Mozilla Laying Off Around A Quarter Of Their Employees

[Scellow]

Please provide sources if you make such a claim. From what I can find, it's rather $427,000 (see https://www.comparably.com/companies...utive-salaries)

2.5 millions my bad

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualrep...8-form-990.pdf

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/stat...035584/photo/1

it grows as their market share decreases

let's not forget that it's not their first mass layoff

[crystall]

The way I see it: WebAssembly - invented for browsers, great for cryptocurrency ... Am I wrong?

Firefox blocks cryptominers by default: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/0...ng-by-default/

[vladpetric]

Firefox blocks cryptominers by default: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/0...ng-by-default/

I didn't mean stealth cryptomining (stealing cycles through the browser), which is indeed a serious issue - rather, usage in smart contracts.

[crystall]

They tried creating phone OS for some reason and other useless projects while their browser was neglected.

Firefox OS was mismanaged but it wasn't a bad bet. KaiOS phones have been shipping by 10s of millions in the past few quarters and while it took a lot of effort some of us finally managed to get Mozilla back on board. That being said the engineering effort at the time was fundamental for the desktop browser too. Firefox OS was the first Mozilla product to ship with e10s enabled - one process per page - as such it forced us to refactor large swathes of code that had not been designed for multi-process operation. When the desktop browser finally switched to a multi-process model most of the grunt work had already been done.

[ssokolow]

If WebAssembly doesn't require the code to come open as HTML / CSS / Javascript that the browser and users can analyze it, I think it will be broken by design.

Have you actually seen what minified JavaScript looks like these days? ...or non-JavaScript compiled to JavaScript using emscripten because you can get better guaranteed performance with a compiler to force-limit use of dynamic language features so it's more JIT-able?

WebAssembly has an official tool for translating the bytecode into its human-readable form, and the plan is to incorporate its functionality into browser developer tools.

This is what the output looks like and it's at least as readable as de-minified JavaScript:

(module
  (type $t0 (func (param i64) (result i64)))
  (func $f0 (type $t0) (param $p0 i64) (result i64)
    (if $I0 (result i64) ; $I0 is an unused label name
      (i64.eqz
        (local.get $p0)) ; the name $p0 is the same as 0 here
      (then
        (i64.const 1))
      (else
        (i64.mul
          (local.get $p0)
         (call $f0 ; the name $f0 is the same as 0 here
           (i64.sub
             (local.get $p0)
             (i64.const 1))))))))

I haven't tried it, but there's also a wasm-to-C decompiler named wasmdec which probably gives better results than trying to read the JavaScript compiled from C by emscripten.

[M@GOid]

I agree, except that I have to use Firefox to manage my router because it allows me to view websites with an invalid certificate, unlike Chrome/Chromium.

I can enter a HTTP router with Chromium...

[mdedetrich]

Might be a controversial view, but in my opinion Brave is killing Firefox in the only real niche it had (Browser that was privacy orientated). Brave almost has all of the privacy benefits that Mozilla has by default (i.e. no extra plugins needed so computer illiterate people can benefit) PLUS

• A solution for advertisements that is privacy respecting and not like cancer. Although blocking works its a completely non sustainable solution unless you want to get back to the 90's where you had to pay for basic things like email
• Uses chromium which means it has much better performance + the brave release already adds the necessary patches for video HW acceleration on Linux (so distro's don't need to manually patch the source)
• Brave Beta (which will mean release soon) has end 2 end encrypted syncing of bookmarks/history etc etc

In other words, Brave cherry picked the best features of both Chromium and Firefox.

You can also tell this by looking at the browser adoption charts of late. Brave and Edge are killing most of Firefox's mindshare.

[increasechief]

There's actually quite a few people working full time on Rust at Mozilla. That being said the project has a strong community so its survival is guaranteed.

My way outsider understanding is that the Servo project still accounts for the large part of edge developments to Rust.

[tildearrow]

I can enter a HTTP router with Chromium...

Well this specific router forces me to use HTTPS... (the HTTP path is just a redirect)

[gabber]

No it's not. <- Equally valid opinion. Do you have any facts to support your claim?

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-...xtention/38140