
Mozilla Fires Servo Devs and Security Response Teams - MrBuddyCasino
https://twitter.com/directhex/status/1293352458308198401
======
smt88
CNET (and Mozilla)[1] say that Firefox still has a fully functional security
team.

The source for this is an unsourced tweet. I'm going to flag it because HN
does not seem like a good venue to hash out rumors.

1\. [https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-
cor...](https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-coronavirus-
pandemic-cuts-revenue/)

------
airstrike
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)

------
elcritch
What?! Servo and the tech coming out of it is the _only_ reason I’ve begun
using Firefox as my daily driver again. The Quantum stuff has made Firefox
usable again. How are these CEO’s chosen? Really seems like Mozilla should be
turned into a CO-OP or something.

~~~
Jonnax
So there's a comment from the CEO here:
[https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-
aGY62z](https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z)

"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use
as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"

"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too
much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other
comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer
is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social
problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to
accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we
don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago
when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my
pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles
elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask
people and their families to commit to."

No self awareness that rather than getting rid of people building interesting
products, they don't realise that they should get rid of themselves and other
executives.

Firefox has been on a downward trajectory in marketshare for the last 5 years.
And they've struggled to reduce their reliance on search engine deals by
creating other revenue streams.

They're all failures and have no self awareness.

Effectively answering: We've all got ferraris and McMansions to pay off

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
For those who haven’t seen it yet, handy chart of Firefox market share vs
Mozilla Foundation chair salary
[https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704?...](https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704?s=21)

~~~
pitay
Note that Brendan Eich resigned April 2014. Here is the original post for that
graph and a bit of discussion on HN relating to the dismissal of 70 Mozilla
employees at the time. :
[https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584](https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629)

------
Jerry2
Confirmation from a person on the Mozilla's (former) threat management team:

> _They killed entire threat management team. Mozilla is now without detection
> and incident response._ > _Tristan, Alicia, Lucius, even our new director
> are gone_

[https://nitter.net/MichalPurzynski/status/129322057088506265...](https://nitter.net/MichalPurzynski/status/1293220570885062657)

I wonder how Tor will handle this...

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Is Mozilla trying to kill Firefox? Without an active threat management team,
it would be irresponsible to recommend Firefox to any of my less technical
friends.

Nowadays, a dedicated, excellent security team is table stakes for a web
browser engine.

~~~
searchableguy
They are not responsible for firefox itself but the infrastructure surrounding
it from that thread.

~~~
tehbeard
That to me reads as the build servers, etc. How is that not responsible for a
safe binary?

------
Santosh83
No comment on the firing of the security response teams, but isn't Servo
pretty much a "finished proof of concept" since quite some time? Hasn't the
techniques it pioneered been integrated, as far as possible, into Firefox?

When it began, the word was that Servo would be the next rendering engine.
Some time later the message became that it was a "testing ground" whose
lessons would be incorporated into Firefox but that it would never become a
production ready engine by itself. If that is so, then essentially Mozilla
have cut an R&D project. Whether that is _still_ as useful to Firefox as it
was in earlier years is something that only the core Firefox engineers can
answers. Regardless one feels that they might kept Servo and let HR or
marketing take the hit.

~~~
roca
That's exactly right, at least up to the last sentence.

------
3131s
I love Firefox, and it's been my main browser for 15+ years, but starting
today I'm going to research alternatives.

It's hardly the first time that Mozilla has screwed up royally, but in general
I have tried to defend them against most criticisms in light of the
circumstances around browser competition (or lack thereof). But I'm not sure I
can do that anymore though, because this is such a bad sign. This CEO and her
administrator underlings are useless and expendable in comparison to the
people who have actually make Firefox, and I hope they know that.

~~~
mulmen
I don’t understand how changing browsers accomplishes anything? It’s clear the
leadership doesn’t care about Firefox. You’re just making their case for them
that Firefox isn’t worth the effort.

~~~
adrianN
Does Mozilla make anything that people use, other than Firefox?

~~~
gerrard23
Thunderbird, and as mentioned below, their HTML documentation is really good.

~~~
adrianN
Oh right, that's actually my email client! But didn't Mozilla try to kill it a
few years ago? Ah yes

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-scraps-thunderbird-
dev...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-scraps-thunderbird-development-
email-client-not-a-priority-anymore/)

> Mitchell Baker, the Mozilla Foundation's chair, said on Friday that
> Thunderbird 's users seemed happy with the program being the way it is.

A pattern seems to emerge.

------
wwwwwwwww
Servo? The future of Firefox if it wants to have a future?

How about the management resigns for 10 years of terrible decisions?

~~~
TheUndead96
Exactly! (sigh)

------
shajznnckfke
A tragic example of the principal-agent problem in action. These people took
over a nonprofit, gave themselves millions, and have just killed the team that
was doing the best job furthering the organization’s mission (preventing a
browser monoculture). Just brutal.

It’s an old story - an organization does good work, allowing it to raise
money, attracting administrators, who hire more administrators and take all
the money. The same happens in universities and public companies. I don’t know
how, but we have to find a way to keep people from latching on and sucking the
blood out of our institutions like this.

~~~
frank2
>These people took over a nonprofit, gave themselves millions

It's more complicated than that: the current CEO of Mozilla has been involved
at a high level from the start:

>In November 1994, Baker was hired as one of the first employees of the legal
department of Netscape Communications Corporation. . . . She was involved with
the Mozilla project from the outset, writing both the Netscape Public License
and the Mozilla Public License. In February 1999, Baker became the Chief
Lizard Wrangler (general manager) of mozilla.org, the division of Netscape
that coordinated the Mozilla open source project.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Commun...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Communications_Corporation_and_mozilla.org)

Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending this CEO's recent performance.

------
mulmen
I followed the other thread today and this came up there as well. This is the
first time I have considered not using Firefox as my web browser since it has
existed. Not because I want to, but because it may simply not exist.

This is terrifying and I feel powerless to do anything about it.

Are there alternatives? How do I support Firefox-the-browser and the people
who make it?

~~~
chrisco255
Chromium-based forks like Brave or Edge or straight up Chrome. Personally I
use Brave as it's privacy focused and crypto friendly.

~~~
mulmen
I don’t care about crypto and I don’t have any interest in a browser based
around advertising. I’ve been willing to pay more for Firefox than I do for
Netflix for literally years. I’ve never been given the option AFAIK.

Is there a Firefox foundation I can contribute to?

~~~
chrisco255
Mozilla is the non-profit that supports Firefox development. What are you
asking? Why they don't have a subscription plan? They do have a monthly
donation form: [https://donate.mozilla.org/en-
US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount...](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-
US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount=30&utm_source=mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=nav&currency=usd)

~~~
mulmen
That’s a donation to Mozilla, not to Firefox specifically.

I don’t want a VPN. I don’t want Pocket. I want Firefox.

------
sanxiyn
Mozilla also fired #1 contributor to Wasmtime, while saying there are "vast
new areas" (their words, not mine) beyond the web and giving Wasmtime as an
example(!!!). This is a tragic comedy.

~~~
sebbyy
That's dissapointing. Wasm/Wasi is what got me interested in Web again.

Do you have source on that?

~~~
sanxiyn
See
[https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contribu...](https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contributors)
and
[https://twitter.com/Sunfishcode/status/1293307332059774977](https://twitter.com/Sunfishcode/status/1293307332059774977).
Pretty clear cut.

------
indy
Who wants speed and security in their browser anyway? These do nothing to
justify a CEO's pay, much better to sack those pesky developers and focus on
strategic partnerships which contribute to the bottom line

------
edumucelli
I am curious how COVID impacted a company like Mozilla? Their main revenue
comes from search partnerships, there were more people at home searching
things during lockdown. In the internal message Mitchell Baker said:

“We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring,
reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands. But COVID-19 has
accelerated the need and magnified the depth for these changes. Our pre-COVID
plan is no longer workable. We have talked about the need for change —
including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring. Today these changes
become real.”

~~~
thu2111
Internet traffic hasn't dropped. See the Google IPv6 statistics for example.
Mozilla's current trajectory has nothing to do with COVID. If anything it
should have helped them as people working from home probably have more control
over what software they can install vs workstations in the office.

The fact that Baker seriously brings up COVID shows why Mozilla has problems.

------
saagarjha
This is so sad…those two teams represented a major part of Mozilla’s
initiative to make their browser secure. Maybe they won’t be immediately
missed, but I’m sure they’ll be feeling the effects in the future.

~~~
mrweasel
I said this in the other discussion about Mozilla firing, but I don't think
Mozilla management cares about Firefox.

From a business perspective I get it, Firefox must be expensive to maintain,
with no clear way to monetize it when the search engine money dry up. Still,
their main focus should be Firefox and finding a way to make their most
successful project profitable. Skimping on security seem to be the wrong
approach.

------
tmikaeld
Skimping on security and removing the thing that made Firefox at least as fast
as the competition...

What options do we have now then?

Because I'm surely not going to skimp on either of those things.

~~~
lmm
The browser that was built from scratch by open-source volunteers, before the
distraction of Netscape releasing their code: Konqueror.

~~~
majewsky
Konqueror is at this point just one of many WebKit browsers. Last time I
checked (2011 when having a chat with one of the devs) they had two devs
working on it in their sparetime, which is clearly not enough for a project of
that scale. Some time after that, Konqueror switched from KHTML to WebKit as
its default rendering engine, and at this point, I don't think KHTML is around
anymore (or if it is, it's only around in kdelibs to satisfy API compatibility
requirements).

~~~
lmm
Konqueror never had more than about five developers at a time, and yet managed
to build a better browser than anyone else - by keeping the codebase clean and
well structured, and by being able to welcome outside contributions in a way
that Mozilla never managed.

WebKit _is_ KHTML, and since (as you say) it's the upstream rendering engine
for many browsers, it makes sense for it to live in a "neutral" place; it's
still an open-source project, and of course at this point it's had many
contributions from outside KDE - which is how things are supposed to work.

If you prefer another WebKit-based browser then by all means use it - I've yet
to find any that match Konqueror though. Just things like the integrated
shortcuts from the context menu are better than anything else offers.

------
tannhaeuser
Wait, Servo is the core browser engine of Firefox isn't it? Do they intend to
become FF another Webkit-based browser?

~~~
polycaster
Not that I expect it but the idea is very intriguing at second thought.

What many people are (reasonably) afraid of at the moment is a de-facto
monopoly of Webkit controlled by Google. So that Google is in a position to
shape the web for their sole business benefit and against the benefit of the
rest of us.

If FF joined the Webkit camp as an active driver, the monopoly (in terms of
control) would be mostly gone and be replaced by what I'd call a standard and
its broadly spread implementation. A web-standard implementation followed by
all major vendors.

Of course branches are likely to divert after a while, but for brief moment in
time, everything in web-land would be rainbows and unicorns.

~~~
shaan7
> what I'd call a standard

Um, just calling a monopoly a "standard" doesn't make it so. There are already
standards for the the web that are defined by the W3C. It is a win for a
standard if there are multiple implementations rather than just one, not the
other way round as you are claiming.

~~~
polycaster
Read again. That's not what I did. Search for the word "control".

------
drno123
They should fire “woke” CEO and hire technical CEO with a vision instead.

~~~
dhruvparamhans
Baker has been with Mozilla since the very beginning. I don’t how she is being
“woke” here.

~~~
drno123
She is not being woke here. What is happening now is the effect of years of
her prioritizing diversity and firing any developer with remotely conservative
views over building the “best” browser. (whatever best means)

~~~
thu2111
Well, she did start the layoff message with something about systemic racism.

But you're right in general. To anyone who thinks Mozilla might build
politically neutral products, case for the prosecution:

[https://i.imgur.com/FN2L5ed.png](https://i.imgur.com/FN2L5ed.png)

It's obviously very problematic for the CEO of a browser company to have such
overt politics. Who can take Mozilla seriously when they claim to be defending
openness and freedom on the internet? Their CEO writes op-eds about the
problem of online misinformation whilst blaming her own layoffs on COVID.
Actions don't match stated principles.

~~~
layoutIfNeeded
Yikes, that screenshot looks pretty bad. Are you sure they are not tailoring
it to the individual users' tastes? This can't be the default of their
recommendation engine...

~~~
thu2111
Why would someone bother to make that series of screenshots if it was
something they'd explicitly requested?

Still, I figured I'd check to see what I get. I can't figure out how to get
these "Recommended by Pocket" sites on my Firefox new tab page, but I only
just signed up, so perhaps it takes a while to appear.

The Pocket Discover tab on their website seems like the closest thing to it.
It has an extremely small collection of sources for its stories and with
absolutely no range of perspectives at all. They're all metropolitan left
outlets. I get: the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harvard
Business Review, Quartz, James Clear (?), the Verge, Vox, the Washington Post,
the Guardian and some Medium articles.

So, pretty good if you live in New York or Washington, I guess. I don't even
live in America so this selection isn't so hot. Here's a sample of recommended
story headlines:

"The Doomsday Invention: Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or
destruction?"

"America's gun problem, explained"

"How exercise shapes you, far beyond the gym"

"Buying organic veggies at the supermarket is a waste of money"

"The true cost of being a black teacher"

"A pregnant woman with COVID-19 was dying, with one decision, her doctor's
saved three lives"

"The rise of American authoritarianism" (it's about Trump, of course)

"One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgement of the child-free"

There are a few stories that might interest me here that I didn't cite, like
"How vulnerable is GPS" (in the New York Times, of course). I personally seem
to get more self-help and less woke content than in the screenshot I posted.
But you get the idea. If you hate Trump, love any publication with New York in
the title, eat quinoa, capitalise Black, and think children are a burden,
you'll love Pocket. If you aren't like that, it has nothing for you.

Oddly, Pocket seems really buggy. A lot of recommended stories under Discover
that come from Medium don't seem to have scraped the title correctly, so the
title ends up being a raw HTTPS URL, complete with fragment specifier. One
recommended story is just "Redirecting..." so they don't even follow redirects
properly.

It feels like this experience sums up Mozilla under Mitchell Baker.

------
sipos
Fundamentally, whether you use Firefox or not, having an organisation that has
user's interests at heart, and is not a major global corp, developing a major
browser, is something we all need. It ensures that the evolution of the web is
in a sensible direction. Mozilla has been an important input in WebAssembly,
for example. Thus, Mozilla's problems are all of our problems.

Mozilla has two major problems though. Firstly, it largely relies on what is
eventually advertising revenue, in a time when users are increasingly using
ad-blockers etc and privacy laws reduce the value of targeted ads. Secondly,
it has little traction on mobile, where iOS basically just has Safari because
of Apple's rules, and Android comes with Chrome very much set as the default
(and few people change it).

I don't really buy that COVID has made much difference. I think that,
ultimately, the two problems above are the issues, and I'm not sure what can
be done about them.

Even if Firefox were replaced with a shiny-new brilliant FLOSS browser, we
still need an organisation behind it that drives web standards in the right
direction (and I think they do need to have a major browser to do that as
effectively as Mozilla has), and it still needs the funding to do it, so would
still face the same issues as Mozilla, even if it weren't Mozilla.

Someone should be taking Google and Apple to task over bindling their browser
and not enabling proper choice on a fair basis, as the EU did to MS (and
actually MS has stopped offering a fair choice of browser too, where you
choose a default and it is installed, rather than have a default you have to
change, that they keep changong back in updates).

------
pletnes
Mozilla was always the «good security and tech, bad management» to me. I hope
they don’t manage the tech away this time.

------
maz1b
Is someone influencing Mozilla leadership hoping to kill Mozilla off through
bad decisions?

------
nojvek
Google Chromium has won. Microsoft gave up on edgehtml, and from the recent
layoffs it seems Firefox is giving up on Firefox's competitive edge. No more
devtools investment, no more servo means more of us will be using the
fantastic chrome dev tools. This in turn means we won't be actively ensuring
our sites work on Firefox as well as they do on chrome. This means even more
decline for Firefox.

With the recent layoff decision, I feel Mozilla CEO is pulling another death
from the inside like Marissa Mayor did to Yahoo. You can't abandon the one
thing that people actually like Mozilla for and chase a shiny egg.

------
chrismatheson
> The VPN work, along with its Pocket service to save and ? > recommend news
> stories and other online content, is in a > product focus beyond Firefox
> where Mozilla is trying to find > new revenue sources.

Sure but I don't think Pocket has had a meaningful update in years.

------
mesaframe
Like all of them?

~~~
sanxiyn
Yes.

~~~
mesaframe
What is the future of the project then?

------
polskibus
I wonder if they could just move Mozilla out of USA, pay less for entire
workforce incl. management and still build great things? The reason they spend
so much is because the have to compete with FANGs.

------
srg0
I cancelled donations to Mozilla Foundation. Servo is important.

------
aneutron
Do we have a source on this ?

~~~
akerro
Not direct source:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)

------
fsociety
Time to go back to Chrome :(

~~~
panpanna
I would rather use Edge

~~~
puzzlingcaptcha
Edge is now based on Chromium [1]. Welcome to the future, where you can choose
from Chrome (Chromium), Edge (Chromium) and Opera (also Chromium).

[https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-
edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-
collaboration/#GmSJg4uFjBM5y8Hz.97)

~~~
akerro
do all of them use google extension store to install adblockers like Brave
(also Chromium)?

~~~
puzzlingcaptcha
They have their own stores apparently (at least the user-facing front).

[https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/Microsoft-Edge-
Ex...](https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/Microsoft-Edge-Extensions-
Home)

[https://addons.opera.com/en/](https://addons.opera.com/en/)

------
layoutIfNeeded
RIP Rust

~~~
thayne
rust has enough momentum now it will probably survive. Although losing one of
the biggest projects that uses it, will certainly be a be a heavy blow, and
probably slow down development.

~~~
feanaro
There's no reason to think this will impact Rust at all. Rust is now spread
far beyond Servo and Mozilla is no longer employing most of the Rust
developers. This has been the case for several years, AFAIU.

~~~
Melchizedek
And big companies with a lot of money, such as Microsoft, seem to be starting
to use Rust. If I was in a leadership position at Microsoft, I would be
looking into hiring the Servo devs that just got fired.

