5 ms·

Mozilla does so many things. I am afraid they loose their focus on one thing they could have done best. Make the best open source browser of the world. Look how

Mozilla does so many things. I am afraid they loose their focus on one thing they could have done best. Make the best open source browser of the world. Look how they abandoned firefox OS phones. They shouldn't hope to become Google by doing almost everything Google does. Google is way bigger and has better Engineers.

midgetjones 11y ago
I agree with your general point, but saying Google has better engineers is a bit of an assumption.
- mundanevoice 11y ago
  I don't think it's an assumption. Just look at the contributions of some of the senior staff engineers such as Brad Fitzpatrick for GO, Jeff dean to name a few on their projects. I don't see any parallel at Mozilla who could rival them. Well, for really ambitious software projects, you really need someone who has tonnes of experience and can write really good code. Not to say that Mozilla doesn't have any, but I think they are not in the same league.
  - Terretta 11y ago
    > Well, for really ambitious software projects, you really need someone who has tonnes of experience and can write really good code. Perhaps more important is permission to explore and invent and follow through.
    - wolfgke 11y ago
      How do you come to this conclusion?
    - mundanevoice 11y ago
      Permission to explore and invent sounds nice and it is very educational. However, It is not a guarantee a good quality product. You need correct decisions and architecture to write any complex software and experience matters a lot in this space.
  - espadrine 11y ago
    Both Go and Jeff Dean's projects are meant for server-side work, so it is unsurprising that Mozilla is not a rival in this space. However, it turns out they are heavily innovating in the same space as Go with their stunning work on Rust. Additionally, they are building world-class next-gen products with their work on Servo and Daala. Not to mention fantastic tools such as http://rr-project.org/ http://rr-project.org/. I believe your assessment of Mozilla's engineering talent is inaccurate.
    - mundanevoice 11y ago
      Well, you could say Servo is world class, but on what basis? Rust looks very nice but hardly anyone outside Mozilla is actually using in production as compared to Golang which has a very good adaptation in the community.
      - whyever 11y ago
        By that logic PHP is a much better language than Go, and has better engineers.
        mundanevoice 11y ago
        I am comparing Go and Rust, not PHP and Go.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  - kibwen 11y ago
    I can't speak for Mozilla at large, but I've had the pleasure of witnessing both Mozilla's Rust and Servo teams at work and can assure you that they are at the top of their league. To pick just two examples, Alex Crichton is an unstoppable machine ricocheting around the compiler, standard libraries, package manager, various miscellaneous tooling, and dozens of libraries in the broader Rust ecosystem leaving patches in his wake (all while finding time to perform legendarily detailed code reviews); meanwhile, Patrick Walton is an awe-inspiring graphics programmer and browser engineer whom I am convinced is among the top five humans with back-to-front understandings of the CSS specification, and by now is likely the world's foremost expert on cross-browser CSS quirks and edge cases. TL;DR: I'm a squeeing fanboy for a lot of the people in Mozilla Research.
    - mundanevoice 11y ago
      Well, you have a point but you see, both Rust and Servo are at the nascent stage. We still have to see widespread adoption of Rust. Servo is definitely way behind any browser engine in terms of features and specs and rewriting from scratch might also introduce new bugs(happens with every software product of considerable size). To summarise, both of these are very nice and ambitious goals but I really hope they turn into something nice rather than just an ambitious project(Servo).
      - zepto 11y ago
        How does this point about adoption have anything to do with the parent's point about the capability of the engineers?
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      > whom I am convinced is among the top five humans with back-to-front understandings of the CSS specification I'm flattered, but I don't even rank among the top five CSS wizards in this building, much less on the planet :)
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    On the other hand, do you have experience with Android tooling or its APIs?
    - mundanevoice 11y ago
      Yes, I am familiar with them. The tooling has been really good of late. Android Studio has really improved and it is no longer as bad as it was with Eclipse.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        I bet you don't use the NDK then.
        mundanevoice 11y ago
        Nope, I don't.
        pjmlp 11y ago
        Then as info: - Gradle still doesn't provide half of the functionality of the ndk-build scripts - Studio still not up to what Eclipse CDT provided - We NDK users were left dry while they figure out how to provide proper support For both NDK and SDK, lots of bugs to choose from: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list Then going back to the SDK, any professional Android developer can enumerate lots of issues when you need to get information. Also I am yet to see a release of the support library that isn't followed by complaints in G+.
        mundanevoice 11y ago
        I sympathise with your problem and I understand it must be pretty shitty. But Java is the main language for Android, C/C++ support is via NDK. Since a majority of devs write in Java, naturally more emphasis is given on the Java ecosystem and not the NDK, which is definitely sad. Also, what big Open Source project doesn't have issues? Could you name one?
  - MatthewPhillips 11y ago
    > I don't see any parallel at Mozilla who could rival them. Are you serious? Patrick Walton, Alon Zakai just to name a couple.
digi_owl 11y ago
You see this across the FOSS world these days. Its not enough to hammer out golden code apparently, it has to be some kind of social agenda behind it.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
So, they should only work on a browser? Why? Why can't they work on all these different things? Lots of great things come from thousands of failures.
thristian 11y ago
The thing is, making "the best open source browser of the world" has never been a priority for Mozilla. Their stated goal has always been "to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web". The first thing they made was a web-browser, because they had all the pieces and all the people right there, they had a good idea how to do it, and because the biggest threat to openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web at the time was the dominance of Internet Explorer. These days, Mozilla must be less focussed because there's no single dominant threat to focus on. There's things like video patent codecs, DRM, promoting HTTPS, the ever-increasing complexity of the browser stack, the enticing power of native mobile apps, the lack of an awesome funding model for freely-distributed content, the return of walled-garden content platforms... They could focus on making Firefox awesome and abandon all the rest of those issues, then we'd have a nice browser but we might have a much less interesting and useful Internet to browse with it. I do not envy Mozilla's leadership in the slightest right now, they're making a bunch of very tough decisions and nobody will know if they did the right thing for maybe five or ten years.
- mundanevoice 11y ago
  > These days, Mozilla must be less focussed because there's no single dominant threat to focus on. I don't think this is the right way. Having two much on the plate can actually be negative and you might end up doing nothing really well. I don't think that Mozilla should only be working on Firefox, but rather select few more which manage to do properly. We need a focused Mozilla, not a scattered Mozilla which tend to do everything that's a FAD (For eg: IOT)
StevePerkins 11y ago
Every year as December 31st looms, I sit down and parcel out my end-of-year donations to organizations I care about. Wikipedia, EFF, and of course some non-tech-related charities. Every year, I weigh whether I should throw some bucks to the Mozilla Foundation. I've been using their browsers, under one name or another, for over 20 years since the day I first discovered the web. It's been the most important piece of software in my life. I appreciate what they (along with Apache and BSD) have done in providing an open source counterexample for the GPL, and opening the door for open source in corporate software development. Moreover, I worry about their long-term financial viability. Yahoo is NOT going to be around in its current form forever. I'm not sure whether there's any other "anchor sponsor" on the horizon that would fund Mozilla at the same level as Google or Yahoo without forcing compromises in principles. However, I still just haven't been able to make myself click the donate button. The things that I ACTUALLY care about from Mozilla (i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird) are things that fell into their lap from Netscape back in 1998, and which they've incrementally tweaked or re-worked in the two decades since. I don't feel a sense that anyone in a leadership position at Mozilla really cares about those things. I think they see them as "legacy software", providing only a "brand" to be "leveraged" in squeezing a bunch of other junk onto their resumes. They work on a lot of interesting technical things behind the scenes, but little of it appears to have traction or visibility. The things that ARE promoted by leadership and marketing are "day-late-and-dollar-short" imitations of whatever Google did a few years prior. I don't care if you create a "me too" copy of Android without any phone carriers to sell it. I don't care if you create a "me too" Raspberry Pi, that will be lost in a sea of other coming-soon hobby boards by the time it's actually released. The Wikipedia article on Mozilla suggests that their annual budget has grown from $2 million initially, to over $300 million today. You know what? They were a better and more RELEVANT organization when they were closer to the $2 million mark. I don't want to donate money so that a band of Google-reject executives can pad their resumes with nonsense and shut down Thunderbird. I almost kinda HOPE that their funding collapses in the wake of Yahoo's death, so that the leadership bails and they're forced to downsize into something sensible and focused on the flagships. I just hope that the perhaps-inevitable reformation can happen gracefully without being so jarring as to end Mozilla altogether.
- mikegioia 11y ago

midgetjones 11y ago

I agree with your general point, but saying Google has better engineers is a bit of an assumption.

mundanevoice 11y ago
I don't think it's an assumption. Just look at the contributions of some of the senior staff engineers such as Brad Fitzpatrick for GO, Jeff dean to name a few on their projects. I don't see any parallel at Mozilla who could rival them. Well, for really ambitious software projects, you really need someone who has tonnes of experience and can write really good code. Not to say that Mozilla doesn't have any, but I think they are not in the same league.
- Terretta 11y ago
  > Well, for really ambitious software projects, you really need someone who has tonnes of experience and can write really good code. Perhaps more important is permission to explore and invent and follow through.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    How do you come to this conclusion?
  - mundanevoice 11y ago
    Permission to explore and invent sounds nice and it is very educational. However, It is not a guarantee a good quality product. You need correct decisions and architecture to write any complex software and experience matters a lot in this space.
- espadrine 11y ago
  Both Go and Jeff Dean's projects are meant for server-side work, so it is unsurprising that Mozilla is not a rival in this space. However, it turns out they are heavily innovating in the same space as Go with their stunning work on Rust. Additionally, they are building world-class next-gen products with their work on Servo and Daala. Not to mention fantastic tools such as http://rr-project.org/ http://rr-project.org/. I believe your assessment of Mozilla's engineering talent is inaccurate.
  - mundanevoice 11y ago
    Well, you could say Servo is world class, but on what basis? Rust looks very nice but hardly anyone outside Mozilla is actually using in production as compared to Golang which has a very good adaptation in the community.
    - whyever 11y ago
      By that logic PHP is a much better language than Go, and has better engineers.
      - mundanevoice 11y ago
        I am comparing Go and Rust, not PHP and Go.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- kibwen 11y ago
  I can't speak for Mozilla at large, but I've had the pleasure of witnessing both Mozilla's Rust and Servo teams at work and can assure you that they are at the top of their league. To pick just two examples, Alex Crichton is an unstoppable machine ricocheting around the compiler, standard libraries, package manager, various miscellaneous tooling, and dozens of libraries in the broader Rust ecosystem leaving patches in his wake (all while finding time to perform legendarily detailed code reviews); meanwhile, Patrick Walton is an awe-inspiring graphics programmer and browser engineer whom I am convinced is among the top five humans with back-to-front understandings of the CSS specification, and by now is likely the world's foremost expert on cross-browser CSS quirks and edge cases. TL;DR: I'm a squeeing fanboy for a lot of the people in Mozilla Research.
  - mundanevoice 11y ago
    Well, you have a point but you see, both Rust and Servo are at the nascent stage. We still have to see widespread adoption of Rust. Servo is definitely way behind any browser engine in terms of features and specs and rewriting from scratch might also introduce new bugs(happens with every software product of considerable size). To summarise, both of these are very nice and ambitious goals but I really hope they turn into something nice rather than just an ambitious project(Servo).
    - zepto 11y ago
      How does this point about adoption have anything to do with the parent's point about the capability of the engineers?
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    > whom I am convinced is among the top five humans with back-to-front understandings of the CSS specification I'm flattered, but I don't even rank among the top five CSS wizards in this building, much less on the planet :)
- pjmlp 11y ago
  On the other hand, do you have experience with Android tooling or its APIs?
  - mundanevoice 11y ago
    Yes, I am familiar with them. The tooling has been really good of late. Android Studio has really improved and it is no longer as bad as it was with Eclipse.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      I bet you don't use the NDK then.
      - mundanevoice 11y ago
        Nope, I don't.
        pjmlp 11y ago
        Then as info: - Gradle still doesn't provide half of the functionality of the ndk-build scripts - Studio still not up to what Eclipse CDT provided - We NDK users were left dry while they figure out how to provide proper support For both NDK and SDK, lots of bugs to choose from: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list Then going back to the SDK, any professional Android developer can enumerate lots of issues when you need to get information. Also I am yet to see a release of the support library that isn't followed by complaints in G+.
        mundanevoice 11y ago
        I sympathise with your problem and I understand it must be pretty shitty. But Java is the main language for Android, C/C++ support is via NDK. Since a majority of devs write in Java, naturally more emphasis is given on the Java ecosystem and not the NDK, which is definitely sad. Also, what big Open Source project doesn't have issues? Could you name one?
- MatthewPhillips 11y ago
  > I don't see any parallel at Mozilla who could rival them. Are you serious? Patrick Walton, Alon Zakai just to name a couple.

digi_owl 11y ago

You see this across the FOSS world these days. Its not enough to hammer out golden code apparently, it has to be some kind of social agenda behind it.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

So, they should only work on a browser? Why? Why can't they work on all these different things? Lots of great things come from thousands of failures.

thristian 11y ago

The thing is, making "the best open source browser of the world" has never been a priority for Mozilla. Their stated goal has always been "to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web". The first thing they made was a web-browser, because they had all the pieces and all the people right there, they had a good idea how to do it, and because the biggest threat to openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web at the time was the dominance of Internet Explorer. These days, Mozilla must be less focussed because there's no single dominant threat to focus on. There's things like video patent codecs, DRM, promoting HTTPS, the ever-increasing complexity of the browser stack, the enticing power of native mobile apps, the lack of an awesome funding model for freely-distributed content, the return of walled-garden content platforms... They could focus on making Firefox awesome and abandon all the rest of those issues, then we'd have a nice browser but we might have a much less interesting and useful Internet to browse with it. I do not envy Mozilla's leadership in the slightest right now, they're making a bunch of very tough decisions and nobody will know if they did the right thing for maybe five or ten years.

mundanevoice 11y ago
> These days, Mozilla must be less focussed because there's no single dominant threat to focus on. I don't think this is the right way. Having two much on the plate can actually be negative and you might end up doing nothing really well. I don't think that Mozilla should only be working on Firefox, but rather select few more which manage to do properly. We need a focused Mozilla, not a scattered Mozilla which tend to do everything that's a FAD (For eg: IOT)

StevePerkins 11y ago

Every year as December 31st looms, I sit down and parcel out my end-of-year donations to organizations I care about. Wikipedia, EFF, and of course some non-tech-related charities. Every year, I weigh whether I should throw some bucks to the Mozilla Foundation. I've been using their browsers, under one name or another, for over 20 years since the day I first discovered the web. It's been the most important piece of software in my life. I appreciate what they (along with Apache and BSD) have done in providing an open source counterexample for the GPL, and opening the door for open source in corporate software development. Moreover, I worry about their long-term financial viability. Yahoo is NOT going to be around in its current form forever. I'm not sure whether there's any other "anchor sponsor" on the horizon that would fund Mozilla at the same level as Google or Yahoo without forcing compromises in principles. However, I still just haven't been able to make myself click the donate button. The things that I ACTUALLY care about from Mozilla (i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird) are things that fell into their lap from Netscape back in 1998, and which they've incrementally tweaked or re-worked in the two decades since. I don't feel a sense that anyone in a leadership position at Mozilla really cares about those things. I think they see them as "legacy software", providing only a "brand" to be "leveraged" in squeezing a bunch of other junk onto their resumes. They work on a lot of interesting technical things behind the scenes, but little of it appears to have traction or visibility. The things that ARE promoted by leadership and marketing are "day-late-and-dollar-short" imitations of whatever Google did a few years prior. I don't care if you create a "me too" copy of Android without any phone carriers to sell it. I don't care if you create a "me too" Raspberry Pi, that will be lost in a sea of other coming-soon hobby boards by the time it's actually released. The Wikipedia article on Mozilla suggests that their annual budget has grown from $2 million initially, to over $300 million today. You know what? They were a better and more RELEVANT organization when they were closer to the $2 million mark. I don't want to donate money so that a band of Google-reject executives can pad their resumes with nonsense and shut down Thunderbird. I almost kinda HOPE that their funding collapses in the wake of Yahoo's death, so that the leadership bails and they're forced to downsize into something sensible and focused on the flagships. I just hope that the perhaps-inevitable reformation can happen gracefully without being so jarring as to end Mozilla altogether.

mikegioia 11y ago