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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 2 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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jorvi ◴[15 Jan 20 23:48 UTC] No.22060167[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.

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1. zelly ◴[16 Jan 20 03:31 UTC] No.22061451[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.

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2. ncmncm ◴[16 Jan 20 05:52 UTC] No.22062010[source]▶
I guess you liked Internet Explorer best until Microsoft finally abandoned it.