This includes the entire Servo team which was working on its next generation web engine that was supposed to be Firefox's ticket to staying afloat in the future. Servo also popularized the Rust language afaik
Aside from Servo, they also axed the entire threat management team, because why would a browser need threat detection and incident response, amirite?
Relevant links:
https://nitter.snopyta.org/directhex/status/1293352458308198401
https://nitter.snopyta.org/MichalPurzynski/status/1293220570885062657
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865
This sucks shit. Mozilla was one of the few remaining hold outs from the utopian ideal days of the Internet. This looks like they are basically looking to abandon that position and become just another 'services' provider. Fuck capitalism.
Mozilla is essentially the only thing that is stopping Google from being in complete control of web standards. Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, etc. all use Blink, Google's browser engine.
So yeah, this is very worrying.
I used Vivaldi for a month when FF75 came out.
Then Lichess broke and I found a userChrome hack that fixed the address bar.
Vivaldi works mostly great but is proprietary and I reaaaally don't want to use a proprietary browser, especially a blink one
Thank goodness employment isn't tied to health insurance or anyth--I'm sorry I think I just got a note here, let me read it...
"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"
Moz CEO: "Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
As compared to the 100% discount your laid off employees are now "asked to commit to"
So she was appointed in April. Since her appointment she's upped Executive salary and laid off 250, killed their future web engine and their threats department and is now focusing on money making strategies. This is the death of Mozilla. The execs are just going to run the corpse into the ground sucking every dollar out.
In the U.S., Mozilla-paid COBRA benefits through the end of the year. In all other countries, where we can, we will seek to provide similar coverage.
Don't worry, you have just five months to find a job in a tight market where literally no one is hiring!
luckily, I'm seeing a lot of fellow developers reaching out and offering jobs to the laid off employees.
We tend to take care of our own but it sucks that other industries don't or can't do that
Practically an essential skill for CEOs and LinkedIn-types I think
changing the world, through meaningless jargon and rethoric
didn't think anyone would use this kinda marketing speak after silicon valley satirized it
CEO gets 2.5 million fucking dollars
They even ruined Mozilla (edit: and when I say 'they' I don't mean anything weird, I mean people running things laying off 250 people and not being able to even do a token gesture of slightly lowering their massive 'compensation')
And then Google ran the web
They cancelled their patreon because patreon donated to Black lives matter.
The thing with konqueror/epiphany/surf/qutebrowser/midori and all of these independent projects is that while they might be decent on their own, the lack of any kind of decent and robust extension system really undermines your privacy
You can set up a DNS-level/host-based ad blocker but it's still not as good as a dedicated extension like uMatrix/NoScript/uBO in advanced (medium/hard) modes.
I think FF is still it. Or at best a fork of it like IceCat.
It will still be a long time before anything becomes comparably as good an option as Firefox, even with the engines stalled and the project adrift. A lot of responsibility for the future of the a Internet just fell in the laps of thankless volunteers though.
I'm not sure how things can be changed, but I think it is essential for us to stop building web browsers (and web services) as if they were space elevators. For all intents and purposes, browsers have grown to levels of complexity rivaling operating systems. I mean, it legitimately takes longer to compile Firefox than it does to compile the Linux Kernel with nearly all the modules enabled.
Obviously we can't go back to gopher, but we have to do something to bring the standards of the web within reach of being implemented by mortals.
They all ultimately use Chromium/WebKit to render. They're not really independent.
Konqueror can be configured to use KHTML, I recommend you try it to see how it looks. It isn't really compatible with most sites in 2020.
yeah I'm aware. Also isn't Konqueror dead? Afaik the browser that KDE develop now is Falkon.
Also I believe Midori and PM/Basilisk have their own engines but they also inherit the compatibility issues that comes with that.
Honestly, I find HN to be a mix of insufferable techbros as well as a lot of level-headed folks with nuanced takes
just have to know which threads to avoid i guess
generally agreed and I also find it useful to keep tabs on which way the SV bourgeoisie are moving on things / what they're telling themselves (less so in recent years as they used to use the platform much more heavily in the past). but that also means I don't expect topics like executive pay to be trash fires and this time it wasn't.
IMO this just makes the Linux desktop more important.
We may soon have a tech world where the majority of apps are written specifically for a Google platform, imagine Chromium + Fuschia. Most users will have little ability to create content, or access the internet, besides consuming corporate media. If we want technology that can benefit independent creators, radical movements, and decentralized organizations, we need to be able to build it ourselves.
Luckily Linux is improving. GTK4 + gtk-rs + Wayland + Flatpack give us a halfway decent platform to build with IMO.
