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Mozilla has laid off their dev tools people and the entire MDN team
- claviska 6y agoI know the Mozilla layoffs aren't news, but 25% is a lot and I haven't seen any sources saying exactly what happened in terms of the reorg. The fact that both of these teams have vanished is a major gut punch to developers.
- PaulHoule 6y agoParticularly MDN. I remember the bad old days when you had to have a few huge O'Reilly books to write advanced HTML or program Javascript because Firefox and IE and other browsers were all so different -- you were lucky to have any official documentation at all, never mind something that looked at Javascript from a portable point of view. MDN paved the way for having online developer info available for the web platform. I use it every day. In fact, I go out of way to look things up on MDN because if I just search "Google" I get spammy and sometimes wrong results that are crammed with ads, often poorly written, etc. It is sad that good documentation can't pay for itself. It's like "the truth is paywalled but the lies are free".
- theandrewbailey 6y ago> In fact, I go out of way to look things up on MDN because if I just search "Google" I get spammy and sometimes wrong results that are crammed with ads, often poorly written, etc. Tip: use DuckDuckGo's searchbangs[0]. I reach for !mdn everyday. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=mdn https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=mdn
- dhimes 6y agowith ddg I don't even have to use the bang. Just mdn <whatever I need> gets me to it as the first result.
- sushshshsh 6y agoWhy can't good documentation pay for itself? Oldschool Runescape's wikipedia is arguably the best and most accurate and most thorough documentation of functionality and nuance I've ever seen. Not sure what the server costs are but if it was distributed as a torrent then I'm sure 99% of the information would still be correct.
- random_dork1 6y agohttps://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft-google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-micr... Mozilla is not alone in maintaining MDN
- syshum 6y agoThat is from 3 years ago, I would love to see evidence that these other entities are major contributors to the MDN Wiki
- tzs 6y agoI liked the O'Reilly days. MDN is good, especially as a reference to refresh something I once knew but haven't used in a while, or to deepen my knowledge of some part of something I do know fairly well. But when it comes to learning something new and big, I often get lost on MDN. After I finish reading one page, it can be unclear what page I should read next. After I've made a few such choices and seem to have reached the end, it is often not clear if I've really covered the topic or there might be more if I go back several steps and make a different choice. In the O'Reilly days, to learn topic X I could just get "Learning X" to get the basics, then "Programming X" to get a deeper understanding, "X Cookbook" for a ton of examples, "Advanced X" to go even farther, and maybe they would also have some more specialized books covering the use of X in specific applications. There might also be more books between beginner and advanced for some topics. And maybe an "X Reference". (There was also for some topics "X: The Definitive Guide" which tended to be a massive book that kind of tried to cover from beginner to advanced in one volume). There would be an O'Reilly book aimed for people at whatever my current level of X understanding was, and reading that book would take me up a level. There's no reason a website can't do that too, but it doesn't happen automatically. The website needs to provide guidance to lead the reader through in a page by page sequence that will take them through some topic in a way that makes sense and is complete. It's way too easy for a site to end up with a lot of ways to wander off such a path and end missing things or getting things in a confusing order.
- shbooms 6y agonot to mention the ~70 employees laid off in January which brings that percentage of lay offs in 2020 to just under a third of the total workforce they started the year with.
- 33degrees 6y agoI think part of the issue is that a huge chunk of Mozilla's revenue comes from their deal with Google, which expires in a few months is unlikely to be renewed with similar numbers, if at all.
- fmax30 6y agoMozilla MDN docs are my go-to resource for js related stuff, does this mean they won't be maintained and updated anymore? To be honest, I would be more than willing to pay a reasonable monthly subscription fee to access their docs.
- Semaphor 6y agoIt’s not only them anymore: "Mozilla brings Microsoft, Google, the W3C, Samsung together to create cross-browser documentation on MDN" -- https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft-google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-micr...
- claviska 6y agoThat's at least a tiny bit of good news then. Thanks for clarifying that!
- pintxo 6y agoThe blog is from 2017!
- jrott 6y agoThat is good news. Do any of the other companies have people working on MDN?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stingraycharles 6y agoThat’s a blog post from 2017. I wouldn’t be so sure it will continue under the Mozilla umbrella without them dedicating any people to it.
- uallo 6y agoMDN is a Wiki. Everybody can contribute.
- jacquesm 6y agoYesterday's thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- D13Fd 6y agoThis sucks, but it's not all that surprising given that their Google deal--90% of their revenue--is about to expire and won't be renewed.
- Semaphor 6y ago> and won't be renewed. Source?
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoMentioned by ZDNet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees-while-it-refocuses-on-commercial-products/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees... (fwiw I found out by way of John Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/11/mozilla-layoffs https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/11/mozilla-layoffs)
- Semaphor 6y agoThat doesn’t say it won’t be renewed, just that it’s currently not renewed.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoDoesn’t it seem a little late for them to be renewing a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars? At minimum, I think it spells trouble. Would love to be wrong. Edit: Since anything can happen, I personally wouldn’t have written the sentence with as much certainty as the GP, but I don’t think they were far off.
- Semaphor 6y agoFunny thing ;) > Mozilla and Google are expected to extend their current search deal for another three years, multiple sources have told ZDNet. https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-expected-to-extend-its-google-search-deal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-expected-to-ex...
- bluejekyll 6y agoThe MDN is such a great resource. It’s my primary source for looking up web standards documentation. Does this imply that won’t be maintained anymore?
- random_dork1 6y agoNo. Mozilla is only one of multiple companies that work on MDN https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft-google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-micr...
- bluejekyll 6y agoThanks. Still feels like a pretty big loss from that.
- m-p-3 6y agoWithout MDN being actively maintained, the web just became a worse place.
- random_dork1 6y ago> Without MDN being actively maintained, the web just became a worse place. We don't know that that's the case. There are multiple huge companies working on MDN https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft-google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-micr... Please don't assume the worst by default.
- rvz 6y agoHow exactly?
- m-p-3 6y agoIt's a way better resource than w3school, would be a shame if it drifted out because of a lack of maintainers.
- btbuildem 6y agoWait, so who did they keep on staff?
- aphextron 6y agoIt's been pretty obvious over the last 5 years or so that the Mozilla we once knew is dead and gone forever. The MBA types have completed their takeover of a once venerable engineering organization. I'm glad that Firefox still exists as an alternative to Chrome, but the differences between them from a privacy and freedom standpoint are increasingly negligible. And with this move it seems very obvious what management's sole focus is at this point: "trimming the fat" of what little community focused efforts they had left, and boosting revenue.
- invokestatic 6y agoThe problem is you need money to hire venerable engineers. And you need to hire a lot to maintain a modern browser. Yet every attempt by Mozilla to monetize and diversify has generally been met unfavorably here on Hackernews.
- jacquesm 6y agoThey have money. Their CEO gets paid 2.5 million per year. That one time windfall they made from the search bar deal would have funded FireFox development for a sizeable fraction of eternity.
- phildenhoff 6y agoThat's the price of a CEO, just like salaries in the hundreds of thousands are the prices of software devs. Of all places I would expect Hacker News to get this.
- formerly_proven 6y ago> just like salaries in the hundreds of thousands are the prices of software devs Only in very specific locations and roles.
- phildenhoff 6y agoYes, and Mozilla is run out of Mountain View, California, so that's a very specific location where getting tech executives is expensive. Could they get someone cheaper elsewhere? Absolutely. Is it worth it to pay more to get a CEO that's well-connected or, at a minimum, knowledgeable about what's going on in that region? Absolutely. I'm not saying I agree with it morally — I think CEO's are paid an insane wage and the wealth disparity in the United States is disgusting — but those are the unfortunate economics.
- nicoburns 6y agoThis seems short-sighted. As does firing the Servo team. Does anyone know which teams they have kept?
- emteycz 6y agoWhat? So is the project over? What about webrender and wasm-related stuff?
- nicoburns 6y ago> So is the project over? As an independent research project, more or less I think. I suppose it might continue as an open source project. We'll see. > What about webrender and wasm-related stuff? Webrender and related projects will continue as part of Firefox I think. But I guess Mozilla won't be doing any further experimental work.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoDo you have a source for the Servo team claim?
- nicoburns 6y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/i7stjy/how_do_mozilla_layoffs_affect_rust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/i7stjy/how_do_mozilla... https://twitter.com/asajeffrey/status/1293220656339988483 https://twitter.com/asajeffrey/status/1293220656339988483
- claydavisss 6y agoBaker has burned all of Mozilla's goodwill in a weird effort to compete with NordVPN.
- edgarvaldes 6y agoTime to go back to Firebug? Well, except Firebug no longer exists.
- quotemstr 6y agoThis new world of safe, approved, and powerless browser extensions sure is great, isn't it?
- untog 6y agoRelated reading from QuirksMode about MDN: "the cult of the free must die" https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/the_cult_of_the.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/the_cult_of... I think a version of MDN that solicits donations from the companies and individual developers that make use of it could be great. Mozilla being propped up by money Google gave them from the search bar always felt fragile.
- Hoenoe 6y agoI will gladly donate money to them the whole year trough. And I think a lot of people/businesses would as long as they market it well enough and make it easy enough.
- avolcano 6y agoFirefox Dev Tools were how I sold other devs on trying Firefox. I think the number of devs who liked the tools and stuck by them is the only reason why as much of the web renders well on Gecko as it does. Certainly, I've worked at small startups where no one used Firefox that turned out to have significant visual bugs on Firefox for months, because no one ever bothered to check it out. I understand why Mozilla wants to make more money new ways. I think everyone does. I was going to get their VPN as soon as it became available on Mac. I also completely understand that they can't monetize Firefox, at least not in its current state. Users would obviously rebel against any kind of proprietary features that live behind a commercial license, and I don't think they can make any compelling hosted services that integrate with Firefox either. But I don't understand why Mozilla seems to be trying to speed along its death.
- debacle 6y agoFirefox Dev Tools are the best around.
- thoughtpalette 6y agoUhhhhhh, maybe back when firebug was the only way to debug. But this is all subjective anyway, huge fan of Chrome dev tools here.
- agustif 6y agoThis is pretty bleak and sad news for future browser competition I guess
- protomyth 6y agoI'm a bit confused. It seems like not having great dev tool keeps developers using Chrome which hurts the adoption of Firefox. Do they not get that?
- rdslw 6y agoUnfortunately 25% at mozilla, 25% at booking, 25% at uber, 20% at linkedin, more at airbnb (obviously) shows how internal management teams are seeing revenues HUGELY shrinking. This tells a lot about fact that stock prices are bad measurement of situation we're in. It's funny to observe that S&P and Nasdaq are at the February all time high, pre-covid levels. Let that thought sink in.
- cft 6y agoI think this will be written up in the history books, like in the fall of Rome: "stock market decoupled from the fundamentals".
- almost_usual 6y ago>Unfortunately 25% at mozilla, 25% at booking, 25% at uber, 20% at linkedin, more at airbnb (obviously) shows how internal management teams are seeing revenues HUGELY shrinking. Of course some companies will struggle during covid. There are others though that have grown and are beating their forecasts. The covid proof tech companies will absorb this talent and grow larger.
- rdslw 6y agoFor me, trying to say, that total net economic impact of covid is _zero_, is like gross negligence in analytical thinking. Sorry for being strong here. funny fact: I'm using (as we're hiring) 'What do you think of covid' as nice and quick question to judge reasoning ability. Conspiracy? bam. Flu like? bam. ends in a month? bam.
- almost_usual 6y agoThe fact you’re using that question in what I’m presuming is a technical interview is odd and also potentially insensitive to the candidate. I can’t imagine how I would respond if a family member or someone I’d known had just passed because of the virus.
- xxs 6y agoThat's quite weird, imagine: "Ohh well, my grapda passed in April. Personally, I spent 2 weeks puking.".
- aeroheim 6y agoMDN has such a large impact and influence on the web development community so it's baffling to me as to why this decision was made. I just hope there are plans in the work to at least preserve if not continue its operation eventually under a different organization perhaps. Honestly, I just really don't want to think of the alternatives without MDN. I don't think ANYONE wants to go back to w3schools.
- cft 6y agoThat's a massive blow. Rust next?
- steveklabnik 6y agoThe team these days is pretty small. Two folks have posted publicly about it, one was, one wasn’t. We’ll see, I guess.
- The_rationalist 6y agoAt least two paid rust dev from the core team got fired.
- crumpled 6y agoThis is the eventuality that WebPlatform.org was supposed to prepare us for. But I think WebPlatform failed because most of the docs were upstream at MDN, and people never stopped looking there.
- rahul_201 6y agoHuge fan of Firefox, this is unfortunate. Noticed that this girl is helping them in some way. https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl/status/1293237589202178048 https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl/status/1293237589202178048
- sequoia 6y agoPardon my french but fuuuuuck. I switched to chrome back in the early 2010s after years of Firefox use because it was faster, and I stuck with it because the the devtools were better than firebug and later built-in FF tools. But always I told myself "next year, I'll switch back to Firefox" which I was much more comfortable with ideologically. Eventually after years of waiting FF got fast enough and the devtools were good enough (and chrome got creepy enough: the automatic browser sign-in made clear chrome was tightening the noose of browser/web/google lock-in). So I switched back a year or two ago and have been quite happy with it! This news indicates it won't be long before I have to switch again. Mozilla's strategy seems so incoherent, at least from the outside. Who is their target demographic? Perhaps "power users" & developers like me are too small a demographic to be worth competing for (see also: the toyification of the macbook pro). But I seriously wonder if Mozilla as a nonprofit has a path forward without keeping some of the "power users", (casual) privacy nerds, and FOSS folks in the fold. Are they planning to compete with Google for casual users as "just another browser"? I really don't see how they plan to beat google in this arena. EDIT: In Mozilla's defense, no I have not donated anything to the organization to keep FF or MDN development running (though I have contributed to MDN & FF in small ways) so perhaps I share some of the blame here. TBH I'd donate if I knew it was going to FF & MDN and not one of the two thousand other little projects Mozilla keeps starting and killing.
- waheoo 6y agoOr their CEO's pocket.
- stu2b50 6y agoActually, if you donate, literally none of it will go to Firefox. You'd be donating to the Mozilla foundation, not the Mozilla corporation, which develops Firefox. P.s the Mozilla foundations CEO makes 2.5 million dollars a year, and said "it would be too much a financial burden to cut C suite salaries to 500k" https://mobile.twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1293233620711243776 https://mobile.twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1293233620711...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vesinisa 6y agoWith the caveat that the source is a Twitter thread, if this turns out to be true it is increasingly looking like the end of Firefox and Mozilla. Earlier today, a separate Twitter thread was posted that claimed the whole Servo team had been let go. This is a massive blow to Internet as we know it. It will mean that WebKit / Blink will now be the de facto Internet standard. In about 5 years Blink-based browsers will be the only relevant target for web development and all remaining users will be urged to switch to Chrome/Edge/Safari or have to suffer broken sites. With Google pushing Chromium to make life for ad blockers difficult, I would really hope an open source project for a new Blink-based privacy-respecting browser to emerge. (As far as I know the Brave Browser is financed by ads that are hard-coded in the browser.)
- Ajedi32 6y agoSafari isn't Blink-based (though I suppose modern WebKit and Blink do share a common ancestor). I agree with the sentiment though; we're getting dangerously close to a browser engine monoculture. Not to mention Firefox is unique in that it's the only independent browser developed and controlled by a non-profit.
- vesinisa 6y agoBecause of their shared ancestry, I would assume replacing WebKit with Blink in Safari is quite easy. Once we start reaching Blink monoculture, expect Blink-only feature use on the web to sharply increase. This could mean Apple switching to use Blink for Safari as well, just like Microsoft did with IE Edge. If we can learn anything from when IE6 reached monoculture in early 2000s (e.g. 96% market share in 2002), its development velocity sharply increased and the web site developers adopted the resulting IE-only features in abadon (stuff like XMLHttpRequest date from this era.) Some of these features were later standardized, but large swaths of the web remained IE-only for the next decade and more, even as competing browsers surpassed IE in performance and features. I am afraid Blink development will likewise accelerate and web site developers will adopt these Blink-only features as if they were web standards. Only this time, building a competing web engine looks unlikely due to the sheer complexity to ever achieve feature parity with Blink.
- 6y ago
- wg0 6y agoMozilla should have diversified into CDN static web app delivery/JAMStack or similar on top of existing clouds or something. Plus additional instrumentation tooling with backend services to monitor frontend performance etc could be an area which could bring decent amount of revenue.
- saos 6y agoWow. Will others be looking at moving away from Firefox soon? I moved to Firefox because of the devtools! It sounds like they have leadership that’s out of touch with community.
- random_dork1 6y agoI dislike these tweet links with no context. I am supposed to know who the person tweeting this is and how reliable they are?
- lhnz 6y agoTheir profile description says they are W3C staff, and this can easily be confirmed by googling their name.
- losvedir 6y agoThis is sad. I remember back when Firebug came on the scene and all of a sudden it wasn't just possible it was easy to debug your website. That, more than anything, I think is why Firefox took off the way it did. Then Chrome came out with its developer tools which eventually, I thought, surpassed Firefox. But Firefox's native dev tools are quite good, too. I switched back to Firefox as my personal browser a year or two ago when they had the big rendering overhaul (I think "Quantum" or something? when they included the rust code to do layout in parallel, or something like that). It seemed like Firefox was finally moving in the right direction! But now with the news that they let go of the dev tools team and Servo, I worry about the future of Firefox. I, personally, don't care about Mozilla other than Firefox, so this seems bleak. I'll continue to use the browser because I like it so much, but I imagine eventually it will fall behind newfangled CSS/JS features that developers will use and I'll have to switch eventually.
- rammy1234 6y agohttps://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing-mozilla/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...
- raxxorrax 6y agoMDN is extremely useful, something I cannot ascribe to Mozillas management. There seems to be some kind of ridiculous transformation in process. Maybe they know that Google will stop sending money?
- Fej 6y agoThis is absolutely bonkers - if the Firefox dev tools stagnate, then devs won't test their sites on Firefox, leading to even more users ditching the product for Chrome!
- whack 6y agoNot to derail this conversation, but I wonder how much this can be attributed to the ousting of Brendan Eich. Political views aside, Eich was a technologist first and foremost. His replacement, Chris Beard, is a business/marketing guy at heart. It's hardly surprising that Mozilla has since trended more towards business/marketing priorities, as opposed to engineering excellence.
- eximius 6y agoWant to help? https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
- chrisseaton 6y agoWhy throw money into this fire?
- butz 6y agoRecently migrated fully to Firefox at work and was really enjoying DevTools. While they still lack features in some places, but Inspector tool with flexbox and grid visualisation is very useful. Also little hints why some properties were not applied really helps. MDN is also one of my frequently visited websites with a lot of useful info. Is there way open source community could save these projects? I would gladly sponsor further development of Firefox DevTools.
- bgorman 6y agoFrom an outside perspective it seems like Mozilla has been spending the last few years trying to get traction with social justice and political issues while neglecting their core product. Safari and Chrome are much faster, Mozilla should have shipped servo in a product by now instead of investing in legacy tech for a declining product.
- spanhandler 6y agoAs an on-again-off again user (currently on-again but today here I am googling WebKit-based Linux browsers) who hasn't loved FF since 2.0, it looks like they're spending a shitload on UI fiddling and marketing/messaging of dubious or negative value. Sometimes the UI fiddling and marketing are combined, for when they really want to make me like the product less.
- rvz 6y ago> The excellent devtools were a good., non-ideological reason for developers to use Firefox as part of their daily work, & thus test in it & care about it. Moz had long given up on any other developer relations activities. Pale Moon, Waterfox, SeaMonkey and IceWeasel to Firefox: "Your First Time?" Economically, Mozilla never had stood a chance against the major browser competition given that it was also being 'kept alive' by its main competitor for decades. The open-source alternatives also had no chance of competing and are eternally relying on donations. The moment Google entered with their own browser and Microsoft, Opera, Qt and Electron crowd all jumped into the Chromium boat, Mozilla only had 'Firefox' as the only reason why they are still relevant and that's it. Not even Mozilla cares about the greatness Rust brings. It's just another open source tool which everyone is saying: "tank u, gimme dat 4 free". Here's another way to make money: Mozilla could also easily have been the Rust equivalent of "Erlang Solutions Ltd.". We all know that no-one would go for their non-competitive VPNs or premium bookmark service. The reality is, Mozilla has to stand on its own and pivot to something else other than Firefox to generate revenue if it wants to stay true to its mission statement which is essentially privacy. Not sure how they have the balls to support "privacy" (on their frontpage) [0][1] and then tell us that they have a contract with Google to fund them [2] as the default search engine choice at the same time. [0] https://www.mozilla.org https://www.mozilla.org [1] https://www.mozilla.org/firefox https://www.mozilla.org/firefox [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/
- EdwinLarkin 6y agoWhat boggles my mind is why Microsoft just did not acquire Mozilla. They could be funding the project while owning the brand. Hell they could have made FF into the default browser and people would actually not associate it with Explorer or whatever.
- sanxiyn 6y agoAs I understand, Mozilla is not for sale and can't be acquired.
- EdwinLarkin 6y agoCant the for profit entity be acquired?
- rasz 6y agoThis makes perfect MBA sense, why bother developing anything when you can transition to shipping Chrome skin with paid Google search bar?
- MasterYoda 6y agoReally sad about this lay off, Mozilla does so much good stuff, not just Firefox. https://donate.mozilla.org/ https://donate.mozilla.org/
- nicholosophy 6y agoThat money goes to the Foundation. The Corporation can't receive money from the Foundation. The Corporation makes Firefox.