employee wellness, including mental wellbeing

* Support for making the internet free, open and accessible to all

* History of working for non-profits and traditionally neglected sectors

* Stated opposition to current influence of money and big tech in politics

I think that's a symptom and not the cause of the current situation.

Without getting into the politics of Eich's firing, It simply looked like people there just didn't care about the browser there anymore.

If they did, the people who were vocal enough to get a CEO fired would obviously have raised a voice against the dropping marketshare (aka their own bottomline), money squandered on various non browser projects (pocket), all these PR nightmares (mr robot, recent layoffs ) etc ...

Needless to say when i say people, i mean at least the vocal ones in power and obviously not everyone.

Lots of companies have political silliness going on inside them but are still able to produce good products. For example - the CCP stuff at Bytedance, the Cheobol stuff at Samsung and the various stuff at Google.

Those companies aren't propped up by substantial quantities of volunteer labor. The volunteers rebelled against Eich when he made it clear he would not apologize for trying to take away the human rights of the people volunteering to support the project. It was a complete failure of leadership on his part.

This is a nice story but it's untrue. We had no volunteers who actually worked on Mozilla code and who "rebelled" (Hampton Catlin et al. did not contribute as part of "The volunteers"). The entire late March to early April drama was too fast to measure any change in volunteer contributions to Mozilla code. Volunteers saying they'd stop volunteering wasn't a factor in what went down.

Worse, you are making stuff up in claiming that volunteers in substantial numbers "propped up" Mozilla. The Google money was still good enough to pay all essential personnel.

Seán, how do you feel about the sign "No Irish Need Apply"? Would you be happy working for a company where the boss pays campaigners who want to discriminate against you?

If not, you can perhaps see why people didn't want Eich's bigotry around their project.

Can you confirm if that was the case at Mozilla? They actively discriminated against hiring gay people? From what I've heard that's not true at all.

I think a closer analogy is no boss or CEO will likely have political views that match my own and I tolerate that and will work for such people.

What is "active" discrimination?

When the CEO is donating to causes which directly discriminate against you - would you apply to work there?

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