Why do you think it sucks? It's been absolutely epic the last couple years in my opinion. They're making some awesome technical choices. They've repeatedly gotten themselves into trouble on the social level, but frankly I don't see how you could say they're not doing well technically. I'm pretty sure Firefox is outperforming Chrome on multiple aspects, and they're positioning themselves to become the best browser period.
I don't really care for its "smart" features like the anti-tracking or other services they offer, so unfortunately I won't be paying them any money any time soon, but to me it's incredible that there's a company out there paying people to rewrite their rendering engine in rust, while also having to pay/support people to actually make that same language suitable enough to become a critical part of an app with such a large user base.
I also see privacy issues sit in the Firefox bugtracker. I read about fuzz tests from project zero and elsewhere and realize Firefox is under-fuzzed, both DOM and JS. I finally stopped using Firefox because, as somebody who writes native code for a living and reads about bytecode VMs for fun in my spare time, I could no longer convince myself that it was satisfactorily secure.
What awesome technical choices do you think Mozilla has made recently? I'd love to hear an example. Throwing away the plug-in model to catch up for performance was an necessary technical choice (perhaps), but it was largely solving a self-made problem and catching up with the competition rather than bona fide innovation, so it falls short of "awesome" to me.
I haven't been following exact features between browsers too closely recently, but Firefox's Tracking Protection has been around for a while and improving for years; and of course, Firefox is where AdBlock/uBlock originated. What does Safari provide that Firefox does not? How does it affect web compat?
> and Chrome made JIT exploitation and then Spectre attacks in JavaScript impossible by using process boundary separations and applying sandboxes to purpose built processes.
This feature has been a long time coming in Firefox, and it's still not all the way there.
But Firefox did just release an opt-in process isolation feature for Firefox, which applies stricter cross-origin controls for a variety of content, and in exchange gives web developers access to SharedArrayBuffer, the feature that needed to be disabled to mitigate Spectre attacks.
So site isolation is progressing, and the first iteration of it has been released.
> What awesome technical choices do you think Mozilla has made recently?
The development of Rust. Servo, which acted as an experimental testbed for a parallel browser engine and has led to its CSS parser, WebRender, and a number of other components being used by Firefox. Asm.js as an alternative to NaCl, which led to the joint development of WASM.
> I haven't been following exact features between browsers too closely recently, but Firefox's Tracking Protection has been around for a while and improving for years; and of course, Firefox is where AdBlock/uBlock originated. What does Safari provide that Firefox does not? How does it affect web compat?
Firefox, like uBlock and AdBlock is list based - it forbids known bad actors. Safari is changing web standards to make tracking impossible, regardless of whether or not you are a known actor, and doing it gradually and carefully enough enough where breakage is minor enough that users don't complain. And Safari has less market share than Firefox. Look at e.g. https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/ for the principles and the other posts on the blog for details about the implementation. It's an industry wide change that a non-advertising funded browser company needed to push, and it just needed a real leader to push it. And that person turned out to be John Wilander (https://twitter.com/johnwilander). For whatever reason (I've given my thoughts above), I think Mozilla struggles to attract these sort of talented experienced mid-career people.
Rust is pretty cool, but Servo is pretty immature, and it seems like Mozilla just fired all those people. I dunno. I don't see a bright future there.
Well, yeah, that's the problem.
Until now, I felt like despite its issues, Mozilla was mostly on the right track. There have been a few mistakes here and there, but it was fundamentally doing good work.
However, cutting Servo, and it looks like maybe Cranelift as well (not sure about that, but Dan Gohmen aka sunfishcode, who seemed to be one of the lead contributors, has been laid off) is a huge blow.
While Servo as a whole browser is pretty immature, a number of components of it were adopted by Firefox, such as its CSS parser, Webrender, its GPU accelerated parallel rendering engine, and more.
You had asked about what Mozilla had done recently, and I listed a few things. But it looks like they are cutting a lot of that. They mentioned focusing on wasmtime and the Bytecode alliance, but I don't see how cutting one of their lead contributors helps out with that.
And they seem to be slowly cutting the head count on Rust; it's less apparent because there are enough people not at Mozilla contributing, and some of the core contributors have been moved onto other projects which use Rust at Mozilla so while they're not contributing directly they are still somewhat involved; and some folks have left of their own accord.
But now it looks like some of those other teams are being cut, like Servo and at least some of the wasmtime team, so I really hope that more companies can put some more investment directly in Rust, as well as the WASM ecosystem.
I don't know about web features lagging, I feel that's also just chrome pushing web features before they're fully ratified, but maybe there's some where firefox really lags. It was a bit painful for my project that they've held back on the shared buffers thing, but I think that's going to be turned on soon again.
Besides webrender, they've been really working at performance the last couple years, there's performance improvements in nearly every release.
If they're not fuzzing their interpreters that is worrying. If they really are doing bad, surely someone's gonna come and do it for them right? Or do you think Firefox is so small right now hackers aren't even bothering?
I think the future is a rebase on Chromium. With so many companies (Brave, Google, Microsoft) each shipping their own integrations in Chromium, integrations will naturally become plug-in based (or at least, have a fairly stable API), allowing each vendor to opt in or out of each customization. Then, projects like Tor will move the TorBrowser to Chromium with their own implementations that are tracker free and one of them will eventually take the place of Firefox as the rallying point for the free software ideologues.
Which is a shame because I have a lot of sympathy for the free software ideologues. I'd like to win the browser fight for user-first free software ideology, not just corporate directed free software. But I no longer see Mozilla or Firefox as a banner under which that can be done. At the same time, I'm not sure how next free banner gets started.
- many addons are still broken/unsupported after Quantum
- addons have been blocked from Firefox for questionab,e reasons
- Firefox often ships proprietary third party software & DRM
- telemtry enabled by default
- the total fiasco that is the totally incomplere Fenix that was released to the stable channel on Android
There have been epic things, but the list of bad things has been growing a lot.
It is notable that in your summary you refer to this as political fashion swings, and "unpopular" political views, and an overreaction. Would you characterize the civil right movement in the same fashion?
You also seem to correlate competent technical leadership with someone who sympathizes with Eich's views. That in my experience doesn't follow at all. If anything competent leadership means you have worked with many people of all different backgrounds and have excelled at leading and empowering them. Mozilla likely has many LGBTQ employees, and if your personal prejudices stifle their contributions, then you are not competent by definition of leadership.
Just to answer your question explicitly: yes. If somebody had a political opinion that was popular with 40% of the population and had not brought it into the workplace, I would not support firing the person for holding that opinion, even if the opinion were, for example, that schools should be segregated by race. While I personally don't support segregation by race, I don't find firing people for political views kept outside of work to be in the long term interest of liberal societies. I find the notion of segregated but equal schools unworkable (because those with power will always ensure their schools are better) but not inherently evil. And, in some situations (e.g. gender), I do not oppose "separate but equal" schooling. While I personally attended a public school, I have several friends who attended single-sex private schools, and they turned out OK.
With all this in mind, your language around "denying a human right" makes it clear that you aren't giving Eich's views a fair hearing. California had domestic partnerships for same sex couples that ensured comparable protections around spousal visitation, etc. While I also disagree with the notion of "separate but equal" for partnerships and support granting gay couples the right to marriage, international organizations (like the United Nations) do not generally consider "separate but equal" to be human rights violations. To be a human rights violation, the separation must be coupled with a disparity in treatment (as in segregated schooling in the United States), which Eich is explicitly opposed to.
But we are talking about Mozilla specifically, which states in their manifesto: "We are committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience." If we put aside any value judgement on that statement, I can see how a CEO publicly supporting exclusion can raise concerns about their performance with respect to the company's mission.
Even so, Eich wasn't fired, he resigned and moved on.
Far more interesting to me is that 6 years later, you and others on this forums go to such effort to justify why any problem with the company is a consequence of that resignation. Eich doesn't need your support. I'm curious as to what drives the justifications and the splitting hairs as to what is the approved meaning of human rights as defined by international organizations. The language about denying human rights should have been the least controversial part of what I wrote.
I think you may be observing something about yourself and attributing to others. Mozilla's problems aren't a consequence of Eich's resignation. Mozilla has several problems - I described three of them that are particularly prominent to me - 1) Debian / power users 2) wikimedia executives 3) and social justice amok. Eich resignation was one of two symptoms I gave as examples of the third problem. I could also have given this blog post as an example, as it bizarrely tries to describe a layoff in the context of fighting racism (were the laid off employees racist?).
I find it interesting that you ignored all the other problems I mentioned and the other symptoms of the same problem and focused in on attacking Eich to such an extent.
The history of civil rights didn't end with Brown v. Board of Education. The Civil Rights Act and Loving v. Virginia also repudiated separate but equal. Voluntary single sex education and certain environments where women might feel vulnerable are specific exceptions. The California Supreme Court gave separate but equal for same sex unions a fair hearing in 2008 and found it was discriminatory and unconstitutional. The US Supreme Court agreed in 2015.
Eich didn't apologize or even say he wouldn't do it again. He actually pointedly refused to explain his views except to say he supported civil unions.
At companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, you can work on a browser regardless of your political views. At Mozilla, you need to think a certain way first. A smaller pool of technical talent to choose from leads to worse technical leadership. Recall that Eich only became the CEO (over the opposition of a portion of the board) after months where Mozilla was searching and couldn't find anybody better. It's not that the people who have particular political views are particularly talented, it's just that some of them are talented, just like the people who disagree with them. If you can include talented people of all stripes, you can do better than if you restrict yourself to talented people from a single ideological group.
Unless by "everything" you mean the government of the United State of America (the country where Mozilla has its headquarters), in which case, it's OK again (Obama opposed same sex marriage at the time when Eich made his donation). You can dress it up like Eich's views were some big sin that demands banishment from society, but of America's 45 presidents, 44 of them agreed with Eich, and the one who disagreed initially agreed with Eich before disagreeing with him. So, I'm pretty sure you can be in charge of everything with those views.
Yes.
Marriage is certainly part of UDHR ("according to national laws governing the exercise of this right" which allows said human right to not apply to certain groups of people. UDHR also considers it a human right for someone to be kidnapped and forcefully re-educated so I do not understand why anyone takes it seriously) but that does not make it a human right. Marriage is nothing more than the government acknowledging that two people love each other, I personally fail to see why this should be a human right (or why the government is meddling in it at all).
its the right of inheriting when your spouse dies
its the right to be covered by your spouse's insurance
its the right to share joint custody of children
its the right of spousal privilege in court
its that you can file taxes jointly
its the rights to benefits as a spouse of a veteran
and dozens more of trivial and important legal rights most couples take for granted. These are trivially denied in many social interactions and used to make others feel like second class citizens, and deny them their pursuit of happiness. This was all debated and settled by the Supreme Court in 2015.
If the government would stop meddling in all the other legal affairs then I would see the reason for your confusion why they are meddling in marriage.
> its the right of inheriting when your spouse dies
You can designate your own heir.
> its the right to be covered by your spouse's insurance
> its the right to share joint custody of children
> its the right of spousal privilege in court
> its that you can file taxes jointly
> its the rights to benefits as a spouse of a veteran
> and dozens more of trivial and important legal rights most couples take for granted
And I am arguing that these are not things that should come with marriage - people who decide to not get married and people who are not legally allowed to get married (such as people in polyamorous relationships) should have the ability to enjoy the same rights as married people. Regardless though, not all of these are part of the universal definition of marriage (nor are a necessary part of it), the UDHR says that marriage as an abstract concept is a human right (and only for certain people at certain times as the law allows) - it does not designate any specific privilege between married people as a human right.
> If the government would stop meddling in all the other legal affairs ...
There is a difference between the government attempting to catch someone who violated the rights of someone else and the government recognizing (or not) the love between people.
Your defenses... aren't.
It's not airing the letter to the general public that was problematic. It's thinking that those are appropriate things to say out loud that's a problem. One of my coworkers passed from cancer a few years back. Frankly, a lot of people thought he was a real jerk before he passed. Nobody said bad things about him to people who knew him after he passed. Not internally, not publicly, not part of the carpool, not anonymously on blind, not even as a little joke after having a few drinks at the bar. Speaking ill of the dead is nasty. And it's mean. People who liked the deceased will overhear you and they'll go home later and cry and think about what people would say about them if they died and then cry more. Mitchell (? I don't remember who tbh) kicked a puppy and put it on YouTube and you're here with "Yes, Mozilla has a long history of putting the things it does on YouTube." It's not the publicity that's the problem - it's kicking the puppy in the first place!
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from the CNET article. It wasn't really about gay marriage, it's because the board was indecisive and make a decision and then doubted themselves? So, it was just incompetent management? If you aren't sure about promoting somebody, don't promote them. Promoting somebody and then having them resign because you weren't sure is terrible. Mature corporations with competent leadership recognize that personnel decisions matter - that peoples' feeling are impacted when titles are granted and taken away - and make these decisions deliberately and carefully.
The Eich affair was the cause, but it's not the underlying problem. Mozilla lacks competent technical leadership. Managers with ten years experience in the product area who can make broad-lens decisions. You can see this everywhere. I participate in the web ecosystem in my day job. I'm always struck by the lack of professionalism in the emails from Mozilla employees on github issues. Most Mozilla employees mail like employees 1-2 years out of college. At my company, that fades - managers speak to employees who get too heated in emails and give them pointers with regard to staying on topic and staying technical. But you can also see them in product - Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature - one of the most important strides for privacy on the web in decades - was produced by somebody with a 10 year lens - somebody who saw the security blog post in 2012 about being able to track Twitter users based on their image caches and who had dealt with a decade of the gigantic mess of incompatibility that is cookies for just as long. For their tracking prevention solution, Mozilla copied what some existing plugins did. And it all goes back to Eich. Because managers with 10 years of experience are closer to 40 than 20. They're substantially more likely to have seen political fashions swing - they've seen somebody (perhaps the Dixie Chicks) have their career ruined for reasons that seem incomprehensible a decade later. And they've accumulated at least one "unpopular" political view. And they've come to realize that some organizations are simply too interested in political fashion to be an appropriate home for them.
The point is - what happened to Brendan Eich doesn't prevent me from using Firefox. I don't use Firefox because it sucks. And it sucks because Mozilla can't hire good people with decades of experience. And Mozilla can't hire good people with decades of experience because of what happened to Brendan Eich (and the attitudes that led to it).