They might have the money, but they don't really seem to want anything to do with the project.
> they are moving more to using a javascript rendering method instead of xul
> I am not really sure what the problems are with working with xul though
> I think firefox moved off it a long time ago too
And that's the moment when firefox became garbage - just another chrome-alike, except slower and more resource-hungry. It had been getting worse for a decade prior to that, but dropping xul and breaking a ton of my extensions and customisability was the (large) straw that broke the camel's back. Sound familiar yet?
> I feel like thunderbird's user base is more the type to want to use thunderbird because it runs like a local first desktop style app as an alternative to using a web interface to their email. At least that's what I like about it.
(forgive my tone, nothing against you, I just get emotional when morons take an excellent piece of software I've been using for decades and turn it into broken, unusable trash)
> just the fact that they've ensured that k9mail is still maintained seems like an objective win, even if it's now called Thunderbird.
Comparing Firefox to Chromium-based browsers doesn't make much sense since these browsers don't develop their own web engine.
in a couple of years they built the engine from scratch. it's going to soon enter Alpha. how many people from ladybird built that engine? about 10?
all while everyone has said that modern web makes this task impossible
Perhaps other browser makers want to move faster than Ladybird.
point is that Mozilla is wasting money and having 4000 people working on chrome may not be the correct benchmark.
About ladybird, I think it is quite a good benchmark:
- they have accomplished a task many thought impossible in the modern world
- they accomplished it while having a handful of people
- they had a fraction of resources compared to both google and Mozilla. only about a year ago they had few hundred of thousands as support money to get them started.
The engine may not be finished yet. may not be as performant as the other two. but they did a 3rd engine. and given 10% of the budget Mozilla has, they would progress much more. Ladybird Team has shown how everything about Mozilla is mismanaged and simply broken.
A few pints about Ladybird:
* It's an awesome project, and they appear to be pretty efficient. * Greenfield projects always move faster than big codebases that are 30 years old. * Bigger teams always have more overhead than smaller teams. * Ladybird only does a small fraction of the things Firefox does. It's an important fraction, but still a small one. * The Ladybird GitHub repository has 1.3k contributors. Not sure where the number 10 comes from. * Only part of the people at Mozilla are engineers working on Firefox. There's also management, legal, marketing, HR and all the other folks you need to run a corporation. There's also engineers working on other products, backend services and infrastructure not required by Ladybird in its current stage.
None of the points above are quantitative, so Ladybird and Firefox are also hard to compare. I personally do think the Firefox org at Mozilla is pretty efficient for what it is; not based on the points above, but rather based on having worked at Mozilla for more than six years.
Yet, they decide to waste almost $7 million per year to pay a CEO and God knows what else.
>and God knows what else.
They publish their financial reports. It's mostly.... the browser. They actually spend more in total and in inflation adjusted terms directly on the browser than ever in their history as a company. Unless they're just faking all those reports? Need more than vibes here.
No, people are saying that Firefox needs to diversify their revenue streams because almost all of their revenue comes from their main competitor who (likely) only keeps Firefox alive to keep regulators from forcing them to divest their browser. The situation has gotten more dire since the regulators got fired last year.
Which side of the quantum accusation will be invoked in any given comment thread? Flip a coin and find out.
There's something about this specific part that doesn't sit well with me.
It's like justifying a huge salary for the president of a charity because they receive millions a year in donations and revenue from charity shops... it's just wrong.
7 million (assuming that's the correct value) is a lot of money. Perhaps not as much as they'd make at Google, but a lot of money nonetheless. And Mozilla is supposed to be a non-profit, with a good mission, with a manifesto, in a David vs Goliath struggle... but the CEO still makes millions, even when cuts are being made those working on the main mission?
The bar for Mozilla is different because they present themselves as being different. Multi-million salaries is what you expect from regular companies, not from good non-profits, and I think that's why the CEO's salary always comes up in these discussions.
With all this said, I also agree with the point about some of the criticism. Nothing Mozilla does pleases everyone, there's always something. It's a hard position to be in.
That's the problem. CEOs get paid so much more than everyone else while typically not providing value commensurate with their pay.
The MZLA company that makes Thunderbird is also working on improving self-funding by launching a Thunderbird-branded webmail service.