SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 5, Insightful) by EEMac on Saturday September 26 2020, @01:42PM (11 children)
When a FireFox update announced FireFox was "more than a browser" and I was part of a social movement for using it, I knew it was time to consider Chrome.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @05:44PM (9 children)
Sorry you got modded down. I'm a woke hippie leftie, all in on many modern social/ist movements.
But that's no place for a browser project. I'm with Cal Peterson (who wrote the article that JWZ commented on) and JWZ. Mozilla Foundation should have focused on financial sustainability without spending their entire budget each year, and their goal should have been making the best browser in the world and defending web standards. All these digressions are killing them.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:49PM (3 children)
I'll let someone else downmod you. How dare you absolve Mozilla from their societal responsibility to right the wrongs White Patriarchy has wreaked upon the intersectionally oppressed in the world? By the way, where is *your* commitment to hand over all the ill gotten gains your privilege has afforded you to outreach efforts, getting poor females with no interest in a four-year CS course a chance to take your job, which you only got via your privilege?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @04:46PM (2 children)
Oh, so our industry never had a problem with sexism and sexual harrassment in education or the workplace. Gotcha.
And no white man ever got a psychological benefit from existing in classrooms dominated by white men, teaching staff almost all white men, and managers almost all white men. Gotcha again.
I'm in my 40s, and I had women classmates get told by professors and managers in the field that technology was a man's job and being a woman made them inherently incapable of doing it well. It's easy for me to say that if I was born a woman, I would have fought past that - but I wasn't, so we'll never know. And I haven't even touched on racism.
In summary, go fuck yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:17PM
So what? That's called a Birthright. If anything, we have been way too nice, and have been giving it all away. We should have shipped the Africans back home after the civil war and only ever accepted immigration from White countries. Women should be at home having White children, not whoring themselves for fake Jew money.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday September 27 2020, @06:12PM
My wife entered medical school in Manitoba the year that the informal quotas on female admissions were made slightly more permissive. That was back in the 60's.
On her first class a professor surveyed the classroom and remarked on the waste of money being spent on women who were just looking for their Mrs. degree.
Female doctors were rare in those days; and they tended to be among the best doctors available because the selection criteria were far more stringent than those for men.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @03:40AM
I discovered that as soon as I turn off my television, all of the latest & greatest social movements vanish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:50AM (3 children)
One thing I've long wondered is where all of that money is actually going. The Gnome Foundation crippled itself in much the same way years ago and I have to wonder if it is the same outreach programs involved with Mozilla, and just how exactly are the respective CEOs related to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @04:39PM (2 children)
I wrote the parent comment. I don't know how much GNOME Foundation spent, but Outreachy at Mozilla covered 20 interns for six months each year, when they had 1,000 employees. 75% of their staff is male and 75% is white, and less than 7% total is a combination of black, Latino, or Native American. So Mozilla's diversity initiatives and their impact on company demographics and company budget are irrelevant to their implosion. The CEO cost more in a single year than their entire diversity program over its life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:22PM
The numbers don't matter. Racial discrimination is "wrong" remember? Or is racism OK, as long as it's used against Whitey? Also, if everyone is equal, then what the fuck does race have to do with programming? All cultural Marxist BS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @07:13PM
It's harder to quantify the damage caused by injecting woke dangerhair activists into the organization.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 28 2020, @04:47PM
The problem with Chrome is that it's owned by Google. The problem with Edge is that it may as well be owned by Google, except now your data is likely going straight to Microsoft or maybe to Google and Microsoft.
At least Firefox is still a Third Party program. They don't have built-in incentives to funnel all your data to the parent company or to monetize you (at least not as much).
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"