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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 40 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source | bottom
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strict9 ◴[15 Jan 20 21:06 UTC] No.22058568[source]▶
Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops large and small over the past 10 or so years.

In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop, and manage.

But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs, though usually with mixed results.

For Mozilla, axing quality and security first is a bad look when those are crucial aspects of a privacy-first company value.

replies(7): >>22058757 #>>22058762 #>>22058953 #>>22059007 #>>22059065 #>>22059192 #>>22060314 #
1. zelly ◴[15 Jan 20 21:57 UTC] No.22059192[source]▶
If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$.

I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.

Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.

replies(10): >>22059302 #>>22059312 #>>22059422 #>>22059430 #>>22059972 #>>22060992 #>>22060994 #>>22062072 #>>22065318 #>>22074608 #
2. la_fayette ◴[15 Jan 20 22:07 UTC] No.22059302[source]▶
Cpu usage of chrome is higher on chrome on mobile. Cpu affects battery life more than memory... so firefox is a good choice on mobile.
replies(1): >>22059947 #
3. saagarjha ◴[15 Jan 20 22:08 UTC] No.22059312[source]▶
> If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$.

And further contribute to the browser monoculture?

> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.

And you've reported this, I assume?

> Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.

Really? I explicitly avoid Chrome on my computer because it can't handle the web without chewing through my RAM.

> Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.

I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.

replies(2): >>22059627 #>>22061002 #
4. fencepost ◴[15 Jan 20 22:20 UTC] No.22059422[source]▶
Could you clarify "recently" a bit more? Clearly it's after the release of uBlock Origin, but I'm pretty sure that there was a big effort to clean up memory use a few years ago.

Maybe it's poor Linux support, I have a distressingly high 4 digit number of tabs open on a Windows box and I don't think I've seen it go past 8gb with multiple weeks of runtime.

Edit: Win10 Pro on a Xeon with 48gb ram available

replies(3): >>22059534 #>>22059638 #>>22059882 #
5. basch ◴[15 Jan 20 22:21 UTC] No.22059430[source]▶
SpiderMonkey? SM and V8 are javascript engines. Gecko is a browser/layout engine.
6. zelly ◴[15 Jan 20 22:31 UTC] No.22059534[source]▶
Recently meaning 1 month ago
replies(1): >>22059946 #
7. zelly ◴[15 Jan 20 22:41 UTC] No.22059627[source]▶
There already is a browser monoculture. Even Microsoft's default browser is now Chromium with a different logo on it. The way to get diversity in browsers is to have adoption. There are hundreds of alternative browsers out there, but they do not diversify the browser market because they are unusable. You want diversity of browser adoption, not diversity of implementation.

There just aren't enough users out there to stick to a bad browser for religious reasons. It has to actually be better.

The browser market is as free of a market as you can get. Chromium has won. It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE. It's basically too late to catch up. While trying to catch up, they will lose what little market share they have left, and the result will be an undisputable browser monoculture. What Mozilla can offer is a different frontend (or "userspace" if you will) to Chromium. That is the realistic approach.

> I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.

desktop user agents: 8% and dropping, about to be overtaken by Internet Explorer (lmao)

4.9% with mobile included

<1% mobile only

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...

replies(2): >>22060030 #>>22060167 #
8. usr1106 ◴[15 Jan 20 22:43 UTC] No.22059638[source]▶
What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs? How can you even find what you are looking for? (Honest question, no attack)

I hardly ever have more than 10 tabs open, and aggressively close everything I am not working with. I also shut down my browser twice a day (2 working locations) and never restore the previous session. I do bookmark some pages, but as a matter of fact I notice that I hardly ever refer to my bookmarks. I don't have the feeling that I am missing out on anything.

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9. fencepost ◴[15 Jan 20 23:13 UTC] No.22059879{3}[source]▶
What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs?

Fail to go back and clear them out, mostly. Most were left open because of something relevant at the time, so I mostly need to spend a little time going through and nuking or nothing. There's been little friction due to leaving them open so it hasn't been a priority.

Pretty much the same thing that leaves some people with tens of thousands of messages in their inboxes (I deal with someone who does that and it makes my teeth itch, so my inbox isn't so bad).

replies(1): >>22063628 #
10. shpeedy ◴[15 Jan 20 23:13 UTC] No.22059882[source]▶
Previously, Firefox was fine on computer with 2GB of memory and hundreds of tabs. Now, 8GB is not enough.
replies(1): >>22062089 #
11. fencepost ◴[15 Jan 20 23:21 UTC] No.22059946{3}[source]▶
If you have a limited number of sites that blow FF memory usage up like that within a limited time (and that you're willing to share in a bug report) then that might be something helpful to report. Failing that, there may be some telemetry available that might be able to identify problem areas, though I'm not sure what details would be.
12. The_rationalist ◴[15 Jan 20 23:21 UTC] No.22059947[source]▶
Websites are not tested for Firefox for Android.
replies(1): >>22060223 #
13. roca ◴[15 Jan 20 23:24 UTC] No.22059972[source]▶
> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.

Of course this is not the experience of the vast majority of Firefox users, so it's pointless to suggest that this means something about Firefox's overall quality. You can easily find people making the same sorts of complaints about Chrome.

replies(2): >>22060965 #>>22061231 #
14. bzbarsky ◴[15 Jan 20 23:31 UTC] No.22060030{3}[source]▶
> The browser market is as free of a market as you can get.

Given all the UA-sniffing and purposefully sending broken or degraded sites to various browsers going on nowadays (including on Google properties), no, it's not.

15. jorvi ◴[15 Jan 20 23:48 UTC] No.22060167{3}[source]▶
> It had an advantage of being written mostly from scratch with lessons from the failures of Firefox and IE

Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world, and incessantly being featured on the front page of the biggest (90%+) search machine in the world.

replies(1): >>22061451 #
16. tomrod ◴[15 Jan 20 23:53 UTC] No.22060199{3}[source]▶
You might consider usint Zotero as a bookmark manager. It is originally for bibliographies. I don't think I can ever go back.

It has a fantastic FF extension.

17. tomrod ◴[15 Jan 20 23:54 UTC] No.22060223{3}[source]▶
Indeed. I keep Brave around just to handle the 5% of sites that are decidedly not FF friendly.

FF -- fix text sizing. As an example, old-style Reddit renders wonderfully on Brave and terribly terribly small on FF mobile. Another tester site is BOFH.

18. toyg ◴[16 Jan 20 01:55 UTC] No.22060965[source]▶
Considering he was on Linux, btw, that was probably not a Mozilla build.

Sadly, one of the drawbacks of opensource is that people can take your code and butcher it, and users will blame you.

replies(1): >>22068543 #
19. toyg ◴[16 Jan 20 01:59 UTC] No.22060992[source]▶
You were probably not using a production-grade Mozilla build, or a recent one. All sorts of shenanigans go on in the Linux world when it comes to builds.
replies(1): >>22061435 #
20. smnthermes ◴[16 Jan 20 02:00 UTC] No.22060994[source]▶
Weren't Quantum/Servo/e10 Firefox's saviors?
replies(1): >>22065385 #
21. Klonoar ◴[16 Jan 20 02:00 UTC] No.22061002[source]▶
>And you've reported this, I assume?

This is a total non-response. They're not actually under an obligation to report a bug and use their time - Mozilla, however, is obliged to make their browser work properly, and to ensure the team that's working on it is properly staffed/resourced/competent.

Your response is downplaying someone's actual concern by acting like it's wrong that they don't spend their spare time participating in open source software development.

Furthermore, this "browser monoculture" argument is ridiculous. WebKit and Blink are both open source, and Mozilla is increasingly becoming what Opera was back with Presto: a lone engine with quirks that nobody wants to waste their time working around.

If Mozilla gave up Gecko tomorrow and forked WebKit (a la what Blink is) I don't think I'd bat an eye. This is like what junior programmers wind up learning at some point - nobody cares what the code looks like, just that it does what it's expected to.

I say this all as someone who's contributed to some Mozilla repos, has a massive personal investment in Rust (and has read a good chunk of Servo, and liked it), and has been a fan since the Mozilla Suite days.

replies(2): >>22062646 #>>22063107 #
22. scriptsmith ◴[16 Jan 20 02:40 UTC] No.22061231[source]▶
It could be a genuine leak, but it sounds an awful lot like Firefox using 28 GiB of virtual memory.

Firefox often appears to use large amounts of memory in top / htop, but I believe that's just reported address space allocations. The RES column gives a more accurate depiction of memory usage.

replies(1): >>22061416 #
23. zelly ◴[16 Jan 20 03:24 UTC] No.22061416{3}[source]▶
It was real memory. I know the difference. I only noticed because I got an OOM error in my Java program and X11 froze, couldn't use my mouse. This happened multiple times with different heavy duty JS websites, particularly SPAs.
24. zelly ◴[16 Jan 20 03:27 UTC] No.22061435[source]▶
I used the official, automatically-updating build from getfirefox dot com. Package managers are always outdated, which you don't want for browsers (CVE madness).
25. zelly ◴[16 Jan 20 03:31 UTC] No.22061451{4}[source]▶
I'm skeptical of this argument. Advertising companies shill garbage to us all the time. If it were bad, people would have stopped using it. As strong as the Google brand is, I don't think people are using it just because they were told to. Consumers, even the least technical of them, are still savvy enough to notice "slow internet". Their friends tell them to switch to Chrome, then they stop complaining about it, done.

> Chrome's main advantage was/is the limitless ocean of resources of one of the biggest three companies in the world

Yes, this is the reason why it became the best. It had loads of talented developers deployed on it for years and years. You can either complain about it or be happy that it happened and you have access to the fruits of this labor for free.

replies(1): >>22062010 #
26. ncmncm ◴[16 Jan 20 05:52 UTC] No.22062010{5}[source]▶
I guess you liked Internet Explorer best until Microsoft finally abandoned it.
27. bzbarsky ◴[16 Jan 20 06:06 UTC] No.22062060{3}[source]▶
> How can you even find what you are looking for?

Type '%' (no quotes) followed by parts of the URL or title or both in the URL bar. Searches only your open tabs. I can usually find exactly what I want quite quickly.

28. saghm ◴[16 Jan 20 06:09 UTC] No.22062072[source]▶
> I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.

Not sure what was going on with your experience, but I use Firefox on x86_64 machines with far less than 28 GiB of RAM daily and several extensions (including uBlock Origin), and I've never had anything like that happen. I'm not sure how JS-heavy the sites I visit are though, as I don't have any issues, so I don't really pay attention to that.

29. saghm ◴[16 Jan 20 06:12 UTC] No.22062088{3}[source]▶
> I hardly ever have more than 10 tabs open, and aggressively close everything I am not working with.

I must be quite an outlier, because even 10 tabs open at once sounds like a distressingly high number to me.

30. sfink ◴[16 Jan 20 06:12 UTC] No.22062089{3}[source]▶
Have you checked how Chrome does with 8GB now?

Sadly, the sites out there have changed far more than any of the browsers have, and not for the better. They load a ton of crap that does not contribute to the value delivered to the user, but instead contribute value to the site owner and the dozen layers of intermediaries in between user and site owner.

31. saagarjha ◴[16 Jan 20 08:31 UTC] No.22062646{3}[source]▶
> Your response is downplaying someone's actual concern by acting like it's wrong that they don't spend their spare time participating in open source software development.

Anything that broken would be fixed, almost instantly, had they reported it. I am not very amenable to people who discuss their very extreme personal anecdotes that they have failed to even put even the basic (some may even say courteous) amount of help and instead talk about their experience like it's typical.

> Furthermore, this "browser monoculture" argument is ridiculous. WebKit and Blink are both open source, and Mozilla is increasingly becoming what Opera was back with Presto: a lone engine with quirks that nobody wants to waste their time working around.

Open source does not ensure that a monoculture will not develop; both WebKit and Blink are financed by billion (trillion?) dollar corporations that have almost complete control over what will or will not be worked on or merged in. Every engine has its own quirks and slant on how it interprets the web standard: if WebKit was the dominant browser today we'd all be even more hesitant to roll out WebM or WebGL 2.

> If Mozilla gave up Gecko tomorrow and forked WebKit (a la what Blink is) I don't think I'd bat an eye. This is like what junior programmers wind up learning at some point - nobody cares what the code looks like, just that it does what it's expected to.

Who exactly are you likening to "junior programmers"?

> I say this all as someone who's contributed to some Mozilla repos, has a massive personal investment in Rust (and has read a good chunk of Servo, and liked it), and has been a fan since the Mozilla Suite days.

And you know my personal history on this pretty well too, but you'll notice I'm advocating for Mozilla in this case.

32. throwaway-9320 ◴[16 Jan 20 10:00 UTC] No.22063107{3}[source]▶
> WebKit and Blink are both open source

Doesn't mean much since Google controls what features are planned, implemented and included in Chromium.

33. usr1106 ◴[16 Jan 20 11:43 UTC] No.22063628{4}[source]▶
Right, my private Gmail inbox has more than 70,000 conversations (no clue how many messages). Using search I typically find quickly what I want.

As a programmer who has spent significant time with performance work, having useless tabs in a browser would hurt me. But that Google has to search through a bit longer list of messages I can accept as the typical wastefulness of computing these days. (I am old enough to have done time-sharing on 4 MB with 11 other students on their VT100)

34. pitay ◴[16 Jan 20 15:23 UTC] No.22065318[source]▶
This is probably too late for anybody to notice but I got FF memory usage down significantly by:

1) Not using the recommended performance settings. Setting 'Content Process Limit' to 2 removed more than half the memory usage IIRC. There are other settings that you will need to go to about:config to change like what size images are cached to memory etc.

2) Use the 'Auto Tab Discard' extension. You will have to configure this to not discard tabs on certain sites or you may lose info you have typed into a webpage. Fortunately this is easily configured by right clicking a tab.

At the moment Firefox is using 700MB to display 5 tabs. 4 HN and on Reddit tab. Given that these sites are close to just text I find 700MB absurd, but that is just the web these days.

35. pitay ◴[16 Jan 20 15:28 UTC] No.22065385[source]▶
Strangely after Quantum, Firefox worked worse for me. It is still the case, with Firefox regularly pausing all network activity for a few seconds or even a minute, so I am stuck with websites stuck loading or video stuck loading for a decent amount of time. The UI and everything functions, it is just the network communicating that is stuffed, so anything that requests something has to wait until Firefox's network part decides to respond. I am used to it now, but this happened when Quantum came out and has remained the same for me since.
36. wott ◴[16 Jan 20 20:30 UTC] No.22068543{3}[source]▶
Firefox gigantic leaks happen to me on Windows too. Depending on the mood, it ends with a crash or with Windows warning me that it will kill some processes if that keeps going on.
replies(1): >>22074628 #
37. wesgarland ◴[17 Jan 20 13:56 UTC] No.22074608[source]▶
How, exactly, would you replace Gecko with V8?

One is a layout engine, one is a JavaScript interpreter.

38. wesgarland ◴[17 Jan 20 13:57 UTC] No.22074628{4}[source]▶
Happens on mac, too.

Some mornings I'm beachballing for my whole first coffee. Eventually I just wind up power cycling the mac if I can't open a shell prompt with which to `pkill -9 plugin-container`....

replies(1): >>22074955 #
39. toyg ◴[17 Jan 20 14:43 UTC] No.22074955{5}[source]▶
I'm on Mac too and I've never seen anything like this. The odd tab will crash (particularly after I started using containers extensively and more than one adblocker/anti-tracker), but that's it.

> pkill -9 plugin-container

Ahhh, ok - that's not FF, that's a crap plugin (likely Flash). It's the browser equivalent of blaming Windows when a crap taiwanese driver gets it stuck. You could try uninstalling all that crap.

replies(1): >>22079464 #
40. wesgarland ◴[17 Jan 20 21:20 UTC] No.22079464{6}[source]▶
Amazing how it happens neither with Chrome nor Safari. Any idea how they solved that problem?