Mozilla Announces "Open Web Docs" Following Last Year's Layoffs
Last year during the big round of layoffs at Mozilla the entire Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) writers team was laid off. That was a particularly sad blow considering how valuable the MDN documentation has been to web developers as a very useful resource. Today the Mozilla folks are announced Open Web Docs in seemingly looking to have the community take over.
Following those unfortunate layoffs last summer, they exposed all of the Mozilla Developer Network documentation to GitHub. Now they are announcing the Open Web Docs organization.
"Open Web Docs (OWD) is an open collective, created in collaboration between several key MDN partner organizations to ensure the long-term health of open web platform documentation on de facto standard resources like MDN Web Docs, independently of any single vendor or organization. It will do this by collecting funding to finance writing staff and helping manage the communities and processes that will deliver on present and future documentation needs," was written on the Mozilla Hacks blog.
Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Following Layoffs, Mozilla and Core Rust Developers Are Forming a Rust Foundation
A Pretty Dire Assessment of Mozilla
Firefox 83 Released; Mozilla Kicks Rusty "Servo" Web Engine to the Linux Foundation
Related Stories
Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
The Mozilla Corporation announced today it was laying off approximately 250 staff members in a move to shore up the organization's financial future.
The layoffs were publicly announced in a blog post today. Employees were notified hours before, earlier this morning, via an email [PDF] sent by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation Chairwoman.
Baker's message cited the organization's need to adapt its finances to a post-COVID-19 world and re-focus the organization on new commercial services.
[...] In 2018, the Mozilla Corporation said it had around 1,000 full-time employees worldwide. Mozilla previously laid off 70 employees in January. Several sources have told ZDNet that the recent layoffs accounted for nearly a quarter of the organization's workforce.
Main casualties of today's layoffs were the developers working on the company's experimental Servo browser engine and Mozilla's threat management security team. The latter is the security team that investigates security reports and performs incident response. The security team that fixes bugs in Mozilla products is still in place, according to sources and a Mozilla spokesperson.
Changing World, Changing Mozilla
Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.
Rust Core Team + Mozilla To Create A Rust Foundation
Rust's core team and Mozilla are announcing plans to create a Rust foundation with the hopes of establishing this legal entity by year's end. The trademarks and related assets of Rust, Cargo, and Crates.io will belong to this foundation. Work is well underway on establishing this foundation with originally coming to the idea of possibly creating an independent Rust foundation last year, now pushed along by the recent Mozilla layoffs and the global pandemic. This should allow the Rust community more safety rather than being reliant upon a sole organization (Mozilla) and help foster growth and open up new possibilities.
Lay(off)ing the foundation for Rust's future
Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Related: Linus Torvalds: Don't Hide Rust in Linux Kernel; Death to AVX-512
Co-founder of Netscape (formerly Mosaic Communications Corporation) and of Mozilla.org, Jamie Zawinski, has some brief comments about the current situation with Mozilla and its browser.
Back to Mozilla -- in my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
And they just completely threw in the towel on standards when they grabbed their ankles and allowed W3C to add DRM. At this point, I assume Mozilla's voice on the standards committees has all the world-trembling gravitas of "EFF writes amicus brief."
By the way, one dynamic that the cited article missed is that a huge part of the reason for Google's "investment" in Mozilla was not just to drive search traffic -- it was antitrust insurance. Mozilla continuing to exist made Chrome not be the only remaining web browser, and that kept certain wolves at bay.
Google has decided that they don't need to buy antitrust insurance any more. Wonder why.
Firefox 83 Released With Warp'ed JavaScript, HTTPS-Only Mode Option
Most notable with Firefox 83 is the SpiderMonkey "Warp" upgrade aiming to deliver better website responsiveness and other real-world JavaScript performance improvements. Mozilla describes the Warp benefits as "improved page load performance by up to 15%, page responsiveness by up to 12%, and reduced memory usage by up to 8%. We have replaced part of the JavaScript engine that helps to compile and display websites for you, improving security and maintainability of the engine at the same time."
Firefox 83 also ships with an option for an HTTPS-only mode whereby every Firefox connection aims to be secure and will warn the user should HTTPS not be supported.
Mozilla Punts Servo Web Engine Development To The Linux Foundation
Ever since the mass layoffs at Mozilla earlier this year and some Mozilla projects in jeopardy many have been wondering: what about Servo? Well, today it's heading off to the Linux Foundation.
Mozilla and the Linux Foundation are jointly announcing this morning that the Servo web engine development will now be hosted by the Linux Foundation.
The Rust-written code-base that's served as a long in development "next-gen" web engine at Mozilla will now be developed under the Linux Foundation umbrella. Besides Mozilla, this move has the support of other industry stakeholders like Samsung and Let's Encrypt.
See also: Firefox 84 Beta Begins Enabling WebRender By Default On Linux
Chrome 87 Released With More Performance Improvements
Google Is Already Experimenting With WebP2 As Successor To WebP Image Format
Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Following Layoffs, Mozilla and Core Rust Developers Are Forming a Rust Foundation
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Wednesday January 27 2021, @12:39AM (3 children)
come do the work for free we used to pay for or better yet fund it yourself, that massive endowment we have stashed away it is not enough to pay the bills. BTW we got some more shitty changes to the interface coming, we cannot be out Googled.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @12:50AM (1 child)
Morons indeed. Fortune favors the brave, [brave.com] afterall, we need more than de-platforming! [mozilla.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @02:56AM
And while they are busy digging:
Welcome to Pale Moon
https://www.palemoon.org/ [palemoon.org]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday January 28 2021, @12:16AM
In other news, today I'm announcing Open Back Yard in the hope that the community takes over. Any minute now I'm expecting hordes of eager people to turn up to mow the lawn, weed the garden, cut back the tree branches, and repaint the shed.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 27 2021, @12:48AM (10 children)
Is there anyone who didn't see this coming as soon as Mozilla decided making sure people know you're super woke was more important than the code?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @12:58AM (6 children)
And they axed documentation team, ones that actually do useful work, rather their SJW division.
(Score: -1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday January 27 2021, @02:35AM (5 children)
Hey, White folks. Worried about your employment prospects with Biden's new immigration plans? Well, I got good news for 'ya -- people who can write technical English worth a damn, and especially with hands-on experience of technical/programming processes are in high demand now and that will only increase even if everybody else gets replaced by $15/hr Mexicans or AI. Why, you ask?
- Most people including native-born Whites can't even technically write, and don't even fucking bother with asking autistic engineers to write procedures
- Job security - Perhaps anybody who can write chooses not to because they believe they will write their jobs away if no longer needed
- Job security - The ESL assholes you have to work with choose not to work with you because they believe you are writing their jobs away.
- Have to observe processes interacting with hostile ESL operators who believes that one of them should have got your job, or
- Having to observe processes interacting with friendly ESL operators who are illiterate in any language,
- Multiply those hassles in triplicate if your company gets bought out or otherwise is expecting imminent "restructuring."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @03:07AM (4 children)
It's been my observation that for each MBA hired, about 15 useful people lose their job.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday January 27 2021, @03:45AM (1 child)
It's easy to say that MBAs and people with degrees in "Engineering Management" will keep suck-ups and cronies rather than talented folks, but at the end of the day, the MBA Jew has to justify their profits or cost savings to an even bigger Jew, and money talks. MBAs might not be the brightest but they know which geese are laying the golden eggs. The MBAs take credit for those golden eggs, and when those golden eggs go away, upper-management notices*.
* Unless they're all Jews. They'll profit and get hired elsewhere through nepotism.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:48AM
Up to a point.
The problem is, MBAs, like all management types, who fuck up at company X have absolutely no problems at all getting work at companies Y,Z,A,B....etc. and the cunts know it. In fact, it has been known for companies who, when they do wake up and realise the MBA turd they hired has cost them a fortune and is screwing up their business, make the appropriate noises to said turd about time to seek future challenges with a promise to write them a glowing reference just so they can get rid of them a little bit faster.
Engineers, programmers and other 'grunts' who're let go as part of the MBA's streamlining/whatever? slightly different story....it's usually better for your future career prospects for you to jump ship when one of these turds starts exploiting you than to wait for you to be 'reorganised' out of your job either when you've done all the work so they can take sole credit for it, or as part of the blame game when it all goes horribly wrong. If you leave early enough into what you perceive to be a potentially 'hostile' regime implemented by one of these turds you have a better chance of obtaining a good reference as you can't be blamed for 'being inept' or 'sabotaging the project' etc. That shit happens later when it all starts going tits up and scapegoats are required.
There's only one thing worse than a useless turd with a MBA, and that's a useless turd with a MBA who got the job through nepotism. If you've the misfortune to work in a place where that happens, seek alternate employment immediately, don't wait hoping that the inevitable won't happen, it will happen, and it will cost you....
Bitter experience?, me?, what makes you think that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @02:32PM (1 child)
...ok but Mozilla doesn't hire MBAs? Literally all the way up to director their positions are advertised publicly and I've never, once, seen an MBA req. Go have a look https://careers.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org] yourself if you want.
Diss Moz if you want but be accurate in doing so.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 27 2021, @02:54PM
Nope, they hire based on how far you are away from straight, white, male, and conservative. You know, instead of silly things like being better at the job and working with other people than everyone else in the list of resumes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @05:09AM
gross
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday January 27 2021, @08:32AM (1 child)
It took you that long? Already when they started to ape the Chrome version numbering system, the writing was on the wall.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 27 2021, @02:56PM
There's a difference between ordinary stupid decisions and flat out insane, bigoted decisions.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by pTamok on Wednesday January 27 2021, @09:54AM (4 children)
I hope one or both of the ends has a panel that is easily removable from the inside, otherwise I can see some people thinking it funny to roll one over, trapping the occupant(s) inside and optionally setting fire to it. For some reason, homeless people are regarded as worthy of abuse by some people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @03:16PM (1 child)
You commented on the wrong article.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday January 28 2021, @08:56AM
How the dickens did that happen? I'm not usually that scatterbrained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:41PM
I dunno, I saw plenty of documentation from IBM or Oracle that was more than capable of trapping and crushing someone. Usually it was an intern rather than a homeless person, but is there really that much difference?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday January 28 2021, @12:18AM
At night, the ice weasels come.