Mozilla Laying Off Around A Quarter Of Their Employees

[Flaburgan]

I spent a month making my own web browser

I always wondered why so many people / project use webkit and not gecko when they need a webengine. In your case, is it only because that's what QtWebEngine uses? Did you consider using Gecko or Servo?

[uid313]

Mozilla's CEO Michell Baker salary plotted against the market share of Firefox.

[ssokolow]

The question is, WHICH 1/4 got cut? Was it the 1/4 that just sits around jerking off all day and fighting the Social Justice fight instead of actually doing their @#$%ing jobs? Or was it the 1/4 that actually works when at work? Or the 1/4 that didn't fall completely in line with the required groupthink? I suspect it's a lot more likely to be some intersection of the last two than the first one, or the N people associated with garbage like Pocket etc.

Given the importance of having a competitor to Blink-engine'd browsers, it does worry me that one of the "P.S. Don't worry. I didn't get laid off" blog posts on Planet Mozilla was a post proposing the concept of a browser extension that lets you filter out content that distresses you.

(I'm all for being able to get away from the depressing state of reality, but I don't think deepening our filter bubbles is healthy, civically responsible, or practical. Read a book or play a single-player game.)

That said, it is the newest in a series of extension ideas, with the previous two being very practical ideas for alternative tab management extensions, and we can't all produce winners all the time.

[Flaburgan]

Now, how can a web browser identify a miner when it downloads just a binary blob and cannot see its source code ?
(...)
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

I don't get your argument, when you install packages on your computer, you get the binary and that's fine. Maybe you would like to improve WebAssembly by asking for the sources at the same time at the binary, but that doesn't make it "broken by design", or every compiled software would be broken...

[crystall]

Since Mozilla's upper management role and compensation has been called into question multiple times in this thread I'd like to mention that there will be announcements soon about that too. The cuts affected all the organization and upper management wasn't spared.

[Fanboy80]

100M to antifa.
Abandon Taiwan.
Bold statement from Mozilla.

I thought it was "just" 100k?

[starshipeleven]

sounds like something

Change without decent planning can be disastrous and leave long-lasting results, just ask east european countries what happened after the soviet block collapsed and they opened their economy to capitalism without any plan.
The only nation that did decently and nowadays is not a total shithole is the one that had a plan, Poland.

[gwelter]

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.

Just type 'thisisunsafe' in the Chrome window with the certificate warning. This should unlock the way to proceed with an invalid certificate.

[chithanh]

It's sad that Mozilla has to lay off 250 people, and it is even more sad that the people who have been running the show and manoeuvred Mozilla into this situation are still there, and the folks who have no fault are let go instead.

When they are at it, they could also scrap that toxic dictation of what its members and contributors are allowed to think and say in their private time. Mozilla is one of the worst offenders in restricting freedom of speech and opinion.

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

In addition to the Dissenter browser extension that was already mentioned, Mozilla also pushed out their former CEO Brendan Eich for donating his personal money to a constitutional amendment campaign against same-sex marriage.

Qt uses Chromium code for their Qt Web Engine component. I spent a month making my own web browser using said pieces

Unfortunately, Google continued working on Chromium and somehow broke the abiliity to redirect image loads from https to my local perm-cache.

Or use qtwebkit? Its development is not very active though.

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

Unless Mozilla somehow solved the halting problem, I don't think they can block cryptominers specifically. They just enumerate known/alledged cryptominers and block them. We know from decades of experience with antivirus software, that this approach doesn't work and will cause high rate of both false positives and false negatives (for more explanation, see #2 at https://www.ranum.com/security/compu...itorials/dumb/).

[Lemmiwinks]

I once proposed to Mozilla to offer more privacy focused services, like an email service i.e., where you pay a small fee and get a secure PIM based on open standards. I did this as a proposal ticket where just one person replied something like, wtf, why should Mozilla do that?! Sad...