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I worked closely with Mozilla during the first few years of Firefox. It's only the same in name and logo these days. The hard truth is internal and external p
by MozillaEx 11y ago
I worked closely with Mozilla during the first few years of Firefox.
It's only the same in name and logo these days.
The hard truth is internal and external politics in the organization were so toxic senior-level programmers who were more risk averse were pushed out.
Imagine taking C++ pros who advised in the creation of W3C/IEEE/etc drafts, and tossing them out in favor of node.js programmers.
The gray hairs were betrayed in favor of node hipsters. Whatever happened to respecting those who made you.
This hits hard. The truth is Mozilla's days of glory are numbered.
Over the coming years the decline will come to eventually wrestle Firefox out of Mozilla's hands and into a normal open source project.
Was all this office backstabbing worth it?
This is what happens when you lose the hacker ethic. It's disappointing.
- moron4hire 11y agoI think, if you really want to say something, it'd be more appropriate with your real name and as its own blog post, rather than trying to rain on the parade of some not-management-level Mozillians releasing a project.
- MozillaEx 11y agoI want to just program without all the backstabbing and treachery. In this case, the drama at this organization in particular is so intense it manifests itself in the news. The creator of javascript, a pillar of the internet, was publicly humiliated and crucified. Why? They knew his name. They looked up his voting records. That's witchhunting. It's letting a bunch of people in the peanut gallery dictate what goes on - that's not integrity or leadership. I already suffered enough due to office politics, I feel no need to compromise my identity to voice my opinion.
- moron4hire 11y agoIf you just want to program, then why are you leaving comments like this? You're passive aggressive behavior is more office politics.
- gObO 11y agoMaybe because he wants to raise the issue about what is going on? Fight fire with fire, kiddo.
- matthewmacleod 11y agoI want to just program without all the backstabbing and treachery. I mean, for someone who just wants to program you're creating an awful lot of drama. I don't really buy your complaints, which come off as mostly baseless ranting. If I were to read a blog post that raised some of those issues in a constructive manner, I might have more confidence in your legitimacy. As it is, though… I don't really believe you.
- Nadya 11y agoNo comment on their specific claims or validity - but the overarching issue does exist. /r/GitInAction exists specifically to highlight what they are talking about in regards to Open Source projects and, more specifically, GitHub projects where this exact issue is occurring. A bunch of non-programmer busy-bodies opening issues about wording or grammar without so much as submitting a pull-request to fix it (likely because they don't even know how to open a pull-request, because they don't use Git, because they don't actually code using GitHub). It isn't a stretch of the imagination to think a corporation as large as Mozilla has a few of those busy-body types in it. It's turned into internal politics, raising non-issues, and creating a fuss around any wrongthinkers to get them fired or scrutinized. Rather than programming.
- gObO 11y agoHaha yeah because it's not like this is going on everywhere in tech. Nope this is a non-issue and exMozilla is a misogynist racist asshole, how dare he oppose us.
- ihsw 11y agoThat was over a decade ago, things change. Firefox is more relevant now than it was before, I welcome their efforts to change with the times. They are taking massive risks now, simultaneously developing an entirely new programming language (Rust) and building an entirely new browser engine on it (Servo) is ambitious. It is clearly self-evident that it has paid off. There is nothing wrong with node.js programmers, your implication that they're inferior is a broad-sweeping and baseless generalization. The grey hairs are most certainly still around, and they're most definitely well-respected. Rust's C++ roots is evidence of this. Mozilla is flourishing, that cannot be denied. Firefox is a normal open source project, Mozilla receive's contributions from around the globe. The hacker ethic isn't gone, it matured into something better. https://github.com/mozilla/ https://github.com/mozilla/
- Scarbutt 11y agoReal question, how is Mozilla flourishing when its main product, Firefox, has been declining in market share for years?
- darklajid 11y ago'Declining in market share': I assume you count 'Google throws crappy internal ads at every internet user and encourages mum and pop to "upgrade your browser"', right? I find it difficult to see how that can _not_ damage a free market. Mozilla seems to flourish as far as I am concerned: Servo, Rust and Firefox are surprising me time and time again and seem very well received in all my social circles.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bobajeff 11y ago"The hard truth is internal and external politics in the organization were so toxic senior-level programmers who were more risk averse were pushed out." I wish you'd go into a lot more detail than that.
- moron4hire 11y agoI'd like to see it, too. Just not in this thread.
- gObO 11y agowelcome to open sores, where eggplant emoticons get you banned from github and Furfox values hipster node.js developers more than the original core, c++ devs
- jonathonf 11y ago> Over the coming years the decline will come to eventually wrestle Firefox out of Mozilla's hands and into a normal open source project. Please fork it.
- komontu 11y agoSee: Pale Moon. https://www.palemoon.org/ https://www.palemoon.org/
- jonathonf 11y agoI was kind of after a project that could feed back upstream, or provide a little competition in the same way that Firefox does (did?) for Chromium. Palemoon, though a decent fork, doesn't (seem to) have all that much to offer upstream.
- Grue3 11y agoThis. Firefox NEEDS a fork before all the plugins ecosystem is destroyed. There NEEDS to exist at least one browser for hardcore users, that supports actual plugins and not glorified greasemonkey scripts. Otherwise we are screwed.
- Pr0Wolf29 11y agoThis is what happens when you let politics get in the way of programming. There is no evidence of a project that has not lost quality due to politics. Even GNU is often cited as being more complicated and bloated to its competitors. When the previews for Australis came out, I saw far ahead what it seems like no one else saw. I said that it would become something more locked down, reflecting the authoritarian attitude of hipster webdevs, which has been shown with the diminishing customization, and add-on signing. I said it would become a crappy rip-off of Chrome, which is what Australis made it. I said the good programmers would eventually be pushed out by webdevs who were not as good, and here Mozilla is making the Rust language, which is merely a crutch for people not good enough to use C++. So far all of my predictions have come true. There is still hope with Pale Moon, staying true to good design, however my message to you all is simple. Never let politics get in the way of quality software. Thank you.
- jmhain 11y ago> I said the good programmers would eventually be pushed out by webdevs who were not as good, and here Mozilla is making the Rust language, which is merely a crutch for people not good enough to use C++. And C++ is just a crutch for people not good enough to use assembly.
- pcwalton 11y ago> here Mozilla is making the Rust language, which is merely a crutch for people not good enough to use C++. There is, in my experience, zero correlation between programmer skill and frequency of vulnerabilities introduced through memory management problems. In fact, it's often the best programmers who introduce use-after-frees and such, possibly because they're more productive and write more code.