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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.
Jamie is responding to the summary of the current situation with Mozilla outlined by software engineer Cal Paterson who points out that Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay having gone up 400%.
One of the most popular and most intuitive ways to evaluate an NGO is to judge how much of their spending is on their programme of works (or "mission") and how much is on other things, like administration and fundraising. If you give money to a charity for feeding people in the third world you hope that most of the money you give them goes on food - and not, for example, on company cars for head office staff.
Mozilla looks bad when considered in this light. Fully 30% of all expenditure goes on administration. Charity Navigator, an organisation that measures NGO effectiveness, would give them zero out of ten on the relevant metric. For context, to achieve 5/10 on that measure Mozilla admin would need to be under 25% of spending and, for 10/10, under 15%.
Previously:
(2020) Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
(2020) Firefox Browser Use Drops as Mozilla's Worst Microsoft Edge Fears Come True
(2020) The Web Is Now Too Complex To Allow The Creation of New Browsers
(2019) The Future of Browsers
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:47AM (11 children)
Expect a full on assault of the wrongs of Firefox/Mozilla and anonymous praise and blind worship of MS "Edge" until FF ceases to exist.
It's a ONE MICROSOFT WAY world, my friends. Anywhere there's FOSS, they're almost bound to be there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:49AM (4 children)
i wonder how many former microsoftees work at mozilla on ff. just sayin'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:57AM (3 children)
I wonder how many NSA agents work at Mozilla on FF. FTFY.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:38AM (2 children)
FTFY
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:36AM (1 child)
Never enough of them.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:38PM
NSA? Dammit we told them this was our op.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:09AM (1 child)
Wanna know what Microsoft Edgy isn't? Distinct from Google Chrome in any meaningful way.
Google dumps money into Mozilla, inflating salaries and funding toxic behavior and diversity initiatives. That drives away talent and results in complete paralysis of the organization. Then Google gets to pretend that there isn't a browser monoculture.
Mozilla is a lapdog, and Firefox is a failed experiment.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday September 27 2020, @08:17AM
This implies some sort of planning and evil scheming on Google's part. They actually don't need to do anything apart from sit back and hold marshmellows over the Mozilla dumpster fire. You don't need to actively push an organisation that's already busy committing suicide all by itself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:04PM
He left not long after Mozilla decided to fuck us all by rewriting their browser from scratch rather than reusing the netscape 4.x base that would have seen them release a year earlier and without all the performance problems mozilla had for its first 4 years of development, is one of the most prolific contributors to xscreensaver (having produced a few dozen of the demos in it during the 90s-early 00s including the Xmatrix screensaver), has been vocally critizing mozilla when they fucked up since, oh yeah and he ran the DNA lounge and a couple independent pizza places for most of the 2000s, so yeah, this guy is not a shill and quite legit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:38PM (2 children)
Have you woken up from a 15 year coma?
Microsoft is no longer a player in the web browsers space. They publish a fork of Chromium.
Google now controls the browser space with an Iron fist MS could only ever dream of. Chromium is the de-facto rich client for the web.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:06PM (1 child)
>Have you woken up from a 15 year coma?
Microsoft is no longer a player in the web browsers space. They publish a fork of Chromium.
Nice try. I don't believe in the, "New Microsoft" idea so many shills are pushing.
Their actions remind me of predatory bird(s) which lay their eggs in the nest of another bird's and the mother raises an alien bird.
Or, maybe something like mites or other predatory insect who eventually kill their hosts and then eat them, or eat them while they're still alive.
M$ does M$. It always has, it always will, that's my opinion. EEE is very much a concern.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:07PM
just like the buttfucked Novell to death.