The author links to a previous post with graphs with the answer. Roughly, there’s a controversy flag that gets enabled when comments are greater than upvotes, with limits. Looks like that’s what happened to the author’s posts.
I’ve seen this happen to many interesting posts and not a big fan, but this is connected to a business after all.
I found the book (hyper media systems) to be better at explaining full integration than the library site, which gives nuts and bolts and big picture, but not much intermediate info.
I recently tried a hello-world in react. It made ten network requests on page load and probably had a sizable first download. That’s why web pages are so slow today.
Hello world in react is just a few lines of code that mounts a react component to a dom element. There should be zero network requests beyond the initial download of html and js.
You’re either doing something wrong or not actually doing a hello world.
I don’t know but vite was involved, looks like it was setting up live updates. This is part of the problem, you can’t just include a script apparently.
vite adds additional things to your page in dev so that it's easier to debug. when you are running it in production, it is just one js bundle & one css file.
That’s just Vite’s dev mode. I think React is way overused but your example here is a bad one. You just weren’t aware what the dev tool was doing, it has nothing to do with the experience end users will have. It isn’t even anything to do with React.
This made me realize that another set of batteries should be installed in the boat trailer (etc), rather than carrying them around every day when not needed.
The charger station situation will probably need to be figured out however.
Does it really? I think, this makes you have a wrapper and I am not sure if you can get rid of all issues with "display: contents". Also you are already in the body, so you can't change the head, which makes it useless for the most idiomatic usecase for that feature.
The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.
They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook.
But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.
If they were on a sustainable trajectory they wouldn't be selling their soul for advertising money and other ill-advised revenue projects that contradict their stated mission.
Okay, but now you're changing the subject. The claim was that they don't have an endowment or that they're not investing it. But they are.
The truth is the vast majority of organizations with an endowment are not able to rely on it in perpetuity, I think there's a small subset of organizations that basically amounts to a bunch of elite universities. So it's not the intended or functional or actual purpose of any endowment to be permanent firewall against any conceivable financial hazard for all eternity. Having at one point worked for a non-profit myself that had an endowment, generally, what you do is you calculate how long an organization's operations could be funded by that endowment, and is one of a portfolio of metrics for gauging the financial health of a non-profit. It's more properly understood as a firewall to create some breathing space in the face of financial uncertainty. Again, reaching back to my limited stint at a non-profit, they withdrew a little bit from their endowment during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, as well as during covid. It's rarely the case that an endowment can fund an organization in perpetuity.
And maybe I'm crazy but if someone falsely accuses Mozilla of not maintaining an endowment, it seems relevant to point out that they do actually have one.
No—they did not cut costs enough to build a sufficient endowment. Again, income of several billion dollars.
That is plenty for an endowment to build a browser+ in perpetuity... like an order of magnitude in excess. Ladybird/servo are successfully building on perhaps 1% of that?
I'm sure they have some money in the bank and it gets interest, but obviously not enough or handled well enough to avoid the temptation to start an advertising project due to their unsustainable spending rate.
You keep trying to make it sound like they "did everything they could." No, they did not by a long shot.
They could be on a sustainable trajectory and still sell their soul purely out of greed. I'm not suggesting that Mozilla is actually doing that, I just wanted to point out the possibility.
Yep. Mozilla is effectively just a tax dodge for Google anymore.
Heck, this AI first announcement was probably strongly influenced behind the scenes by Google to create an appearance of competition similar to Microsoft's and Apple's relationship in the 1990s.
Also, ironically, I just switched full time to Brave only yesterday.
The "other things" is what most people seem to have problem with.
Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies.
If it were focused on its core mission -- building great software in key areas -- it would see it can't afford this, because that's the same money that if saved would make them financially independent of Google.
> In 2018, Baker received $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla.
> In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million.
> In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5.5 million,
> and again to over $6.9 million in 2022.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundation_and_Mozilla_Corporation
Mozilla took in the money from the distant past all the way into the present. They have leaned into privacy the whole time, while not being perfect.
At some point they ease off the google money or it goes away itself. And they move forward on privacy.
Google was less demanding in the past as well; they continue to give Apple billions each year.
There are a number of privacy-oriented business models, as listed here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html - while not as lucrative as some, combined with an endowment its a good living that many companies would envy.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding and they have zero savings to show for it.
Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.
> Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.
Look at how much money Google gave to Apple (Safari) vs Mozilla (FireFox) per year.
The CEO has unarguable been doing a poor job. Losing market share has lost them more potential revenue than any of their pet projects raised.
Well, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries.
So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser.
That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.
Exactly! With such an endowment they should be able to develop a browser and maybe some other stuff with a small team that’s focused on tech and not social justice.
There are about 800 unique weekly committers to the Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number for that project. A little harder to find that same figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had about 750 employees as of 2020.
Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at $100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare, this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like the goals and direction might be more important than the number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying.
So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget and operations pretty aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And browser development definitely needs a core of experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of skills!)
Working at Mozilla should be more than money. $200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people that are happy with a high paying job and have enough idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.
None of those figures are what the engineer makes, they're costs. And they're illustrative, not literal. You won't pay everyone at the same rate either for example, and not all will be engineers either, and I totally left both those facts out of it. Oh no! And also omitted the fact that a company whose vision and ideals people agree with can hire said people for less money, which again brings us back around to the point that the vision might be more important.
Maybe they should quit their presence in the Bay Area. The rent is insanely high. Not just of an office, also the workers. Besides, freedom of speech, liberty, DEI are each under pressure in USA. Mozilla is very much welcome here in Europe :-)
Another comment observed your cost estimates were low.
> But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
Google could reduce Chrome development to maintenance and remain dominant for years. It would be much like Internet Explorer 6. Firefox falling too far behind in performance or compatibility would be fatal.
> Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing?
The Ladybird developers have not produced a browser comparable to Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi have not produced a browser engine comparable to Ladybird of course.
> I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.
28 is a magic number was not a reasonable interpretation of my comment.
I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the original accusation was not correct, which is what should be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the next accusation.
What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong accusation after another? They don't have an endowment (they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major releases with thousands of patches per release with everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved gpu performance to security fixes)
There's nothing to acknowledge. You're asking everyone to accept the presumption embedded in the statement that a billion dollars "goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries", namely that Mozilla should be a large company and should rely on a steady stream of outside money instead of seeking sustainable financial independence. But Mozilla's lack of focus and excessive spending on side projects is a major part of the complaints against Mozilla, and you aren't even trying to make a reasonable case that Mozilla needs to be spending money like that.
That isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible.
If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.
I’ve seen this happen to many interesting posts and not a big fan, but this is connected to a business after all.
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