I am not absolving Mozilla management of any responsibility, but at the same time, there are limits to how much is under their control. It's pretty ignorant to suggest that what is going on with...
Exemplary
It greatly saddens me to see Firefox die slowly all the time due to, what I can only assume is, bad management.
I am not absolving Mozilla management of any responsibility, but at the same time, there are limits to how much is under their control. It's pretty ignorant to suggest that what is going on with Mozilla and Firefox is entirely management's fault.
I'm counting firing over half of your company over the course of a year
You need to double-check your numbers, because the actual layoffs were closer to 25%. That's not to say that it wasn't painful: I'm still shattered that it happened, as are many of my colleagues (quite a few have since left).
as part of "Firefox dying" and "bad management." The last thing Firefox needed was less manpower.
Is it "good management" to bleed red ink, then?
Nobody wanted to lay people off, but when revenue went down, how was management going to pay them?
More importantly: What are you doing to help keep Firefox and Mozilla healthy?
Chalk it up to fatigue due to the fact that I and many other Mozillians have been on the receiving ends of all kind of hostility for quite some time. I just no longer have the emotional capacity...
Exemplary
I'm not sure it was your intent, but the overall tone of what you wrote comes across as incredibly hostile, which is definitely unnecessary.
Chalk it up to fatigue due to the fact that I and many other Mozillians have been on the receiving ends of all kind of hostility for quite some time. I just no longer have the emotional capacity to discuss these issues in anything less than blunt terms.
Ignorance isn't fixed by calling someone ignorant. You need to provide actual information.
Okay, but I'm not sure why the onus lies entirely on the person calling you out, especially when the information you need is just a quick internet search away.
Anyway, here are some other factors that do not help:
Mozilla's primary competitor is Google.
The Google home page has the highest traffic of any page on the web. They use that page, as well as the "above the fold" search results, to market Chrome. There are some reasonable estimates of what the market value of that exposure would have been had the Chrome team actually had to pay for it. Those dollar amounts are in the range of nine to ten figures.
Google requires Android device manufacturers to ship Chrome by default in order to license Play Services [1]. Most manufacturers are going to play ball because they need access to the Play Store. Yes, some manufacturers don't, but they're niche.
[Caveat: We're getting very far into my personal opinions within this post] Google can afford to throw massive amounts of money at Chrome/Chromium development. Our budget pales in comparison. They're able to demo relatively massive numbers of prototypical web features and push them through standards committees while everybody else is still playing catch-up from their previous round of features [2]. And then they evangelize web developers to use those new features [3]. Without a similar budget, the other players appear to be perpetually "behind."
Google tends to optimize and/or enhance their own websites [EDIT: Massively popular in their own right, such as GMail, GApps, and their various incarnations of chat apps] in favour of Chrome.
Mozilla does not have its own OS to bundle a browser by default.
In some ways it was hoped that FirefoxOS could have been that vector, but alas...
Microsoft no longer worries about antitrust scrutiny around bundling IE/Edge with Windows; all of their consent decrees have expired. In modern versions of Windows, they now give Edge special privileges which allow it to programmatically replace the user's default browser. The third-party browsers do not have those privileges. EDIT: Oh, Edge also gets special keys for enabling it to be distributed through the Windows Store, while the third-party browsers don't. When Microsoft tries to push Windows into a new segment (like to compete with Chromebooks), they like to disable Desktop apps and only allow Store apps. Ergo, no Firefox for you!
It's certainly not good management to raise executive compensation while market share continues to dwindle. Just maybe that money could've be used more effectively elsewhere.
This is getting into "I do not completely absolve Mozilla management" territory, and I do have some personal thoughts about this that I am not going to share, however I will say that it is my understanding that freezing/reducing executive compensation would not have abated the need for restructuring. The announcement was not lying when it said that the big August layoff was precipitated by a decline in revenue due to COVID-19.
But circling back to the "hostility" thing: Since the layoffs happened in August, I've seen a lot of the web peanut gallery arguing that Mozilla executives and employees should not be paid competitively because Mozilla is non-profit. I was pretty disappointed to see some commenters on Hacker News debate whether it would be better to pay mid-five figures to a new grad straight out of school in a low cost-of-living locale instead of paying salaries like mine [4]. Many Mozilla employees could make a lot more money elsewhere (and probably deal with a lot less grief), but we stay because we want to build a better web for everyone. And then to see people suggesting that "non-profit" should also mean "no revenue and no expenses" and that we don't deserve to be reasonably compensated for what we're trying to achieve... It's a figurative slap in the face. So yeah, maybe I am defensive, but Mozillians have been on the receiving end of a lot of bullshit.
I use Firefox every day (even on iOS), despite its plethora of pain points
I am glad to hear this.
willful denial of important features, and spending limited human resources on random tasks.
And you write this while wondering why I am defensive?
Two points:
With a user base as large and as diverse as ours, the list of distinct "important features" that people are upset about is in the hundreds. With our budget, we cannot deliver on all of those simultaneously, if at all. We have no choice but to prioritize, and while I am not privy to the PWA decision, I am confident that it would have been made neither lightly nor without data.
As for your second point, this kind of reasoning really grinds my gears. I don't think it is beyond the realm of common sense to realize that changes like that do not involve halting a team of hundreds of developers to spend thousands of person-hours making those changes. It's like one or two people, for at most a week. Stop cherry-picking bugs you don't like and then using them to dump on all of Mozilla or Firefox. You're not helping. It is similar to some people on /r/firefox who take a massive shit all over the entire development team because they don't like some minuscule theming change. Get some perspective.
Outside of that, there's really not much I can do, unless you've got some strategy/plan more people should know about.
Your best options at the moment:
Use Firefox as often as possible (And thanks), and also encourage others to do so;
Subscribe to Pocket Premium;
Subscribe to Mozilla VPN.
If you're a web developer, push back on using non-standard tech that is not widely supported. Use progressive enhancement whenever possible.
File compatibility bugs: A team of volunteers triage these and figure out whether the bug is in the site or in the browser, and then they report them accordingly;
File any bugs you encounter on Bugzilla (for Desktop) or Github (for [Android] or [iOS])
[1] This has changed a bit in Europe, but broadly speaking this is still an issue.
[2] Joel Spolsky once referred to this kind of strategy as Fire and Motion:
The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features.
[3] As annoying as it is that we cannot ship Gecko on iOS devices, in one twisted way it benefits us too: Google can't ship Blink on those devices either. With iOS's large market share in North America, this means that, in NA at least, the mobile web is forced out of necessity to limit itself to the capabilities offered by WebKit on iOS. This serves as a bit of a brake on the pace of development.
[4] Note that I am trying to treat "being paid competitively" as orthogonal to the debate about the timing and amount of executive raises.
If we had a competent government, they would have long ago intervened in how much power Google has over purportedly "open" standards that practically every business needs in order to survive.
If we had a competent government, they would have long ago intervened in how much power Google has over purportedly "open" standards that practically every business needs in order to survive.
The relevant Wikipedia article has interesting sections on the origin of this expression, and about associated concerns. Such idioms have a common lifecycle : they are born of good intentions, but...
The relevant Wikipedia article has interesting sections on the origin of this expression, and about associated concerns.
Such idioms have a common lifecycle : they are born of good intentions, but after a while the hideous reality starts to show through the thin veil. Work can be both a blessing and a predicament, and the genius of some people in exploiting other people is boundless.
Bottom line : language adapts to reality much more readily than the other way round.
Humankind is a common enough term. I'd suggest that's the gender-neutral alternative to mankind. By extension, humanpower could be adopted for the same use here. It only sounds strange until you...
Humankind is a common enough term. I'd suggest that's the gender-neutral alternative to mankind.
By extension, humanpower could be adopted for the same use here. It only sounds strange until you get used to it.
I am not absolving Mozilla management of any responsibility, but at the same time, there are limits to how much is under their control. It's pretty ignorant to suggest that what is going on with Mozilla and Firefox is entirely management's fault.
You need to double-check your numbers, because the actual layoffs were closer to 25%. That's not to say that it wasn't painful: I'm still shattered that it happened, as are many of my colleagues (quite a few have since left).
Is it "good management" to bleed red ink, then?
Nobody wanted to lay people off, but when revenue went down, how was management going to pay them?
More importantly: What are you doing to help keep Firefox and Mozilla healthy?
Chalk it up to fatigue due to the fact that I and many other Mozillians have been on the receiving ends of all kind of hostility for quite some time. I just no longer have the emotional capacity to discuss these issues in anything less than blunt terms.
Okay, but I'm not sure why the onus lies entirely on the person calling you out, especially when the information you need is just a quick internet search away.
Anyway, here are some other factors that do not help:
This is getting into "I do not completely absolve Mozilla management" territory, and I do have some personal thoughts about this that I am not going to share, however I will say that it is my understanding that freezing/reducing executive compensation would not have abated the need for restructuring. The announcement was not lying when it said that the big August layoff was precipitated by a decline in revenue due to COVID-19.
But circling back to the "hostility" thing: Since the layoffs happened in August, I've seen a lot of the web peanut gallery arguing that Mozilla executives and employees should not be paid competitively because Mozilla is non-profit. I was pretty disappointed to see some commenters on Hacker News debate whether it would be better to pay mid-five figures to a new grad straight out of school in a low cost-of-living locale instead of paying salaries like mine [4]. Many Mozilla employees could make a lot more money elsewhere (and probably deal with a lot less grief), but we stay because we want to build a better web for everyone. And then to see people suggesting that "non-profit" should also mean "no revenue and no expenses" and that we don't deserve to be reasonably compensated for what we're trying to achieve... It's a figurative slap in the face. So yeah, maybe I am defensive, but Mozillians have been on the receiving end of a lot of bullshit.
I am glad to hear this.
And you write this while wondering why I am defensive?
Two points:
Your best options at the moment:
EDIT: And if you really want to contribute:
[1] This has changed a bit in Europe, but broadly speaking this is still an issue.
[2] Joel Spolsky once referred to this kind of strategy as Fire and Motion:
[3] As annoying as it is that we cannot ship Gecko on iOS devices, in one twisted way it benefits us too: Google can't ship Blink on those devices either. With iOS's large market share in North America, this means that, in NA at least, the mobile web is forced out of necessity to limit itself to the capabilities offered by WebKit on iOS. This serves as a bit of a brake on the pace of development.
[4] Note that I am trying to treat "being paid competitively" as orthogonal to the debate about the timing and amount of executive raises.
If we had a competent government, they would have long ago intervened in how much power Google has over purportedly "open" standards that practically every business needs in order to survive.
Human resources?
The relevant Wikipedia article has interesting sections on the origin of this expression, and about associated concerns.
Such idioms have a common lifecycle : they are born of good intentions, but after a while the hideous reality starts to show through the thin veil. Work can be both a blessing and a predicament, and the genius of some people in exploiting other people is boundless.
Bottom line : language adapts to reality much more readily than the other way round.
Indeed : it's manpower. Same as with mankind.
Humankind is a common enough term. I'd suggest that's the gender-neutral alternative to mankind.
By extension, humanpower could be adopted for the same use here. It only sounds strange until you get used to it.