Mozilla Laying Off Around A Quarter Of Their Employees

[nazar-pc]

More restricted, really ?

Let's take web mining case for example, it's not that bad for your computer as it doesn't install /uninstall or delete files, it does pretty much nothing wrong, except that it takes a part of the processing power and consumes more of your electricity.
I think most web miners are written in javascript and since javascript source code is readable by the browser, it can be quickly identified as mining or not.
Since WebAssembly give better performance, the developers of web miners will most likely switch to it.
Now, how can a web browser identify a miner when it downloads just a binary blob and cannot see its source code ?
By CPU or GPU utilization ? That's clearly not a good idea.
So, good, for sandboxing, but it will not stop people taking advantage of using your computer through the web browser for something else that you thought of.

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 care so much about sandboxing as I care about privacy, security and not having my computer taken advantage of.

I'm sure that there are many bad users and companies that want to run unknown code to me on my computer as simple as visiting a page, but I don't.

I see no security issues here. I also see you're not a web dev, so you're just afraid of something you don't understand.

Let me tell you that it is possible to run Web Workers and consume just as much CPU without Web Assembly, but with less efficiency.

So you're afraid of something someone can do (even though browser vendors proactively work on preventing that use case) and only while tab is running and completely forget incredible capabilities that opens up for experiences on the web, which would otherwise require you to install native app, from not very trusted source and potentially giving it access to many files on your disk.

[shmerl]

Mozilla needs to switch from a company that desperately tries to make money from a web browser and some extras to a organization that focuses on making a good browser and only that. No weird experiments or marketing.

It's easy to say, but browsers don't make money. How are you proposing them to be sustainable?

[crystall]

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

Firefox accounts for most of Rust development these days. 14% of the codebase has been converted to Rust already, it's far more than the whole of Servo. A lot of the changes that were developed within Mozilla to speed up rustc were to improve Firefox build times.

[increasechief]

Firefox accounts for most of Rust development these days. 14% of the codebase has been converted to Rust already, it's far more than the whole of Servo. A lot of the changes that were developed within Mozilla to speed up rustc were to improve Firefox build times.

Sure.. so it's the Servo team or whoever is working on Firefox that is mostly pushing Rust forward.

[hotaru]

It's easy to say, but browsers don't make money. How are you proposing them to be sustainable?

dissolve Mozilla Corporation, and develop the browser (and not any of that Pocket or VPN shit) as a real non-profit organization instead of some sort of weird "we're legally non-profit but we own a for-profit corporation" scheme that drives away donations.

[Michael_S]

If we're all lucky, WebAssembly is the Trojan Horse that breaks Microsoft, Google, and Apple. As more and more features are available in a browser, and as WebAssembly allows performance closer and closer to native code, you can do all of your computing on anything that runs a good browser. Then the lock on users in host operating systems and app stores that Microsoft, Google, and Apple have goes away.

More restricted, really ?

Let's take web mining case for example, it's not that bad for your computer as it doesn't install /uninstall or delete files, it does pretty much nothing wrong, except that it takes a part of the processing power and consumes more of your electricity.
I think most web miners are written in javascript and since javascript source code is readable by the browser, it can be quickly identified as mining or not.
Since WebAssembly give better performance, the developers of web miners will most likely switch to it.
Now, how can a web browser identify a miner when it downloads just a binary blob and cannot see its source code ?
By CPU or GPU utilization ? That's clearly not a good idea.
So, good, for sandboxing, but it will not stop people taking advantage of using your computer through the web browser for something else that you thought of.

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 care so much about sandboxing as I care about privacy, security and not having my computer taken advantage of.

I'm sure that there are many bad users and companies that want to run unknown code to me on my computer as simple as visiting a page, but I don't.

WebAssembly is a binary format, but it has a spec. If it was a generic binary blob that is run as a native application it would be insecure.

As others posted, it decompiles to a Scheme-like format that, in my not so humble opinion, is easier to read than minified JS. (Edit: Scheme as in the Lisp dialect.)

And the reason WebAssembly comes as a binary format instead of HTML / CSS / Javascript is to speed loading times. WebAssembly is not only more space efficient, it can start executing before you've finished loading the entire file. You rarely (never?) can do that with JS.

[shmerl]

dissolve Mozilla Corporation, and develop the browser (and not any of that Pocket or VPN shit) as a real non-profit organization instead of some sort of weird "we're legally non-profit but we own a for-profit corporation" scheme that drives away donations.

Do you have enough donations to cover their current work? I don't see any guarantee that can function so far.

[uid313]

Mozilla is laying-off of 250 people, and begging for donations. Meanwhile their CEO Michell Baker is getting an annual salary of US$ 2,458,350.00.

Source: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualrep...8-form-990.pdf (page 9)

[wizard69]

This is awful and very sad!

Well at least they are not in the restaurant business. I could sell you a dozen locations right now all within a few miles of my place.

But FFS, they should've listened to their users when they complained about the slow performance compared to Chromium, about less good support for HTML5, compared to Chromium, about wasting resources in the wrong directions like VR, which I think represents only 0.0001% of their users.
Same with Web Assembly, they wasted so many resources for something that will be broken by design since many of us will block it anyway because of security reasons.

Never understood web assembly myself. Generally users want more secure browsers not less. They want browsers that prevent tracking and address the other uglies of the internet.

They lost too much marketshare, all because they don't listen to users that are screaming here and everywhere else for the real important things to fix.

Does market share matter for a free browser? Seriously if it works and is more secure than something else it would be my first choice.

I still don't know how could they have not understood that the performance is a top priority issue.
Not everybody has a high-end computer where the differences in speed between Firefox and Chromium based browsers are not really visible.
A lot of people have older computers, older operating systems, or bloated operating systems that make the computers slow anyway and the differences between Firefox and the others are not so subtle anymore.

It kinda looks like Mozilla has an issue herding cats. That is it looks like they are going in too many directions with no control at the helm.

I don't know, but Mozilla looked to me like Canonical all these past years.

Users complaining on deaf years.

At least they managed to bring video hardware decoding on Linux, which is very nice!

Maybe it works on Linux, for the most part I have to shift to another browser that actually works well with video. You would think that getting Mozilla to work with Amazon Prime would be high on the list.

In the end Mozilla looks like a company or organization that has lost its leadership and is not focused on compelling directions. Say what you will about corporate leadership but sometime you need for a figure head that sets a rational direction.

[starshipeleven]

I see no security issues here. I also see you're not a web dev, so you're just afraid of something you don't understand.

He also claimed he can sniff out Win7 updates that contain spyware, and not install them.