Mozilla lays off 70

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.

Mozilla uses AFL, which is a genetic algorithm that tests code paths. They are also transitioning to Rust, which will give them a much bigger safety guarantee over most of their code and a much smaller audit surface for the rest.

Mozilla is good at everything except making browsers. rr is the best debugger I've used. I wonder if there's a way for them to monetize Rust. It seems impossible to monetize a programming language without owning a platform e.g. Microsoft (*.NET), Apple (Swift), Borland (Delphi), JetBrains (Kotlin). FirefoxOS for mobile with Rust as the first-class citizen would have been huge for them. Maybe it's not too late. Take note Mozilla.

If there's anything they're going to be in the history books for, it's going to say Rust, not Firefox.

Mozilla is already in the history books for Firefox, any way you slice it. Firefox has been the only serious refuge from proprietary browsers and their vendors for nearly two decades, and has made history in many ways. It would only be omitted if the book was written by a competitor's PR department.

Quality and popularity are rarely correlated, but such metrics are even further confounded when you have monopolistic factions like Google and MS pumping huge money into user acquisition for their competing platforms. It's ridiculous to imply that Firefox is being rejected by users just because Google has been dumping millions into getting people switched to Chrome (and doing so not only with marketing dollars, but increasingly with bully tactics).