Everyone's only in it for the money. There are no good or bad people anymore, only...unfortunates. (that last line I stole from The Equalizer 2).
Rust was a side project, asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM, IIRC LetsEncrypt was a side project (or at least a side project of Mozilla engineers, if not official), significant parts of the initial R&D for AV1 and Opus came out of Mozilla, Servo was largely a side project at the point that it got cancelled (the parts that had been largely successful had already been merged into Firefox, the rest was either nowhere near ready or being completely rewritten or both, and the main application for it at the time was some attempts to make a browser for running web apps in VR headsets at high framerates). Thunderbird was a side project.
But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money, like the branded VPN service. Or projects like FirefoxOS, which ultimately failed but still resulted in a lot of improvements to Firefox and web standards. And it wasn't a bad idea either, it just put the cart (mobile OS) before the horse (the web APIs that are needed to make a browser-based mobile OS successful, like access to GPS and IMU hardware, which didn't exist at the time) without the heft to really push through the barriers while competing directly with Apple and Google.
It seems like people define "frivolous side projects" as "anything Mozilla did that didn't end up being incredibly successful" and anything that did become incredibly successful gets taken for granted. "What did Rome ever do for us" rewritten as a tech parable.
(don't tell me that "we're going to create a whole new language to fix security issues in our web browser" didn't sound a bit frivolous in 2012)
I'm surprised they didn't integrate their own internet search engine into Firefox. But the contract with Google probably prohibits it and Google would immediately pull the plug on Firefox if it got wind of it anyway.
Firefox is like 25 million lines of code. Incredibly complex code, much of it decades old and wrapped in layers of legacy architectural patterns (see XUL, XBL), with severe backwards compatibility considerations (if you break existing websites or people's extensions, they might switch and not come back).
You suggest that NOT rewriting all of that in a couple of years is "hubris"?!? Rust 1.0 didn't happen until 2015 mind you, and Firefox OS was canceled in 2016. The timeline doesn't even make sense.
This kind of nonsense is why I can't take HN seriously when it comes to discussions about Mozilla. Criticisms are perfectly fine (and there are plenty of legitimate criticism to make) but people just abandon all logic when it comes to them for some reason and upvote mindless drivel because Mozilla Bad.
FYI, there are more than 6 million lines of Rust in Firefox, so it's not like it hasn't been happening.
Mozilla could've chosen to port the C++ code to Rust, but they didn't because they had other "frivolous" priorities.
Exactly the type of work seen in a web browser, which has many interconnected but independent parts.
I also believe that if you have enough unit test coverage you can tackle any project, no matter how large. This is, however, lacking in most projects. Many only pay lip service to unit testing.
Yeah, for 2 reasons.
1. Mozilla is a non-profit that takes donations.
2. These "money makers" make their money by tricking Mozilla users into selling their private data to advertisers.
And if you pay attention, you'll notice that people don't generally complain because Facebook gave us React or Llama. They complain about the facebook moneymaker of selling private data and advertising. But even then, they don't complain as much about facebook because facebook doesn't take donations.
Are there any you are thinking of who get a pass?
> Occasionally, sponsors may pay Mozilla to specifically boost the score of their site during frecency ranking. In these cases, the shortcut is based on your history, but shown in the sponsored section. This still happens entirely on your device; your copy of Firefox has a list of participating sites, which receive a higher score during local ranking. [1]
While the ranking happens on device, a smart sponsor will glean information from end users that click through because those links almost certainly track where the users come from. This is selling users' private data to advertisers.
And with firefox vpn, I'm sorry but that's a MITM. If you aren't paying a VPN provider, they are collecting and selling your data.
This is how every advert tracker works. They transparently and slowly gather data based on how you browse the internet. Just because firefox makes some efforts to slow it down, doesn't mean they aren't still participating in the market of selling user data.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy?utm_sou...
Only because Mozilla refused to adopt PNaCL, people keep forgetting about this little detail when praising asm.js.
Rust while an interesting side project, the ideas were from Cyclone which probably would still be around if Rust hadn't happened, and it only really took off, because it became interesting for Amazon, Google and Microsoft, when despite all that money, Mozilla killed the team, and they picked a few of the core team.
HN is not a person. People's opinions differ. This is not 2 faced.
That said, the terms of the contract are not public, and it's possible that it was restricted in a fashion which did not permit such usage.
But I'm sure people would complain if they moved operations to Brno and Warsaw too.
Instead they dreamed up the idea of being a multi-billion corporation next to the non-profit so they could give management commensurate compensation.
So you've got a scarce labor pool, with expensive lifestyles, and a very directly obvious ROI. That alone is a recipe for high salaries. Combine that with the inflation that comes from the fact that for-profit executives get to hide a huge portion of their compensation as stock, whereas non-profits pretty much exclusively offer salary, and you end up with apparently bloated non-profit executive salaries.
And yet Google's funding remains 85% of Mozilla's income, so that 'convincing' doesn't seem to be worth paying for.
No. People imagined this for some reason.