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Mozilla Fires Servo Devs and Security Response Teams
- pletnes 6y agoMozilla was always the «good security and tech, bad management» to me. I hope they don’t manage the tech away this time.
- elcritch 6y agoWhat?! 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.
- guerrilla 6y ago> 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.
- techntoke 6y agoTime to fork it
- elcritch 6y agoHmmm... if they could raise money, Servo and the "rust" link could have decent brand backing... Many alpha-geeks know of it.
- guerrilla 6y agoYeah, 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.
- rjknight 6y agoSame. 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.
- smnthermes 6y agoWebCore is already far diverged from Blink, and V8 was made from the scratch. WebKit is a solid alternative to Chromium.
- elric 6y agoAt 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?
- dandellion 6y agoThe 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.
- sanxiyn 6y agoEspecially 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.
- elric 6y agoThe 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.
- mulmen 6y agoI don’t have any negative association with the Firefox name (yet) but I definitely do with the Mozilla name.
- Jonnax 6y agoSo there's a comment from the CEO here: https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z 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
- winrid 6y agoWell, it's hard to convince someone to get rid of themselves...
- bouk 6y agoWow what a piece of shit. How will my poor family survive without $200k every month???
- JanSt 6y ago> 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!
- fulafel 6y agoIs 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)
- sanxiyn 6y agoIt 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 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- spiderfarmer 6y agoIt's enabled on Windows 10 but unfinished on all other platforms: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where
- fulafel 6y agoreplying 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?
- AmericanChopper 6y ago> 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.
- roca 6y agoMost 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.
- fsociety 6y agoTime to go back to Chrome :(
- panpanna 6y agoI would rather use Edge
- winrid 6y agoIt 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.
- zerocrates 6y agoThis 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?
- Jerry2 6y ago>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-worst-for-privacy-microsoft-isnt-happy/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-professor-says-edge-is-the-w...
- garmaine 6y agoWhich is now Chrome!
- puzzlingcaptcha 6y agoEdge 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/microsoft-edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-collaboration/#GmSJg4uFjBM5y8Hz.97 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- airstrike 6y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoRIP Rust
- thayne 6y agorust 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.
- feanaro 6y agoThere'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.
- Melchizedek 6y agoAnd 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.
- thayne 6y agoThe 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.
- aneutron 6y agoDo we have a source on this ?
- akerro 6y agoNot direct source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336
- wwwwwwwww 6y agoServo? The future of Firefox if it wants to have a future? How about the management resigns for 10 years of terrible decisions?
- TheUndead96 6y agoExactly! (sigh)
- Jerry2 6y agoConfirmation 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/1293220570885062657 https://nitter.net/MichalPurzynski/status/129322057088506265... I wonder how Tor will handle this...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoIs 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.
- searchableguy 6y agoThey are not responsible for firefox itself but the infrastructure surrounding it from that thread.
- tehbeard 6y agoThat to me reads as the build servers, etc. How is that not responsible for a safe binary?
- fgdfgddfg 6y agoYea they are surely moving to webkit after this lmao, no more funding for servo
- waihtis 6y agoThis 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.
- saagarjha 6y agoThis 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.
- mrweasel 6y agoI 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.
- tmikaeld 6y agoSkimping 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.
- mtgx 6y agoBrave, 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.
- msla 6y agoBrave has done more than enough shady things to disqualify itself. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23746117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23746117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027
- chrisco255 6y ago2 of those are simply bugs and the 3rd one was later fixed as well: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10129 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10129
- lmm 6y agoThe browser that was built from scratch by open-source volunteers, before the distraction of Netscape releasing their code: Konqueror.
- indy 6y agoWho 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
- mesaframe 6y agoLike all of them?
- tannhaeuser 6y agoWait, Servo is the core browser engine of Firefox isn't it? Do they intend to become FF another Webkit-based browser?
- thayne 6y agoI 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.
- polycaster 6y agoNot 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.
- Ygg2 6y agoYeah. Rainbows and unicorns. Ask Edge devs about Google services incompatibility.
- polycaster 6y agoWhat do you expect them to answer? Also I cannot see how this has anything to do with my point.
- Ygg2 6y agoProbably 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.
- Santosh83 6y agoNo 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.
- roca 6y agoThat's exactly right, at least up to the last sentence.
- goldfishlover 6y agoYes, and there were massive changes needed if they wanted to continue it https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020 https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020 things like WebRender are more important
- drno123 6y agoThey should fire “woke” CEO and hire technical CEO with a vision instead.
- dhruvparamhans 6y agoBaker has been with Mozilla since the very beginning. I don’t how she is being “woke” here.
- drno123 6y agoShe 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)
- thu2111 6y agoWell, 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 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.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoYikes, 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...
- thu2111 6y agoWhy 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.
- polskibus 6y agoI 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.
- 3131s 6y agoI 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.
- mulmen 6y agoI 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.
- adrianN 6y agoDoes Mozilla make anything that people use, other than Firefox?
- rsa25519 6y agoprintln!("Perhaps Rust?");
- jansan 6y agoI use their HTML documentation quite a lot while developing for Chrome.
- gerrard23 6y agoThunderbird, and as mentioned below, their HTML documentation is really good.
- adrianN 6y agoOh 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-development-email-client-not-a-priority-anymore/ 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.
- mulmen 6y agoI 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?
- chrisco255 6y agoChromium-based forks like Brave or Edge or straight up Chrome. Personally I use Brave as it's privacy focused and crypto friendly.
- csomar 6y agoBrave has a terrible track record for a relatively new browser. See the affiliate injection drama.
- mulmen 6y agoI 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?
- chrisco255 6y agoMozilla 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=30&utm_source=mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=nav¤cy=usd https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount...
- mulmen 6y agoThat’s a donation to Mozilla, not to Firefox specifically. I don’t want a VPN. I don’t want Pocket. I want Firefox.
- maz1b 6y agoIs someone influencing Mozilla leadership hoping to kill Mozilla off through bad decisions?
- sanxiyn 6y agoMozilla 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.
- sebbyy 6y agoThat's dissapointing. Wasm/Wasi is what got me interested in Web again. Do you have source on that?
- sanxiyn 6y agoSee https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contributors https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contribu... and https://twitter.com/Sunfishcode/status/1293307332059774977 https://twitter.com/Sunfishcode/status/1293307332059774977. Pretty clear cut.
- smt88 6y agoCNET (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-coronavirus-pandemic-cuts-revenue/ https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-cor...
- shajznnckfke 6y agoA 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.
- frank2 6y ago>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_Communications_Corporation_and_mozilla.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Commun... Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending this CEO's recent performance.
- chrisco255 6y agoIt'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.
- roca 6y ago"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.
- sanxiyn 6y agoConspiracy theory: Google paid or threatened Mozilla to fire people who are dangerous to Chrome. It's probably false, but that I am even contemplating this is an exhibit for this restructuring's arbitrariness and incomprehensibility, at least from the outside perspective. Theory itself is not out of question. I have reasons to believe Google paid or threatened Samsung to abandon its browser project to replace aging Android's WebKit based browser and to adopt Chrome instead. I worked there, management was enthusiastic about browser replacement project, and suddenly decision was made in the high place to just use Chrome.
- edumucelli 6y agoI 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.”
- thu2111 6y agoInternet 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.
- chrismatheson 6y ago> 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.
- sipos 6y agoFundamentally, 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).
- srg0 6y agoI cancelled donations to Mozilla Foundation. Servo is important.
- nojvek 6y agoGoogle 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.