Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time.
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...
replies(8):
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...
tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded Brave instead.
For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO.
This is important because it is a clear delineation between "privately disagreeing but allowing individuals their freedom" and "actively campaigning to take away rights from Mozilla employees and users".
Really? Do you learn a new language every day? I installed languages that I am interested years ago and forgot about it until you mentioned it.
I doubt funders care about your opinions on gay marriage, but they do care a lot about the stink the cancel culture raised around him.
The poison seems to be applied externally.
The polish of developer tools has exactly zero to do with a browser's popular marketshare.
I write in 4 languages so it's quite annoying to do that every time. In Chrome there is multilingual spell checking even when you mix languages in the same sentence.
There’s no need for aspersions.
But your comparison is not very apt.
This proposition was passed. So by the logic of Eich's
firing the majority of Californian voters would be
excluded due to their political beliefs
That's why we have secret ballots. So you can vote without fear of repercussions.
For better or for worse, once you have a C-level title, you are seen as representing the company and emblematic of its values. As you move up that ladder, things change.
I can't think of too many corporations where the executives' political activity wouldn't be grounds for some scrutiny.
I'm sure we can come up with some pathological examples where very few people would complain an an executive's ouster, such as an executive who supported openly Nazi candidates and figures. And I'm sure we can come up with much trickier and ambiguous scenarios, such as an executive who donated to a politician who then, in turn, opposed gay rights. When it comes to our two-party system, even with our current level of strife, very few would like to see somebody fired simply for voting for the "wrong" one of the two.
I switched to FF about 2 months ago. I made a FF Color theme [0] that matches Chrome's colors to help ease my transition. Only color I wasn't able to adjust with FF color is the tab onhover color.
[0] https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAIWAQAAAAAAAABBKYhm849...
Firefox is by far my least favorite piece of software that I regularly use and I've considered throwing my computer out the window because of it.
Also, "your Views" are different from "your Actions." If I think you're ridiculous, so what? If I think you're so ridiculous that I pay people money to promote a law that would increase what you have to pay in taxes, suddenly everyone cares, and rightfully so!
Did he say "gay people can't use Firefox"?
As well, according to the same Wiki, "There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid." It would be a bummer to run a company of that size, be dedicated to it for so long, and not have any stake in it. Imagine her opportunity cost...
https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAITAQAAAAAAAABBKYhm849...
It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions.
I documented it, proposed a solution with my own justifications for why it would be better, and submitted a bug report.
Feedback from Moz, the work done on it, the patches created, and the release plan for it were all done in the open and I could track it.
The change I suggested was implemented and is now out.
Be the change you want to see... only Firefox/Mozilla would do this in such an open way.
The English spell checking is pretty bad, too, giving me at least an order of magnitude more false positives [1] than Safari or Chrome on my Mac, and Edge or Chrome on Windows. Same when compared to things other than browsers, such as Word, LibreOffice, BBEdit, Pages.
What's baffling is that Firefox, LibreOffice, and Chrome all use Hunspell [2], so presumably the reason Firefox spell check sucks compared to LibreOffice is they have a terrible dictionary.
So why doesn't Mozilla just take the LibreOffice dictionary?
[1] In case I've got the terminology wrong for spell checkers, by false positive I mean where the spell checker says that a word is spelled wrong when it is in fact spelled correctly.
There are greater goals, especially for a company like Mozilla, than making lots of money.
It's horrible on all platforms ;) . The way tabs are handled is by far my biggest complaint, you can't fit as many tabs in as with chrome and since they "upgraded" the extension system the vertical tab extensions don't work well (can't remove top tab panel).
I wish they'd just make a native UI for each platform, their cross platform one has always been a train wreck but it's especially bad since they dropped XUL.
Personally, I think that’s a perfectly good reason for not giving him more money.
“Cancel culture” is many people (many of whom matter to investors in one way or another) stating that they also feel that that is a bad place to put money.
I’m continually impressed by what people are willing to label “politics”. And by how badly people must hate whatever they understand “politics” to be.
Spending his personal money on fucking over other people (with no real benefit to the world), many of whom worked for or could work for him, is a bad sign about those parts of his job.
(That may not be an argument for the board to fire him, of course, but it is an answer to “how good is he at his job?”)
...as long as you were a white, heterosexual man in the US.
1. The increase was in 2017, reported per IRS regs in Mozilla Foundation's Form 990 filing (which must list all comp to board members even if they work for the for-profit Mozilla Corporation subsidiary).
2. The "one guy" is Mitchell Baker, and she is chair of both foundation and corporation boards.
But nice try attempting to pin blame on market share slide these last almost six years on me.
Personally I find it abhorrent that anyone was so quick to rally against Brendan Eich. If we keep going down this path, all we'll be left with are people that change their opinions on a whim and flip flop on issues so quickly that they resemble politicians. I'd rather have a good leader I don't agree with on every issue, than a poor leader who's trying to pretend to be on the right side of whatever political stance is in-vogue.
To your point, I guess it really depends on how you define his set of responsibilities, which is a valid point to make. I thought of something very limited ( writing lines of code ).
From that perspective.. why does it matter who he donates to and why. Is it not up to him to decide?
So, take that anecdotal evidence as you will. But I think I'm not the only one, and a lot of people will disagree with you. We're part of one of the only professions in the world where you can enjoy a very high standard of living in a white-collar profession with little to no expectation of having academic credentials.
The jump in comp in 2017, as far as I can tell, was predicated on the Verizon payments being fulfilled. I hear it was also a quid pro quo for Foundation board members who demanded (order of magnitude smaller) salaries for their work as board members. Perhaps they do a lot, but in past, board members (including me) worked for no added comp.
Mitchell may be worth it, but I'd want more of a turnaround in market share, new revenue sources, or both. Maybe that is just me.
Then why was it so important for gay marriage to have legal blessing?
> It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions.
It is if it becomes the norm (and it has, and it has lead to a Chilling Effect, and the blowback is going to be tremendous).
As for meritocracy, in the 90s no one cared who my online persona was. My persona was about as eye-grabbing as the one I use here. My contributions, for lack of a better term, were dismissed for being crap, which I eventually understood. I think people miss out on that.
As for your point actions and views, I respectfully disagree. You only seem to separate them, because you dislike his views, the resulting words and would like them not to be translated into action. I can understand that, but it sounds .. convenient? You are free to talk about stuff, but the moment you get politically active you get shunned? It seems very backwards to me.
1. Free speech is not just a U.S. 1st Amendment issue, and who cares what else goes wrong at subsidiary levels. From the Committee for the First Amendment (Humphrey Bogard had to disavow under HUAC pressure; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_First_Amendm...) on, depending on whose ox was being gored, both left and right have decried "chilling effects" of less than federal censorship effects on free speech. Cory Doctorow had a good piece on this recently:
https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-for...
Cory covers the full space, including corporate censorship of dissidents of all political stripes, corporate capture via monopolies and market super-powers, etc. Recommended.
2. California has labor law from the New Deal era, which protects employees from being fired or demoted due to political affiliation, participation, or any action including speech:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
So it's not just as simple as your downvoted post seems to say.
And it _is_ up to him to decide how to spend his money. But if he spends that money on things that deeply impact other people, it is more than fair for other people to care.
I agree with you that many fine people do life-saving or otherwise important work for far less. But facts matter, and I'm here to correct the record.
P.S. I was raised in Pittsburgh and Maryland as much as in the Valley.
All the people I know, who left FF, myself partly included, did so for this reason. Quite some sites did not work anymore on firefox. And the normal user does not care that this is because of vendorprefixes which are not standard. They care about that their website does not work anymore.
Keep the webdevs ... keep your users.
In fact per CA labor law it would be illegal to fire me for "being anti-gay": https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... et seq.
And of course, once I got Brave started outside the valley, we got "funders" in the valley to invest, including many top VC firms (who now constitute <10% of all funds we raised to date so don't switch horses to argue we are VC-controlled).
It is in California: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
If you look at their own statistics [1], you will notice that (worldwide) usage started declining after the introduction of Quantum (November 2017), and dropped substantially after the April 2019 addons outage.
This would suggest, IMHO, that Firefox loses market share when beloved features - customization, addons - stop working or got worse.
This is unsurprising to anyone who has been using Firefox for a long time: the primary differentiation factor of Firefox has always been customization. Messing with that would always be a risky proposition. Nuking the whole ecosystem entirely and starting over in the space of a few of months was simply idiotic. Disabling everyone's addon's because of an admin screw up was just the icing on the fucking cake.
Having said that - corporations do have a right to hire and fire who they please. But it is important to at least acknowledge "cancel culture" as a legitimate and immature trend that is happening. Often the pressure to fire somebody comes from the outside, not from within.
From your article:
>On the contrary, political beliefs or views are not a specifically protected category under California's discrimination laws. Nothing in either of the two labor code provisions above directly addresses discrimination or retaliation on the basis of expressed political views. Nor does the First Amendment serve to provide any further guidance. With limited exceptions, the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of "freedom of speech" applies only to government action and not private employers/employees. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 prohibits political affiliation discrimination against federal employees only.
It's an issue that affects anyone that writes in multiple languages. This accounts for the majority of internet users in the world since they write at least in their own language and English. This is not an edge case that affects 10% of users.
Like I already explained, it can't be solved properly with an extension. The ones that try to solve it slow down FF. This has to be solved at the native level, not in JS.
Because it is currently illegal in many places?
>It is if it becomes the norm (and it has, and it has lead to a Chilling Effect, and the blowback is going to be tremendous).
Which is a slippery slope fallacy. Political views are not and have not ever been protected classes.
For example, one of the major considerations when doing UI design is creating elements that have a cohesive style (regardless of which aesthetic style that is).
None of that happened on that god forgotten alert. It's probably the first thing that someone came up with in a rush, in a style that no other UI element of FF shares, and it has stayed like this probably because nobody cares.
> Mr. Eich’s situation is somewhat analogous to the one addressed in Nava v. Safeway, Inc., an unpublished decision of the California Court of Appeal. There, the court found that an employee had a viable wrongful termination claim because Safeway allegedly fired him for opposing gay marriage. Safeway claimed to have discharged Nava for taking down a sign he considered to be pro-gay. Nava claimed he was fired for his political beliefs.
> Eich therefore likely had the right to contribute to Proposition 8 as a protected political activity.
I have met plenty of bigots on both sides of politics. But immediately trying to call me out on labeling this man a conservative by saying he is actually a bigot is, ironically, bigotry itself.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR2HoMXrWo3H...
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/09/business/part-artist-part...
Being fired for your political actions is entirely legal in at-will employment states like California.
The law you cited does not apply, except to companies that use company policy to _coerce_ political action from employees. Firing someone for their actions does not make it company policy.
Mozilla was not coercing employees to take political action by adding politics into their company policy. Mozilla was saying that for that particular position at their company, the employee's political actions were grounds to be terminated.
I'm not sure how many more ways I can explain this, but that's why what happened is legal, despite the lawyers opinion you googled.
Sir, the last comment was stating that I was trying to avoid implying that it was due to real estate.
> I didn't claim that you were a millionaire because you had invested in real estate
> just that you also had invested in real estate
I'm not accusing you of getting rich off of real estate.
I'm just saying that "investing in real estate" is something that requires a substantial volume of money (as you said, a nest egg): it was a way to show that you were well off, not a way to imply you were a slumlord or something.
I agree that something changed at Mozilla, but I've seen it get justified at other previously reasonable organizations with excuses like "everyone else is doing it," or "This is still below-market rate for C-level talent." The fact that it's happening everywhere doesn't make it less nauseating.
[edit]
Mitchell could drop her salary to a "mere" 6 figures and lay off 7 fewer people, but you hardly ever see executives do things like that.
Ooh, "scurrilous"! I'm struck where I stand! If only I had actually said you were to blame for the last 5-6 years, you might have something. I said Mozilla continued its downward slide from when you were there, not that you were to blame for that.
> even accelerating decline
Your chart doesn't show an accelerating decline in the last six years, so you don't have much to go on there either.
In fairness to you, you did say "top job", and I quoted you as saying "chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive", which is what dman said at the top of the thread. Baker was not the highest paid executive for the duration of the chart, but I shouldn't have claimed you said that. So I do apologize for that. I also apologize for misgendering Baker.
I don't know who or what your online persona is, either: I'm still talking to you, and it's still an interesting conversation. There are still places to play anonymously or pseudonymously, and they usually have more people than they did during the 1990s. People generally tend to forego that, though.
As for your point actions and views, I respectfully disagree. You only seem to separate them, because you dislike his views, the resulting words and would like them not to be translated into action. I can understand that, but it sounds .. convenient? You are free to talk about stuff, but the moment you get politically active you get shunned? It seems very backwards to me.
Think of it in terms of separation of church and state, right? I can call you a sinner who's going to hell all I'd like, but it's unconstitutional and wrong on many levels to try and take away something from you that I have no plans to stop partaking in. (I think Eich is an atheist so this is just for the matter of example; I don't know why he didn't support it, he doesn't seem open about his reasoning and as such I'm not going to try and conjure up some reasoning for him.)
I'm not passionate about what Eich did or did not support, because frankly I have no idea why he funded what he funded, but if you look at it in terms of taxes, he's a very well off guy trying to increase the tax burden of a bunch of people (his coworkers/later-employees, no less) solely because he disagrees either morally or pragmatically that they should be able to get married. (Tax benefits to marriage are controversial in the first place, but definitely something incredibly beneficial.)
This country was founded on violent response to moralistic taxes; it's in its blood to care about increasing taxes arbitrarily, and the Prop 8 ads his cash helped fund were absolutely aimed at blurring the separation between church and state, even if that wasn't his intention (though he never denied it was, so we'll never know).
> Mozilla contends Eich voluntarily stepped down; if true, of course, there is no legal issue.
The article was using the Eich example to illustrate the case law it was discussing. It did not state that there was a legal issue in Eich's case, merely hinted that Mozilla's contention might be false and, if so, there was illegal behavior. But the primary purpose of its inclusion in the article was to elucidate the relevant issues, not to argue for or against what happened in that instance.
> Then why was it so important for gay marriage to have legal blessing?
Are you suggesting that the only reason to legalize something is to get a legal stamp on it being moral? The main reason is to stop discrimination.
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity. [1]
This not only prohibits employers from coercing employers to adopt a particular stance, it also prohibits employers from influencing employees to refrain from adoption or following any lines of politician action or activity.
How could firing an employee for political donations not be considered influencing an employee to refrain from a particular line of political action. Specifically, in Mozilla was influencing employees to refrain from the political action of donating in favor of Proposition 8.
> Mozilla was not coercing employees to take political action by adding politics into their company policy. Mozilla was saying that for that particular position at their company, the employee's political actions were grounds to be terminated.
Again, this is not just about specifically telling employees to support a particular cause in its company policy. Employers coercing employees to refrain from adopting or following political action is prohibited too. And in this case, it is pretty explicit what political action Mozilla was trying to make employees refrain from: donating to Proposition 8.
And again, people that study law say that firing Eich for his donations would have been illegal as I provided above.
1. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Also, I kept working on JS, while doing other things. I worked on JS in both Netscape and Ecma TC39 through late 1997, then co-founded mozilla.org with jwz and others. For mozilla.org I was chief architect, but I still kept working on the Mozilla JS engine, SpiderMonkey, adding features such as getters and setters that became important in 2005 due to use by Microsoft's Live Maps.
Live Maps emulated the IE DOM in Firefox via those same getter and setter extensions that I'd added over the years since 1997. In IE, Live Maps of course used the native DOM. This left Safari and Opera failing unless they reverse engineered the getter and setter extensions from SpiderMonkey in Firefox quickly. It took them about a week, and then Live Maps worked in Safari and Opera too.
This shows how quickly browsers can evolve, based on innovation in just one browser's engine, even in the wake of a monopoly period of stagnation.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-tro...
The multilingual thing sounds like a big problem for people that rely on that.
My comment was directed to your other complaints about UX quirks.
"The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions"
Making a browser was part of supporting FOSS and open web standards.
>but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO?
Whilst I agree that the implementation was horrendous the idea behind it was good. Do you know what I love? I can bookmark something and have that bookmark available at home. I can log in somewhere and quickly do it elsewhere. That's firefox sync. Nobody complains about it because it isn't noticed as such a service.
The main dominator of the web currently is Google's chrome. It goes beyond even that. A lot of chrome's convenience and incentive for use for people comes from providing an ecosystem. Keep, calendar and the like and despite how terrible the limited functionality for addons is they all nicely integrate with the browser by defaault and their mobile versions everyone gets on android. Tried an addon for keep on firefox? It's trash. There's no convenient alternatives and without pushing them they won't appear.
Additionally they're entirely dependent on funding from their competitor who pushes the monopolising of webstandards and implementation that they try to combat.
>facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!
The fuck are you on about. moz literally implemented facebook containers to keep the tracking out and their defined data privacy principles can be trusted. Facebook isn't even a consumer or product focused service business (with some exceptions of course) they're generally in it for your data for advertising purposes given that you don't give em a dime for the privilege of using their social media.
I'm not too familiar with the US and it's laws but doesn't marriage have an impact on legal matters, benefits and taxation? I know for example that here I can't get a higher loan based on a higher percentage of my income because i'm single and the bank is limited in how it can lend out the money it lends from a state entity.
>Why yes I do donate lots to the ANP. >Why? Well they align with my love for Hitler, racial purity and fascism. >What do you mean the board things this'll make jewish employees uncomfortable? >A wider range of customers/employees won't like it either? >So what. It's legal, protected political speech in donation form!
Nobody gives a fuck. It's equally legal to not want to associate with such a person. Whether it's a racist or someone that wants to ban gay marriage, etc i wouldn't to work for them, with them or fund them. And guess what. I don't expect the Mormon church or whatever to put part of a gay couple or an advocate or donor for related stuff in an executive position either.
It is a little odd. I think I see action as just an extension of speech. This is probably a reason I hesitate when anyone says you can talk about something, boy you better not, say, actually exercise your theoretical right to assemble.
I think I will need to think about it a little more.
This is an important distinction. It is illegal for an employer to threaten all employees with termination if they do not vote on X, for example. It is not illegal for an employer to terminate an employee for taking a specific political action.
Mozilla did not threaten to terminate in order to coerce action, they terminated for actions already taken place, making it legal.
So your idea is that it's not okay to threaten to fire an employee over political actions, but it is okay to actually fire someone over political actions? No worker protections protects against both. Read it closely:
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through _or_ by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
It prohibits both discharge and threat of discharge. The argument that Mozilla did not threaten to discharge Eich, and thus discharging Eich because of his political activity is not relevant. Both are prohibited.
Thanks for standing up and fighting these good fights.
The law is to prevent employers from extorting all employees into taking political action under threat of termination. Terminating a single employee for their past political actions is different from extorting all employees into action.
Not incorrect, but an incomplete description of these worker protections. It is also prevents employers from threatening employees into refraining from taking political action, "No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity."
> Terminating a single employee for their past political actions is different from extorting all employees into action.
Terminating an employee for their political action makes it crystal clear to the remaining employees that they need to refrain from that political action if they want to keep their jobs - and that violates worker protections.
Again, you seem to be under the impression that these protections only exist to prevent employers from making their employees carry out a political action. That's not the case, they also prohibit influencing employees from refraining taking political action. Firing an employee from donating to a ballot initiative is a very explicit way to get employees to refrain from donating to said ballot initiative.
And yet again, I as well as other commenters have provided you with analysis from law groups that explain that Mozilla firing Eich over his political donations would have violated these worker protections.
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
You also dodged the question.
Where are you getting this idea that this law only applies to company "policy". Reread the protections:
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through _or_ by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
Where does it say that this is only prohibited by policy? It says "No employer shall..." not "No employer shall implement policy to...". The law does not apply differently to company "policy" versus "actions".
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees...
So it's not just coercion, it's prohibiting influence (as well as attempts at either). And it also describes the manner of influence that is prohibited:
> through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment.
It is prohibited to influence employees through discharge or loss of employment or through threat of discharge or loss of employment. Both threatening to fire someone and actually firing someone over political activity are prohibited.
And lastly it describes what the employer is prohibited from influencing their employers to or to refrain from doing:
> to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
Using the above to get employees to follow a political action to to refrain from following a political action is prohibited.
> You also dodged the question.
Because the question is inane and you know it. My whole point was that both threatening to fire Eich and actually firing Eich for donations violated these protections, so this distinction is irrelevant. But I'll entertain you: threatening to discharge someone over political activity is when an employer threatens and employee to fire someone for taking or refusing to take a political action. Discharging someone over political activity is when they are actually fired.
And now it's my turn to give you an inane question of my own: When the law prohibits both threatening to discharge someone for political activity and actually discharging someone for political activity, is trying to justify firing someone for political actions by saying, "it's okay they actually discharged him for political activity, they didn't threaten to discharge him" an effective approach?