5 ms·

What is actually left of mozilla after this?

by fs111 6y ago

darthrupert 6y ago
Roughly 75% of the workforce and of course all the IP.
- bronson 6y ago
  That's a lot of people. Honest question: what are they working on? Not devtools, Servo, and not much Rust, MDN, Firefox, ... Which are about their only projects I know or care about. What are the applying their formidable engineering talent to?
  - blub 6y ago
    Why would they work on the projects you or HN care about? This is why they got in trouble in the first place - spending money and engineering on projects with zero impact on their bottom line or on the metrics that matter around privacy and an open internet.
    - dx87 6y ago
      Those things had zero impact on their bottom line because there's no way to give them money for those things. All anyone can do is donate to the Mozilla Foundation where the money can get spent on whatever non-technical things the foundations wants.
      - blub 6y ago
        Even if there were, that hypothetical income wouldn't even cover the salary of two developers. Who pays for programming languages or runtimes nowadays? Only very specialized users which don't have a choice.
blub 6y ago
The projects which are essential for Mozilla. These were all side-projects which maybe a FAANG can afford, but not a normal company. Mozilla was operating a long time under the mistaken assumption that they're a tech powerhouse when they're obviously not. You can lie to yourself only for so long before the market corrects your assumptions the hard way.
- stonogo 6y ago
  They fired the Servo team. Servo's CSS engine is shipping in Firefox. Servo's rendering engine was supposed to become the primary Firefox graphics engine. It's weird to call that a side project when it's clearly development aimed at becoming the basis of their primary product.
  - blub 6y ago
    Their primary product is the Mozilla brand and the browser, not a CSS or rendering engine. The innards can be swapped out and even the entire browser could and probably will be. Always follow the money. If they got rid of these people it likely means that: a) Rust is not part of Mozilla's future any more b) Gecko's future doesn't look too bright either
  - zelly 6y ago
    If they could use a different, off-the-shelf rendering engine (cough Blink cough) that's actually faster and battle-tested, then they aren't losing anything at all. I've been hearing about Servo for years but nothing's come of it. I installed Servo once and it crashed within a few minutes (on Linux). Though I'm not an expert in it, my impression is that development has been blocked. From a business perspective it doesn't make sense to keep a project on board for years and years when it hasn't produced any deliverables.

What is actually left of mozilla after this?

by fs111 6y ago

What is actually left of mozilla after this?

darthrupert 6y ago

Roughly 75% of the workforce and of course all the IP.

bronson 6y ago
That's a lot of people. Honest question: what are they working on? Not devtools, Servo, and not much Rust, MDN, Firefox, ... Which are about their only projects I know or care about. What are the applying their formidable engineering talent to?
- blub 6y ago
  Why would they work on the projects you or HN care about? This is why they got in trouble in the first place - spending money and engineering on projects with zero impact on their bottom line or on the metrics that matter around privacy and an open internet.
  - dx87 6y ago
    Those things had zero impact on their bottom line because there's no way to give them money for those things. All anyone can do is donate to the Mozilla Foundation where the money can get spent on whatever non-technical things the foundations wants.
    - blub 6y ago
      Even if there were, that hypothetical income wouldn't even cover the salary of two developers. Who pays for programming languages or runtimes nowadays? Only very specialized users which don't have a choice.

blub 6y ago

The projects which are essential for Mozilla. These were all side-projects which maybe a FAANG can afford, but not a normal company. Mozilla was operating a long time under the mistaken assumption that they're a tech powerhouse when they're obviously not. You can lie to yourself only for so long before the market corrects your assumptions the hard way.

stonogo 6y ago
They fired the Servo team. Servo's CSS engine is shipping in Firefox. Servo's rendering engine was supposed to become the primary Firefox graphics engine. It's weird to call that a side project when it's clearly development aimed at becoming the basis of their primary product.
- blub 6y ago
  Their primary product is the Mozilla brand and the browser, not a CSS or rendering engine. The innards can be swapped out and even the entire browser could and probably will be. Always follow the money. If they got rid of these people it likely means that: a) Rust is not part of Mozilla's future any more b) Gecko's future doesn't look too bright either
- zelly 6y ago
  If they could use a different, off-the-shelf rendering engine (cough Blink cough) that's actually faster and battle-tested, then they aren't losing anything at all. I've been hearing about Servo for years but nothing's come of it. I installed Servo once and it crashed within a few minutes (on Linux). Though I'm not an expert in it, my impression is that development has been blocked. From a business perspective it doesn't make sense to keep a project on board for years and years when it hasn't produced any deliverables.