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Mozilla Fires Servo Devs and Security Response Teams (twitter.com/directhex)
230 points by MrBuddyCasino on Aug 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 160 comments



CNET (and Mozilla)[1] say that Firefox still has a fully functional security team.

The source for this is an unsourced tweet. I'm going to flag it because HN does not seem like a good venue to hash out rumors.

1. https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-cor...



What?! Servo and the tech coming out of it is the only reason I’ve begun using Firefox as my daily driver again. The Quantum stuff has made Firefox usable again. How are these CEO’s chosen? Really seems like Mozilla should be turned into a CO-OP or something.


So there's a comment from the CEO here: https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z

"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"

"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, 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."

No self awareness that rather than getting rid of people building interesting products, they don't realise that they should get rid of themselves and other executives.

Firefox has been on a downward trajectory in marketshare for the last 5 years. And they've struggled to reduce their reliance on search engine deals by creating other revenue streams.

They're all failures and have no self awareness.

Effectively answering: We've all got ferraris and McMansions to pay off


> I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market.

Considering the companies performance, she should have been put on a PIP a long time ago, even considering the so called 80% discount. Never seems to happen to CEOs though.

Management is out of touch with reality if they think they deliver any value here.

edit: he to she, thanks!


Mitchell Baker is a she. Largely agree with the PIP part.


*she


Why make a distinction?


The same reason you’d value accuracy anywhere else.


Why did you correct it again?


When I left the comment it said “he”. Nothing more than that, hence the terse reply.


I've been reading comments on this thread for a few minutes, with my kids distracting me mixed in. I've been on the page for over ten minutes. The two corrections came through ~10 apart.

It's entirely plausible that when saagarjha loaded the page, the first correction hadn't even been made yet.


Yup, this pretty much. I expected this to be a small correction and then my comment would end up being collapsed by a passing moderator, but I guess it didn’t completely work out that way this time.


For those who haven’t seen it yet, handy chart of Firefox market share vs Mozilla Foundation chair salary https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704?...


Note that Brendan Eich resigned April 2014. Here is the original post for that graph and a bit of discussion on HN relating to the dismissal of 70 Mozilla employees at the time. : https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629


That is one embarrassing chart, especially for a company like Mozilla. Have they considered firing that person, yet?


Seems like Baker salary is correlated to Firefox marketshare. If I'm extrapolating correctly, a $0 salary should give Firefox 90% marketshare.

// just kidding of course.


I'm actually very saddened by this. What are the alternatives? Use chrome/chromium or other blink powered browsers and let google have it's way with the web? I wish some organizations like Tor will fork firefox and absorb these talent, then I can contribute whatever I can afford monthly to it, knowing that anything I contribute will be going to the betterment of the web than into incompetent management. Maybe they can start a kickstarter campaign or something, I will definitely contribute.


There's still Epiphany and Midori as Webkit-based browsers, but you're gonna lose Web Extensions, Service Workers by default, nice dev tools, and a lot of things in the process.


Wow what a piece of shit. How will my poor family survive without $200k every month???


> "Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"

Why should a nonprofit's CEO be paid that much? Why the hell? I can't grasp this. I don't even understand why they'd make more than a few times what the typical programmer in the organization makes.


She's on my list of terrible female CEOs along with

Marissa Mayer

Susan Wojcicki

Elisabeth Holmes

Edit: in case you missed my username I'm a female myself.


Are you pointing out any genuine connections between the management styles or financial decision making of these other CEOs, or bringing them up just because of their shared gender?

Is there any non-sexist reason to have a list of "terrible female CEOs"?


Not a female here, but one reason to have a list is that people are always looking for a relatable role model. As a women you would want to avoid looking at these CEOs as role models. You should have a list of reasons why you're avoiding them and bring it up when somebody else non-critically tries to put them on a pedestal.

EDIT: on the other hand as an immigrant (really my only "discriminated against" feature) I wouldn't search for immigrant CEOs as role models, so I'm not sure if it's worth it to look for women role models as a woman.


Carly Fiorina (HP)


Ginni Rometty ( IBM )


Just for a bit of balance here, Lisa Su seems to be doing pretty well at AMD. Hard to tell how much of it is her vs the legacy of Jim Kellar though.


This is ridiculous. In my world there are many CEOs of "small and medium enterprises" who are happy to earn 500k.


Well, it's hard to convince someone to get rid of themselves...


A reminder to never donate to Mozilla.


I can't help but think we're experiencing the slow demise of Mozilla and have been for a while now. What kind of family needs 2.5M a year?

NGO CEO just sounds like an oxymoron to me too. CEOs make me think of revenue increase, while I assume NGOs have very different goals - or at least they should have. It just seems like a fundamental misalignment.


ere is a (selective) look at the management of Mozilla in the recent past.

From Mitchell Bakers blog https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva... “Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.”

From http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/29/gerv.html

“I bring up Gerv's open-mindedness because I know that many people didn't find him so, but, frankly, I think those folks were mistaken. It is well documented publicly that Gerv held what most would consider particularly “conservative values”. And, I'll continue with more frankness: I found a few of Gerv's views offensive and morally wrong. But Gerv was also someone who could respectfully communicate his views. I never felt the need to avoid speaking with him or otherwise distance myself. Even if a particular position offended me, it was nevertheless clear to me that Gerv had come to his conclusions by starting from his (a priori) care and concern for all of humanity. Also, I could simply say to Gerv: I really disagree with that so much, and if it became clear our views were just too far apart to productively discuss the matter further, he'd happily and collaboratively find another subject for us to discuss. Gerv was a reasonable man. He could set aside fundamental disagreements and find common ground to talk with, collaborate with, and befriend those who disagreed with him. That level of kindness and openness is rarely seen in our current times.”

Here is an article another person who knew Gervase Markham who refutes Mitchell Bakers account https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/ . Worth a read.

Brendan Eich on the jump in executive share since he was let go: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629

Here is Brokedamouth on the two class system now at Mozilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061500 Comment replicated here (it is worth looking at the whole discussion): “I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families - many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic culture, all around.”

Shown here is the trustworthiness of the current CEO, having a go at someone because their opinions disagreed with theirs, this is straight after his death when he couldn't defend himself. The people who knew him have a very different opinion on what he was like compared to her, and it can be seen what changed with how executives were treated compared to the rest of the employees.


Answering this question directly is a such an obvious trap, I'm surprised they fell for it.


Most of "Quantum" has been just solid engineering work on Gecko. Servo tech, in the form of Stylo, helped a bit, WebRender will help a bit more but has been mostly developed in the context of Gecko for years. "Servo is the only reason I've been using Firefox again" is not accurate at all.


> Really seems like Mozilla should be turned into a CO-OP or something.

I wonder if the people being fired would be sufficiently equipped to do that themselves. Though losing access to the branding may not be workable.


Hmmm... if they could raise money, Servo and the "rust" link could have decent brand backing... Many alpha-geeks know of it.


Yeah, you're probably right especially considering rust. Maybe they can crowdfund it. I think a lot of us and many others using OSS would pitch in to see that happen.


Same. As someone building a web app, the existence of good non-Blink/Webkit browsers is matter of importance to me, and I'd happily help to fund alternatives.


WebCore is already far diverged from Blink, and V8 was made from the scratch. WebKit is a solid alternative to Chromium.


At this rate, the name is starting to become associated with incompetence, so maybe a fork with a new name might be a good idea.

A co-op would make for an interesting business model for a FOSS company. Has this been tried before? Are there any well known cases out there?


The atrocious management is the main reason I refuse to donate a cent to Mozilla. I have no problem donating monthly to Blender and Godot, even though I don't use those nearly as much as Firefox. I would love to support the developers if they made a fork that was actually supported by the community.


Especially problematic is that there is no way to donate to Firefox. None. Neither is there way to donate to Rust. As a result, I donate to Zig, but not to Rust.


The same seems true for many projects under the Apache Software Foundation banner. You can donate to the ASF, but not to (most? many?) individual projects. Might be nice for these types of foundations to update their donations policy. Support project-specific donations, and maybe take some % to support the parent foundation's working.


I don’t have any negative association with the Firefox name (yet) but I definitely do with the Mozilla name.


Time to fork it


Is the Servo originated engine ( WebRender) doing that well in Firefox? Feels like it's very slow work to make it enabled by default in stable and the speedups haven't been yhat great, meanwhile there are basically 2 very different modes that they have to support and maintain.

(this is just because GPU drivers are so flaky afaict)


It took a long time, but WebRender is now enabled everywhere if you are on Windows 10 (and not on battery power). Current status here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where


It's enabled on Windows 10 but unfinished on all other platforms:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where


replying to myself, apparently there's a software based webrender code path in developent too, maybe the long term plan is to drop the non-webrender code paths and just fall back to sw-webrender on setups where there are GPU driver problems?


> How are these CEO’s chosen?

Well obviously the most important factor is making sure they haven’t donated money to any of the wrong political causes.


Confirmation from a person on the Mozilla's (former) threat management team:

>They killed entire threat management team. Mozilla is now without detection and incident response. >Tristan, Alicia, Lucius, even our new director are gone

https://nitter.net/MichalPurzynski/status/129322057088506265...

I wonder how Tor will handle this...


This is a weird phenomenon I've been seeing in some tech companies - getting rid of security ops people because technically you can link security to other BU's, like dev or even IT.

Just looking at Mozilla, there seems to be a lot of security engineers, who are probably going to have to swallow this area of responsbility.

Thing is that even in very mature organizations, preventive actions are not and are unlikely to ever be good enough to not have any need for detection / IR specialists.


Is Mozilla trying to kill Firefox? Without an active threat management team, it would be irresponsible to recommend Firefox to any of my less technical friends.

Nowadays, a dedicated, excellent security team is table stakes for a web browser engine.


They are not responsible for firefox itself but the infrastructure surrounding it from that thread.


That to me reads as the build servers, etc. How is that not responsible for a safe binary?


Yea they are surely moving to webkit after this lmao, no more funding for servo


No comment on the firing of the security response teams, but isn't Servo pretty much a "finished proof of concept" since quite some time? Hasn't the techniques it pioneered been integrated, as far as possible, into Firefox?

When it began, the word was that Servo would be the next rendering engine. Some time later the message became that it was a "testing ground" whose lessons would be incorporated into Firefox but that it would never become a production ready engine by itself. If that is so, then essentially Mozilla have cut an R&D project. Whether that is still as useful to Firefox as it was in earlier years is something that only the core Firefox engineers can answers. Regardless one feels that they might kept Servo and let HR or marketing take the hit.


That's exactly right, at least up to the last sentence.


Servo? The future of Firefox if it wants to have a future?

How about the management resigns for 10 years of terrible decisions?


Exactly! (sigh)


A tragic example of the principal-agent problem in action. These people took over a nonprofit, gave themselves millions, and have just killed the team that was doing the best job furthering the organization’s mission (preventing a browser monoculture). Just brutal.

It’s an old story - an organization does good work, allowing it to raise money, attracting administrators, who hire more administrators and take all the money. The same happens in universities and public companies. I don’t know how, but we have to find a way to keep people from latching on and sucking the blood out of our institutions like this.


>These people took over a nonprofit, gave themselves millions

It's more complicated than that: the current CEO of Mozilla has been involved at a high level from the start:

>In November 1994, Baker was hired as one of the first employees of the legal department of Netscape Communications Corporation. . . . She was involved with the Mozilla project from the outset, writing both the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License. In February 1999, Baker became the Chief Lizard Wrangler (general manager) of mozilla.org, the division of Netscape that coordinated the Mozilla open source project.

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

Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending this CEO's recent performance.


It's very common when a company or organization loses its original founders. The admins and middle managers just don't have the same driving forces or motivations.


"the team that was doing the best job furthering the organization’s mission" is the Gecko team. That team is still largely there.

Servo is/was cool, and some cool stuff that originated in Servo made it into Gecko, but make no mistake that Gecko and Gecko developers contribute far more to the open Web than Servo ever did.


Mozilla also fired #1 contributor to Wasmtime, while saying there are "vast new areas" (their words, not mine) beyond the web and giving Wasmtime as an example(!!!). This is a tragic comedy.


That's dissapointing. Wasm/Wasi is what got me interested in Web again.

Do you have source on that?



I followed the other thread today and this came up there as well. This is the first time I have considered not using Firefox as my web browser since it has existed. Not because I want to, but because it may simply not exist.

This is terrifying and I feel powerless to do anything about it.

Are there alternatives? How do I support Firefox-the-browser and the people who make it?


Chromium-based forks like Brave or Edge or straight up Chrome. Personally I use Brave as it's privacy focused and crypto friendly.


Brave has a terrible track record for a relatively new browser. See the affiliate injection drama.


I don’t care about crypto and I don’t have any interest in a browser based around advertising. I’ve been willing to pay more for Firefox than I do for Netflix for literally years. I’ve never been given the option AFAIK.

Is there a Firefox foundation I can contribute to?


I mean you gotta give credit to Brave and BAT for at least trying to shake up the ad revenue model that makes the web a tracking nightmare.


Mozilla is the non-profit that supports Firefox development. What are you asking? Why they don't have a subscription plan? They do have a monthly donation form: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount...


That’s a donation to Mozilla, not to Firefox specifically.

I don’t want a VPN. I don’t want Pocket. I want Firefox.


Who wants speed and security in their browser anyway? These do nothing to justify a CEO's pay, much better to sack those pesky developers and focus on strategic partnerships which contribute to the bottom line


I am curious how COVID impacted a company like Mozilla? Their main revenue comes from search partnerships, there were more people at home searching things during lockdown. In the internal message Mitchell Baker said:

“We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands. But COVID-19 has accelerated the need and magnified the depth for these changes. Our pre-COVID plan is no longer workable. We have talked about the need for change — including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring. Today these changes become real.”


Internet traffic hasn't dropped. See the Google IPv6 statistics for example. Mozilla's current trajectory has nothing to do with COVID. If anything it should have helped them as people working from home probably have more control over what software they can install vs workstations in the office.

The fact that Baker seriously brings up COVID shows why Mozilla has problems.


This is so sad…those two teams represented a major part of Mozilla’s initiative to make their browser secure. Maybe they won’t be immediately missed, but I’m sure they’ll be feeling the effects in the future.


I said this in the other discussion about Mozilla firing, but I don't think Mozilla management cares about Firefox.

From a business perspective I get it, Firefox must be expensive to maintain, with no clear way to monetize it when the search engine money dry up. Still, their main focus should be Firefox and finding a way to make their most successful project profitable. Skimping on security seem to be the wrong approach.


Skimping on security and removing the thing that made Firefox at least as fast as the competition...

What options do we have now then?

Because I'm surely not going to skimp on either of those things.


The browser that was built from scratch by open-source volunteers, before the distraction of Netscape releasing their code: Konqueror.


Konqueror is at this point just one of many WebKit browsers. Last time I checked (2011 when having a chat with one of the devs) they had two devs working on it in their sparetime, which is clearly not enough for a project of that scale. Some time after that, Konqueror switched from KHTML to WebKit as its default rendering engine, and at this point, I don't think KHTML is around anymore (or if it is, it's only around in kdelibs to satisfy API compatibility requirements).


Konqueror never had more than about five developers at a time, and yet managed to build a better browser than anyone else - by keeping the codebase clean and well structured, and by being able to welcome outside contributions in a way that Mozilla never managed.

WebKit is KHTML, and since (as you say) it's the upstream rendering engine for many browsers, it makes sense for it to live in a "neutral" place; it's still an open-source project, and of course at this point it's had many contributions from outside KDE - which is how things are supposed to work.

If you prefer another WebKit-based browser then by all means use it - I've yet to find any that match Konqueror though. Just things like the integrated shortcuts from the context menu are better than anything else offers.


I'm considering giving Vivaldi (created by ex-Opera founder and CEO) a shot. Yes, it's another Chromium-based browser and it's not open source, but neither was Opera back when I used it (version 9 & 10).


While Vivaldi is not open source, they do provide the source code in tarballs: https://help.vivaldi.com/article/is-vivaldi-open-source/


As far as I understand, they only provide the code which the they are required to (e.g. by Chromium's license). Also: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source/


Brave, run by - wait for it - Mozilla's old CEO, is the best alternative right now.

It's a shame this is happening at Mozilla. I was also quite shocked by their recent article to "safely return to shared memory between tabs", which I immediately thought was a bad idea.

Lo and behold, a mere week after that update, I found that Firefox was eating up my entire memory and making the PC perform poorly.

Shared memory is what made the old Firefox hang so much - I can't believe they thought it was a good idea. I've always believed Chrome's per process tab idea was brilliant, even if it uses a little more memory on average.

I still prefer the security benefits and stability of that architecture over Firefox randomly hanging and peaking in memory use due to memory leaks even if it can use slightly less memory on average.



2 of those are simply bugs and the 3rd one was later fixed as well: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10129


Wait, Servo is the core browser engine of Firefox isn't it? Do they intend to become FF another Webkit-based browser?


Not that I expect it but the idea is very intriguing at second thought.

What many people are (reasonably) afraid of at the moment is a de-facto monopoly of Webkit controlled by Google. So that Google is in a position to shape the web for their sole business benefit and against the benefit of the rest of us.

If FF joined the Webkit camp as an active driver, the monopoly (in terms of control) would be mostly gone and be replaced by what I'd call a standard and its broadly spread implementation. A web-standard implementation followed by all major vendors.

Of course branches are likely to divert after a while, but for brief moment in time, everything in web-land would be rainbows and unicorns.


> what I'd call a standard

Um, just calling a monopoly a "standard" doesn't make it so. There are already standards for the the web that are defined by the W3C. It is a win for a standard if there are multiple implementations rather than just one, not the other way round as you are claiming.


Read again. That's not what I did. Search for the word "control".


> de-facto monopoly of Webkit controlled by Google

WebKit is controlled almost entirely by Apple.


Chrome and Safari all belong to the same family. Blink is a fork of Webkit. Making Chrome the strongest family member in terms of market share.

Also i strongly suppose parent was refering to Edge migrating to Chromium.


WebCore is already far diverged from Blink, and V8 was made from the scratch. WebKit is a solid alternative to Chromium.


Google uses blink, not webkit. Blink has diverged from webkit by a lot.


Yeah. Rainbows and unicorns.

Ask Edge devs about Google services incompatibility.


What do you expect them to answer? Also I cannot see how this has anything to do with my point.


Probably a list of oopsies, i.e. making Google services work with things that aren't Google Chrome.

Even if they are the same bloody thing inside.

Your point was Mozilla could be a strong voice in WebStandards? There won't be any standards. It will be whatever Google does.


> Your point was Mozilla could be a strong voice in WebStandards?

Yes, kind of. One among multiple strong-ish actors. So Google would have the Edge team and Mozilla against them. My reasoning was there would be more counter-weight than with Mozilla doing their thing while slowly being marginalized.

But perhaps I was too optimistic regarding the world's dependance on Google Services (or rather as the worlds perceives it).

Independently of this hypothetical scenario I hope (and still belieive) there are still enough circles remaining which aren't that much associated with Google Services to sustain a user base for alternative products. Rainbows and unicorns again...


> So Google would have the Edge team and Mozilla against them.

<INSERT J Jonah Jameson laughing>

That's like Goliath fighting two baby kittens.

> I hope (and still belieive) there are still enough circles remaining which aren't that much associated with Google Services to sustain a user base for alternative products. Rainbows and unicorns again...

At this point, I think the only hope I have is that EU, basically does a successful anti-trust lawsuit, or if someone invents something else that destroys Google, in the same way mobile destroyed Microsoft's grip on computing market.


Firefox's engine is still Gecko.

Servo is/was kind of a clean slate reimplementation of an engine in Rust. Some parts of Servo have been carved off and implemented into Firefox, though.


I hope not. The biggest reason I use firefox is to avoid the webkit/blink monoculture. Also, I really liked the idea of a browser written in rust, with the additional safety that brings.


or blink


They should fire “woke” CEO and hire technical CEO with a vision instead.


Baker has been with Mozilla since the very beginning. I don’t how she is being “woke” here.


She is not being woke here. What is happening now is the effect of years of her prioritizing diversity and firing any developer with remotely conservative views over building the “best” browser. (whatever best means)


Well, she did start the layoff message with something about systemic racism.

But you're right in general. To anyone who thinks Mozilla might build politically neutral products, case for the prosecution:

https://i.imgur.com/FN2L5ed.png

It's obviously very problematic for the CEO of a browser company to have such overt politics. Who can take Mozilla seriously when they claim to be defending openness and freedom on the internet? Their CEO writes op-eds about the problem of online misinformation whilst blaming her own layoffs on COVID. Actions don't match stated principles.


Yikes, that screenshot looks pretty bad. Are you sure they are not tailoring it to the individual users' tastes? This can't be the default of their recommendation engine...


Why would someone bother to make that series of screenshots if it was something they'd explicitly requested?

Still, I figured I'd check to see what I get. I can't figure out how to get these "Recommended by Pocket" sites on my Firefox new tab page, but I only just signed up, so perhaps it takes a while to appear.

The Pocket Discover tab on their website seems like the closest thing to it. It has an extremely small collection of sources for its stories and with absolutely no range of perspectives at all. They're all metropolitan left outlets. I get: the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Quartz, James Clear (?), the Verge, Vox, the Washington Post, the Guardian and some Medium articles.

So, pretty good if you live in New York or Washington, I guess. I don't even live in America so this selection isn't so hot. Here's a sample of recommended story headlines:

"The Doomsday Invention: Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?"

"America's gun problem, explained"

"How exercise shapes you, far beyond the gym"

"Buying organic veggies at the supermarket is a waste of money"

"The true cost of being a black teacher"

"A pregnant woman with COVID-19 was dying, with one decision, her doctor's saved three lives"

"The rise of American authoritarianism" (it's about Trump, of course)

"One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgement of the child-free"

There are a few stories that might interest me here that I didn't cite, like "How vulnerable is GPS" (in the New York Times, of course). I personally seem to get more self-help and less woke content than in the screenshot I posted. But you get the idea. If you hate Trump, love any publication with New York in the title, eat quinoa, capitalise Black, and think children are a burden, you'll love Pocket. If you aren't like that, it has nothing for you.

Oddly, Pocket seems really buggy. A lot of recommended stories under Discover that come from Medium don't seem to have scraped the title correctly, so the title ends up being a raw HTTPS URL, complete with fragment specifier. One recommended story is just "Redirecting..." so they don't even follow redirects properly.

It feels like this experience sums up Mozilla under Mitchell Baker.


Fundamentally, whether you use Firefox or not, having an organisation that has user's interests at heart, and is not a major global corp, developing a major browser, is something we all need. It ensures that the evolution of the web is in a sensible direction. Mozilla has been an important input in WebAssembly, for example. Thus, Mozilla's problems are all of our problems.

Mozilla has two major problems though. Firstly, it largely relies on what is eventually advertising revenue, in a time when users are increasingly using ad-blockers etc and privacy laws reduce the value of targeted ads. Secondly, it has little traction on mobile, where iOS basically just has Safari because of Apple's rules, and Android comes with Chrome very much set as the default (and few people change it).

I don't really buy that COVID has made much difference. I think that, ultimately, the two problems above are the issues, and I'm not sure what can be done about them.

Even if Firefox were replaced with a shiny-new brilliant FLOSS browser, we still need an organisation behind it that drives web standards in the right direction (and I think they do need to have a major browser to do that as effectively as Mozilla has), and it still needs the funding to do it, so would still face the same issues as Mozilla, even if it weren't Mozilla.

Someone should be taking Google and Apple to task over bindling their browser and not enabling proper choice on a fair basis, as the EU did to MS (and actually MS has stopped offering a fair choice of browser too, where you choose a default and it is installed, rather than have a default you have to change, that they keep changong back in updates).


Mozilla was always the «good security and tech, bad management» to me. I hope they don’t manage the tech away this time.


Is someone influencing Mozilla leadership hoping to kill Mozilla off through bad decisions?


Google Chromium has won. Microsoft gave up on edgehtml, and from the recent layoffs it seems Firefox is giving up on Firefox's competitive edge. No more devtools investment, no more servo means more of us will be using the fantastic chrome dev tools. This in turn means we won't be actively ensuring our sites work on Firefox as well as they do on chrome. This means even more decline for Firefox.

With the recent layoff decision, I feel Mozilla CEO is pulling another death from the inside like Marissa Mayor did to Yahoo. You can't abandon the one thing that people actually like Mozilla for and chase a shiny egg.


> The VPN work, along with its Pocket service to save and ? > recommend news stories and other online content, is in a > product focus beyond Firefox where Mozilla is trying to find > new revenue sources.

Sure but I don't think Pocket has had a meaningful update in years.


Like all of them?


Yes.


What is the future of the project then?


I wonder if they could just move Mozilla out of USA, pay less for entire workforce incl. management and still build great things? The reason they spend so much is because the have to compete with FANGs.


I cancelled donations to Mozilla Foundation. Servo is important.


Do we have a source on this ?



Time to go back to Chrome :(


After years, I switched from chrome to Safari. Takes some getting used to, but now I'm quit happy with it. YMMV


Do you mean because Firefox is in danger and you believe Chrome is your second best option? Or do you mean this as some form of protest?

Changing browsers only hurts Firefox.


At this point, what is the point of supporting Firefox?

The management obviously doesn't care, and it's probably matter of time, before Firefox moves to Blink.


Really? The reason to support Firefox is a counter to the Chrome monoculture. And because I actually like Firefox the browser? With the exception of Linux it is the largest open source project I actually use, and the one I use the most frequently.

Mozilla’s leadership is clearly motivated by money. I will gladly pay them for Firefox.


At this point, I think it's inevitable that Chrome monoculture will happen.

I like Firefox too, but unless you have a spare hundred million of USD lying around, the easiest way to maximize revenue is to minimize workforce. By moving to Blink.


What?! Mozilla funds Google in order to control web standards, and to defend themselves against antitrust suits.

Google doesn't need Mozilla to increase their search marketshare. People who care about privacy switch to things such as DuckDuckGo. When Firefox had Yahoo as the default search engine, many users switched back to Google.


I would rather use Edge


Edge is now based on Chromium [1]. Welcome to the future, where you can choose from Chrome (Chromium), Edge (Chromium) and Opera (also Chromium).

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...


do all of them use google extension store to install adblockers like Brave (also Chromium)?


They have their own stores apparently (at least the user-facing front).

https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/Microsoft-Edge-Ex...

https://addons.opera.com/en/


Brave's shields are built-in, no extension from the Chrome Web Store is involved.


>I would rather use Edge

You should rethink that.

>"We find that the browsers split into three distinct groups from this privacy perspective. In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex."

https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-professor-says-edge-is-the-w...


It does look promising.

The surprising thing about Edge is it actually starts and is interactable faster (~1s) than Win10's Photo Viewer (3-5s)... on an SSD.


This reminds me of a semi recent story about Firefox removing an old feature because it affected startup speed.

My basic thought was: I essentially always have my browser open. What do I care about a few hundred milliseconds, or even a few seconds, on something I do so rarely?


Which is now Chrome!


I love Firefox, and it's been my main browser for 15+ years, but starting today I'm going to research alternatives.

It's hardly the first time that Mozilla has screwed up royally, but in general I have tried to defend them against most criticisms in light of the circumstances around browser competition (or lack thereof). But I'm not sure I can do that anymore though, because this is such a bad sign. This CEO and her administrator underlings are useless and expendable in comparison to the people who have actually make Firefox, and I hope they know that.


I don’t understand how changing browsers accomplishes anything? It’s clear the leadership doesn’t care about Firefox. You’re just making their case for them that Firefox isn’t worth the effort.


I do plan to stick with Firefox in the meantime until the project itself degrades. But it's time to see what else is out there so that I begin supporting another browser with a viable future, in the case the Firefox might not be around anymore or might not meet the criteria I have for a browser.


Does Mozilla make anything that people use, other than Firefox?


Thunderbird, and as mentioned below, their HTML documentation is really good.


Oh right, that's actually my email client! But didn't Mozilla try to kill it a few years ago? Ah yes

https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-scraps-thunderbird-dev...

> Mitchell Baker, the Mozilla Foundation's chair, said on Friday that Thunderbird 's users seemed happy with the program being the way it is.

A pattern seems to emerge.


println!("Perhaps Rust?");


I use their HTML documentation quite a lot while developing for Chrome.


It prepares one for the almost inevitable moment when they will start compromising on their standards in order to get more revenue.

Spoiler: the only other privacy game in town is Safari. Brave has been caught doing some controversial things and Chrome is the thing everyone was running away from in the first place. Edge was found to have one of the worst possible telemetry from all browsers.


For me this is a reason to buckle down on our Firefox support. The leadership will change, but Firefox will outlive them, even if it was no longer supported by Mozilla.


Firefox on macOS has some bizarre longstanding annoyances that make you wonder if they actually use their own product.

• No Dark Mode support

• File Save dialogs not remembering the last folder

• Download prompts constantly asking for what you want to do with the file

• Infuriating Preferences UI (count the number of clicks it takes to delete specific cookies, and no way to add new file types to make them always get saved or opened)


Yes, but for obvious reasons Windows is absolute #1 priority for Firefox. Do you honestly think that's the wrong priority?


> starting today I'm going to research alternatives.

Bromite: https://www.bromite.org

Ungoogled Chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium


I'm sad that Android 10+ isn't supported for the WebView of Bromite. I used it for quite a while.


I have also been switching on and off from firefox especially on mobile as the mobile firefox hasn't worked perfectly - however by using the add-ons the experience was quite good.

Few days ago the mobile firefox upgraded itself to new version that doesn't support most of the add-ons anymore except few of the big ones - "The recommended plugins" so most of the things why I wanted to use firefox is gone.

Now I hear that they have fired both the security response team (really bad on the mobile if the security is not there) and the next generation rendering engine team (really bad if the speed is not there).

Time to go back to Brave and not look back. The management should be fired, they have majorly fcked up the browser I would really want to use.


I understand your point. However I don't think there are any effects right now that warrants changing browsers just yet. There is still a security team and Firefox is actively tested. When over time Firefox can't keep up with its only competition and performance suffers noticeably, then I might consider changing.

Until then, the Firefox container tabs feature is invaluable for software development, software testing and privacy.


RIP Rust


rust has enough momentum now it will probably survive. Although losing one of the biggest projects that uses it, will certainly be a be a heavy blow, and probably slow down development.


There's no reason to think this will impact Rust at all. Rust is now spread far beyond Servo and Mozilla is no longer employing most of the Rust developers. This has been the case for several years, AFAIU.


And big companies with a lot of money, such as Microsoft, seem to be starting to use Rust. If I was in a leadership position at Microsoft, I would be looking into hiring the Servo devs that just got fired.


The impact will be more because Servo is a big project that is pushing the boundaries of what is possible with rust, so language design, the standard library, and the ecosystem are influenced by what the problems that the server team runs into. For example, the url crate is largely driven by Servo's need for a standards-conforming url API.




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