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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the state-of-the-art dept.

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:

  1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
  2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
  3. 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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @04:46PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @04:46PM (#1057669)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:17PM (#1057686)

    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

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 27 2020, @06:12PM (#1057716) Homepage Journal

    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