Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time.
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...
Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time.
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...
This chart feels a bit disingenuous given that Mozilla's form990s show Eich's salary tracking along basically the same line until his departure in 2014.
Yep.
It also doesn't take into consideration revenue growth, which according to the corporation's Wiki page grew much faster and higher in multiples than her salary.
As well, according to the same Wiki, "There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid." It would be a bummer to run a company of that size, be dedicated to it for so long, and not have any stake in it. Imagine her opportunity cost...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
Why? Becoming a publicly traded company comes with assumed responsibilities to make a profit; and, at least in the United States, an assumption that you should reduce your morals for the express purpose of turning a profit, lest your board of directors kick you out for someone that will.
There are greater goals, especially for a company like Mozilla, than making lots of money.
Wikipedia is unreliable. Perhaps you missed it, but Verizon bought Yahoo!, realized how Marissa's five year default search deal with Firefox was bleeding money as most users reset their default to Google, and Mozilla and Verizon declared the other party in breach in rapid succession. This will go to court, and my money is on Verizon. There will be no balloon payment of the last two years.
The jump in comp in 2017, as far as I can tell, was predicated on the Verizon payments being fulfilled. I hear it was also a quid pro quo for Foundation board members who demanded (order of magnitude smaller) salaries for their work as board members. Perhaps they do a lot, but in past, board members (including me) worked for no added comp.
Mitchell may be worth it, but I'd want more of a turnaround in market share, new revenue sources, or both. Maybe that is just me.
I'm in no way an insider and haven't paid attention to the history of this saga. I was just using public, possibly shaky info like the others. My point was to show that one graph is not the whole story, and it prompted you to add even more details. Your last point is definitely fair. I use Firefox on my phone and recently started learning JavaScript, so um, thank you.
According to this article, the lawsuit was settled in September 2019, though it doesn't give a reference and I haven't seen it reported elsewhere.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-tro...
Thanks, I missed that. I asked around, and I'm told that Mozilla's suit was dismissed with prejudice in Santa Clara County Superior Court (original case id is 17CV319921, I think). If true this helps account for both Chris Beard termination and layoffs.
Correction, the source said "corporation board members" demanded compensation, not foundation board members. The 2018 form 990 backs this up: $0 to board members other than Baker. No transparency re: corp board member comp.
I made a bit over 800K, at the top. Mitchell jumped to 2.5M. Math, do you do it?
Loving Brave by the way, thanks for all your hard work, can't wait to see what's coming next.
It's crazy how much FF's marketshare has dropped. It's such a great browser.
It was
When have you last used it?
It is definitely a great browser. I think the market share dropping has a lot to do with browser lockin on specific hardware, and site-specific apps being used more and more. We are losing more and more of the open, public infrastructure of the open web.
Hmm I don't know. I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev tools are great, it's simply not as polished as the competition.
For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO.
[0] https://imgur.com/lODjWSm
I think that alert's design is actually a _feature_. Safari made a similar change a while back not make the alerts look like system UI, to prevent phishing and similar attacks.
Ah, I wondered why that was done. Thanks for the light bulb.
My point is not that it doesn't look native... It's a neglected part of the UI.
The person you responded to specifically explained that. It's made to look non-native on purpose so that users don't think a pop-up, phishing, asking for their password, is a native system prompt. Safari did the same thing. It's not that it's neglected, quite the opposite, actually.
The Safari alert doesn't look native and yet it looks polished.
https://imgur.com/rvsjJtO
Personally, I don't think the Firefox version looks any worse than the Safari version, they're just different. It comes down to preference. Just like you saying it's the ugliest tab bar which I very much disagree with.
Sure, aesthetics is ultimately a subjective thing, but that's not what I'm saying.
It's not? That's exactly how I've been interpreting it. Objectively, how is the Safari version better? Other than subjective design.
When I say polished I don't mean a polished visual style in an aesthetic sense. What I mean is that a designer has put some work on a UI element and after some iterations there has been a conscious decision over why an element looks the way it looks.
For example, one of the major considerations when doing UI design is creating elements that have a cohesive style (regardless of which aesthetic style that is).
None of that happened on that god forgotten alert. It's probably the first thing that someone came up with in a rush, in a style that no other UI element of FF shares, and it has stayed like this probably because nobody cares.
That and I believe the new modal prevents locking up the entire browser.
> It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO.
Really? Do you learn a new language every day? I installed languages that I am interested years ago and forgot about it until you mentioned it.
No, but some people write text in more than one language inside Firefox.
you can add as many as you want (at least I didn't hit the limit) it's just 2 clicks for each and they are retained between upgrades, the parent issue is that Firefox doesn't come with every language installed by default.
A lot of us are bi-lingual. English is not my first language, so being able to use spell checking for my native language and English without things breaking is important to me.
well, I'm bi-lingual as well, I only needed to install languages once. I don't want to have installed dictionary for every language under the sun. They do take space.
Yeah but you don't have spell checking on all these languages unless you manually switch between those.
I write in 4 languages so it's quite annoying to do that every time. In Chrome there is multilingual spell checking even when you mix languages in the same sentence.
oh my bad, I misunderstood what he meant.
I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev tools are great it's simply not as polished as the competition.
The polish of developer tools has exactly zero to do with a browser's popular marketshare.
I do believe there's a comma missing there. engine and dev tools are great (full stop) But! it's simply not as polished.
My bad, I missed a coma...
Ah. I thought you were saying the dev tools weren't polished.
Well maybe not exactly zero, more devs using FF tools --> more websites designed to be optimized for FF first.
If you optimize for your devs use and not your users there's a problem.
But the user will switch to a browser that works for them. Which is happening.
All the people I know, who left FF, myself partly included, did so for this reason. Quite some sites did not work anymore on firefox. And the normal user does not care that this is because of vendorprefixes which are not standard. They care about that their website does not work anymore.
Keep the webdevs ... keep your users.
It is a great browser, once we agree on priorities on what they should be great at. All modern browsers suck badly wrt UI. User interfaces dumbed down to unusability is the new fashion and both Chrome and Mozilla suffer equally from that (which is why I use Waterfox Classic). But while FF focuses on privacy, and definitely delivers in this context, Chrome and others don't, by design. I would happily trade 50% of everything else for 10% more privacy, because an ugly tab, panel, window, menu etc. does no harm compared to the potential disgrace caused by the loss of control on personal data.
It's not one or the other. FF could have the best UI and the best privacy features.
Very true, but it costs money and neither Google's browser with their nearly infinite resources has them. FF might just need more time to implement them properly; I only wish they didn't fall into the dumbed down UI fashion like they did when they copied from others the "let's fill the main page with junk and remove a perfectly working configuration panel completely".
Do you know how customisable firefox's UI is in ways that chrome isn't? They limited it a bit in recent years so you can no longer can easily turn the url bar and tab bar into one bar which i'm sad about but all in all most of the buttons i don't use i can remove, those i do i can add, i can change the colours, shapes and location. Chrome is ugly by default and doesn't allow me to fix it.
Waterfox doesn't really have a future. However, Pale Moon has redundancy in terms of developers and a maintained XUL platform.
Do you find Firefox Dev Tools better than Chrome?
It's probably the only reason that I stick with Chrome, its dev tools are fantastic and often gets new incredible features.
I use Chrome for web development because of devtools. Personal use is all Firefox.
The change can be jarring at first, but I honestly prefer the FF dev tools now.
> The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
I switched to FF about 2 months ago. I made a FF Color theme [0] that matches Chrome's colors to help ease my transition. Only color I wasn't able to adjust with FF color is the tab onhover color.
[0] https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAIWAQAAAAAAAABBKYhm849...
Thanks for this link, I was unaware of Firefox Color - for anyone looking for a Chrome-dark-mode-like equivalent, here's a quick attempt:
https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAITAQAAAAAAAABBKYhm849...
Firefox's spellchecking is just generally awful, even for English. It fails to recognize even basic words such as 'surveil' with the closest suggestion being 'survive'. I've found several other words I wanted to use that weren't found too. I have spellcheck off by default but when I write something long I do a quick check at the end so I don't normally notice this.
Firefox is by far my least favorite piece of software that I regularly use and I've considered throwing my computer out the window because of it.
I think you need to install a new or different dictionary. It’s dumb, but that’s how it works - spellcheck dictionaries are provided on the Mozilla extension store. You could try a new one.
There is something seriously wrong with Firefox if the default spellcheck dictionary is so bad that I might need to install a different one, especially for the English language. Hell they should just be able to merge theirs with Chromium's. Regardless, as I said I don't normally use spellcheck and I trust my own judgement over the computer's so it isn't a big deal for me.
@pier25 Would honestly disagree on your 'polish' concerns. I consciously 'returned' to Firefox macOS a little over a year ago from a contented experience with Chrome, for entirely non-practical reasons (it just felt like a good idea). And it's been nothing but pleasant. I'm a massive fan of the UI, it's simplicity, flexibility, but also its bold sense of self. I despise the too-polished feel of safari. It is impractical. And chrome I return to semi-regularly for debugging or QA, but it honestly feels like a downgrade. It's so plain. So lifeless. So google. Sure there may be edge-case usability issues on FF, such as your multi-lingual spell check, but this seems like an entirely workable extension challenge. Safari on the other hand is drowning in edge cases ... and chrome - privacy.
> Sure there may be edge-case usability issues on FF, such as your multi-lingual spell check, but this seems like an entirely workable extension challenge
It's an issue that affects anyone that writes in multiple languages. This accounts for the majority of internet users in the world since they write at least in their own language and English. This is not an edge case that affects 10% of users.
Like I already explained, it can't be solved properly with an extension. The ones that try to solve it slow down FF. This has to be solved at the native level, not in JS.
I found a UX quirk that bothered me.
I documented it, proposed a solution with my own justifications for why it would be better, and submitted a bug report.
Feedback from Moz, the work done on it, the patches created, and the release plan for it were all done in the open and I could track it.
The change I suggested was implemented and is now out.
Be the change you want to see... only Firefox/Mozilla would do this in such an open way.
> Opened 19 years ago
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687
Sure, no process is perfect. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
The multilingual thing sounds like a big problem for people that rely on that.
My comment was directed to your other complaints about UX quirks.
> also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking
The English spell checking is pretty bad, too, giving me at least an order of magnitude more false positives [1] than Safari or Chrome on my Mac, and Edge or Chrome on Windows. Same when compared to things other than browsers, such as Word, LibreOffice, BBEdit, Pages.
What's baffling is that Firefox, LibreOffice, and Chrome all use Hunspell [2], so presumably the reason Firefox spell check sucks compared to LibreOffice is they have a terrible dictionary.
So why doesn't Mozilla just take the LibreOffice dictionary?
[1] In case I've got the terminology wrong for spell checkers, by false positive I mean where the spell checker says that a word is spelled wrong when it is in fact spelled correctly.
[2] https://hunspell.github.io/
> The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.
It's horrible on all platforms ;) . The way tabs are handled is by far my biggest complaint, you can't fit as many tabs in as with chrome and since they "upgraded" the extension system the vertical tab extensions don't work well (can't remove top tab panel).
I wish they'd just make a native UI for each platform, their cross platform one has always been a train wreck but it's especially bad since they dropped XUL.
Wait you can't scroll trough tabs on macOS? I have hundreds open and can read em perfectly fine
You can.
given Mozillas funding and the fact that most users don't care about browser marketing (except for sneaky performance "tricks" or Google's "want some more speed"-in your face mechanism) I really think, they should focus on the core (e.g. building a browser) and just leave politics (e.g. "safe-sync", "better media integration" - e.g. pocket) out of it completely... And yeah, I'd be more than happy to subscribe to my browser-vendor at this point if this means freedom or not. But not if I look at what Mozilla (and wikipedia) which are raking in money from corporate shills and still want my money to develop their "business" (which is very much specified and as a not-for-profit I don't see the need to "expand")
> politics (e. g. “safe-sync”)
I’m continually impressed by what people are willing to label “politics”. And by how badly people must hate whatever they understand “politics” to be.
well, it's not directly related to browser/app development (which is still the purpose of the non-profit Mozilla foundation???), but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO? coming from traditional dead-tree press in germany... I also shuddered when I saw right under layoff-press that the marketing VP comes straight out of facebook. Instead of building a beacon of a non-commercial, individual and free web, it seems that people at Mozilla are more concerned with having just another carreer but with a better image up front (facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!)
>well, it's not directly related to browser/app development (which is still the purpose of the non-profit Mozilla foundation???)
"The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions"
Making a browser was part of supporting FOSS and open web standards.
>but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO?
Whilst I agree that the implementation was horrendous the idea behind it was good. Do you know what I love? I can bookmark something and have that bookmark available at home. I can log in somewhere and quickly do it elsewhere. That's firefox sync. Nobody complains about it because it isn't noticed as such a service.
The main dominator of the web currently is Google's chrome. It goes beyond even that. A lot of chrome's convenience and incentive for use for people comes from providing an ecosystem. Keep, calendar and the like and despite how terrible the limited functionality for addons is they all nicely integrate with the browser by defaault and their mobile versions everyone gets on android. Tried an addon for keep on firefox? It's trash. There's no convenient alternatives and without pushing them they won't appear.
Additionally they're entirely dependent on funding from their competitor who pushes the monopolising of webstandards and implementation that they try to combat.
>facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!
The fuck are you on about. moz literally implemented facebook containers to keep the tracking out and their defined data privacy principles can be trusted. Facebook isn't even a consumer or product focused service business (with some exceptions of course) they're generally in it for your data for advertising purposes given that you don't give em a dime for the privilege of using their social media.
Firefox Focus too.
Isn't that a very low maintenance thing? Generally just a light and very speedy stripped down version of the browser with simple security/privacy changes that aren't in the main one because they'd be inconvenient for people.
Firefox eats memory. 4GB of memory is barely enough to run browser and show few tabs.
And this was one of the reasons I switched to Chrome many years ago.
Doesn't Chrome have similar memory bloat?
No issues here on Linux. The latest ESR major release has even improved memory use slightly compared to the previous version.
On the windows box I'm currently typing, Firefox is eating less than two gigabytes with over seventy-five open tabs.
I have two FF windows open with a total of ~300 tabs and its currently consuming 2.1GB (Windows 10).
Using Nightly on Linux (Bunsen Helium), 360 tabs, using 1.5 GB, but that will grow if I fire up dormant tabs. Starts going out to swap if I run it too long, then I kill it and update Nightly.
Chrome eats way more across the board in my experience
The decline of Firefox is largely due to Mozilla's incompetence.
If you look at their own statistics [1], you will notice that (worldwide) usage started declining after the introduction of Quantum (November 2017), and dropped substantially after the April 2019 addons outage.
This would suggest, IMHO, that Firefox loses market share when beloved features - customization, addons - stop working or got worse.
This is unsurprising to anyone who has been using Firefox for a long time: the primary differentiation factor of Firefox has always been customization. Messing with that would always be a risky proposition. Nuking the whole ecosystem entirely and starting over in the space of a few of months was simply idiotic. Disabling everyone's addon's because of an admin screw up was just the icing on the fucking cake.
[1] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Keeping XUL extensions would have meant continuing to sacrifice performance, security and stability. That could never have worked long-term.
To be clear... this charts the comp of ONE person at Mozilla (the Board Chair - and now interim CEO).
What's your point? That was already immediately clear from the comment, the tweet and the chart. So what's your angle?
It really wasn’t clear to me at all until I read this comment. I interpreted the tweet (and GP) to mean “this chart tracks CEO pay at Mozilla, regardless of who the CEO is.” Seeing this comment completely changed the perspective for me, so it was helpful.
There’s no need for aspersions.
I think your point is the most important one. This is not "Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share" as Eich says. This appears to be a misleading graph of how much one guy has been paid. His salary went way up in 2016, unsurprisingly (shortly after Eich was fired), and Firefox has continued its downward slide from when Eich was there.
Read more carefully:
1. The increase was in 2017, reported per IRS regs in Mozilla Foundation's Form 990 filing (which must list all comp to board members even if they work for the for-profit Mozilla Corporation subsidiary).
2. The "one guy" is Mitchell Baker, and she is chair of both foundation and corporation boards.
But nice try attempting to pin blame on market share slide these last almost six years on me.
In your Twitter thread you claimed it was a "chart for top job" at Mozilla. Will you now say that was false, that Baker was not the highest paid employee for the duration of that chart?
Don't be dense or try "gotcha" games with me: Mitchell is chair of both boards, hirer and firer of CEOs, she has the top job. I'm told Mitchell is now acting CEO too, so: hat trick!
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/
Also you didn't acknowledge your 2016 blunder, or retract your scurrilous insinuation that I'm to blame lo these past almost six years for continued and even accelerating decline, not to mention loss of FirefoxOS to KaiOSTech. Please do better, or save it.
> your scurrilous insinuation that I'm to blame lo these past almost six years
Ooh, "scurrilous"! I'm struck where I stand! If only I had actually said you were to blame for the last 5-6 years, you might have something. I said Mozilla continued its downward slide from when you were there, not that you were to blame for that.
> even accelerating decline
Your chart doesn't show an accelerating decline in the last six years, so you don't have much to go on there either.
In fairness to you, you did say "top job", and I quoted you as saying "chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive", which is what dman said at the top of the thread. Baker was not the highest paid executive for the duration of the chart, but I shouldn't have claimed you said that. So I do apologize for that. I also apologize for misgendering Baker.
I was curious so I put together a chart comparing Baker, Eich, James Cook (the treasurer, not the explorer), and a baseline of 500k with a 10% raise per year:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR2HoMXrWo3H...
Wow. This makes me wince. My mind is making an emotional connection here to the .org fiasco and recent posts about "the internet of yore". Something(s) odd, unethical seems to be brewing/happening.
I don't much care for Eich but that graph (as in, what it represents) is just shameful.
The salary of top executives has gone way up in the past 20 years or so across industries, and largely without relation to company performance.
Nice deflection. I'm a founder of mozilla.org, Mitchell joined 8 months after, we worked closely for 15+ years. She set the salaries with board approval, always made somewhat more than I did, I never complained. Neither of us was making more than high six figures, until after I left. Something changed, and it is not generic to "industries". No excuses!
I didn't intend for it to come off as a deflection, though I see that it would be easy to read it that way.
I agree that something changed at Mozilla, but I've seen it get justified at other previously reasonable organizations with excuses like "everyone else is doing it," or "This is still below-market rate for C-level talent." The fact that it's happening everywhere doesn't make it less nauseating.
[edit]
Mitchell could drop her salary to a "mere" 6 figures and lay off 7 fewer people, but you hardly ever see executives do things like that.
Remember, I'm the bad guy. Ignore this looting operation amid market share tanking, also do please ignore past board members tied to Epstein. It's all about me. :-/
Ha ha. I love Brendan. Saying it like it is. No-frills.
Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.
I don't live in SV, but the impression I get is that nobody cares what you did 25 years ago.
Ubiquity doesn't equate to profitability. In fact, most of the big internet Startups (Twitter comes instantly to mind) lose and money and likely always will.
Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry).
tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded Brave instead.
Don’t sanitize it, he was fired for being anti-gay.
That should make it a little clearer why funders won’t touch him (and many won’t touch his new work).
I did not know that. It is odd though. I used to remember no one cared what about your Views as long as you were good at what you did. CS was as close to meritocracy as it could have been. It is a shame.
"Views" are one thing... I guess. Working to make sure your employees don't get the legal right to get married is another.
Strange, I don't remember any Mozilla employees organizing and rallying for political causes in the 1990s, and Mozilla was certainly around, if not the dominant platform at the time. Gay rights was no less of an issue then than it is today, it simply hadn't been popularized by the media and endorsed by politicians and corporations.
Personally I find it abhorrent that anyone was so quick to rally against Brendan Eich. If we keep going down this path, all we'll be left with are people that change their opinions on a whim and flip flop on issues so quickly that they resemble politicians. I'd rather have a good leader I don't agree with on every issue, than a poor leader who's trying to pretend to be on the right side of whatever political stance is in-vogue.
> I used to remember no one cared what about your Views as long as you were good at what you did.
This has never been true in any field in any place in the history of the world.
CS was never close to meritocracy (I'd argue that finance is/was historically far closer to meritocracy than CS ever was). Eich was raised in the Valley, got a Master's in CS before he had gotten a job, and was a millionaire and investing in Silicon Valley real estate before he had been working for ten years (he never started a company, and only created Javascript after something like eleven). There are people working on life-saving infrastructure in CS who've been working for forty years who don't have a million.
Also, "your Views" are different from "your Actions." If I think you're ridiculous, so what? If I think you're so ridiculous that I pay people money to promote a law that would increase what you have to pay in taxes, suddenly everyone cares, and rightfully so!
I don't agree. While things might be changing,I know for a fact that on my journey, I went from having no degree or experience, to becoming a senior engineer at one of the largest companies in the world, solving some of the hardest problems in the world, with nothing more than luck, a computer, and a passion for learning. And I know many other people in the same boat, which I hear is not the norm in other professions.
So, take that anecdotal evidence as you will. But I think I'm not the only one, and a lot of people will disagree with you. We're part of one of the only professions in the world where you can enjoy a very high standard of living in a white-collar profession with little to no expectation of having academic credentials.
I can see that ( finance-wise ). Tbh, I did not know there were this many female bank CEOs until I just checked a moment ago. I was pleasantly surprised.
As for meritocracy, in the 90s no one cared who my online persona was. My persona was about as eye-grabbing as the one I use here. My contributions, for lack of a better term, were dismissed for being crap, which I eventually understood. I think people miss out on that.
As for your point actions and views, I respectfully disagree. You only seem to separate them, because you dislike his views, the resulting words and would like them not to be translated into action. I can understand that, but it sounds .. convenient? You are free to talk about stuff, but the moment you get politically active you get shunned? It seems very backwards to me.
Not just banking! Despite not being seen as "Computer Science," the technical areas of finance are also highly diverse. If you can make money, someone will be willing to give you $250,000 a year to fuck off and play with implementing trading algorithms, regardless of who you are. It's pretty sweet.
I don't know who or what your online persona is, either: I'm still talking to you, and it's still an interesting conversation. There are still places to play anonymously or pseudonymously, and they usually have more people than they did during the 1990s. People generally tend to forego that, though.
As for your point actions and views, I respectfully disagree. You only seem to separate them, because you dislike his views, the resulting words and would like them not to be translated into action. I can understand that, but it sounds .. convenient? You are free to talk about stuff, but the moment you get politically active you get shunned? It seems very backwards to me.
Think of it in terms of separation of church and state, right? I can call you a sinner who's going to hell all I'd like, but it's unconstitutional and wrong on many levels to try and take away something from you that I have no plans to stop partaking in. (I think Eich is an atheist so this is just for the matter of example; I don't know why he didn't support it, he doesn't seem open about his reasoning and as such I'm not going to try and conjure up some reasoning for him.)
I'm not passionate about what Eich did or did not support, because frankly I have no idea why he funded what he funded, but if you look at it in terms of taxes, he's a very well off guy trying to increase the tax burden of a bunch of people (his coworkers/later-employees, no less) solely because he disagrees either morally or pragmatically that they should be able to get married. (Tax benefits to marriage are controversial in the first place, but definitely something incredibly beneficial.)
This country was founded on violent response to moralistic taxes; it's in its blood to care about increasing taxes arbitrarily, and the Prop 8 ads his cash helped fund were absolutely aimed at blurring the separation between church and state, even if that wasn't his intention (though he never denied it was, so we'll never know).
It is a good argument. Tbh, I am struggling a little with forming a counter-argument.
It is a little odd. I think I see action as just an extension of speech. This is probably a reason I hesitate when anyone says you can talk about something, boy you better not, say, actually exercise your theoretical right to assemble.
I think I will need to think about it a little more.
I was never a millionaire from real estate before I'd been working ten years. Are you perhaps misinformed by someone who was at SGI and exaggerated rumors they heard? I made more off of SGI options than I did by ten years in from real estate, and I never flipped. I've owned the same properties for over 30 years.
I agree with you that many fine people do life-saving or otherwise important work for far less. But facts matter, and I'm here to correct the record.
P.S. I was raised in Pittsburgh and Maryland as much as in the Valley.
Cool, where in MD? I grew up in Towson and Bel Air.
Gaithersburg.
This says you were a millionaire before you'd been working ten years, and as far as I'm aware it's fairly accurate? It's a profile of you that happened long before you were controversial. I didn't claim that you were a millionaire because you had invested in real estate, just that you also had invested in real estate (I assumed that it was obvious that the former was probably a precursor to the latter, but I guess not).
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/09/business/part-artist-part...
It does not say "due to real estate". How hard is this to read accurately and relate on HN faithfully? I had more upside from SGI's IPO than from valley real estate (which was good too, but I never flipped). Yeesh!
It does not say "due to real estate". How hard is this to read accurately and relate on HN faithfully?
Sir, the last comment was stating that I was trying to avoid implying that it was due to real estate.
> I didn't claim that you were a millionaire because you had invested in real estate
> just that you also had invested in real estate
I'm not accusing you of getting rich off of real estate.
I'm just saying that "investing in real estate" is something that requires a substantial volume of money (as you said, a nest egg): it was a way to show that you were well off, not a way to imply you were a slumlord or something.
I misread your comment, sorry. But I must say real estate was cheap in the ‘80s, especially after downturns. Remember the crash of ‘87 aka Black Monday? Yikes, I’m old.
> CS was as close to meritocracy as it could have been.
...as long as you were a white, heterosexual man in the US.
To be clear, it wasn't that he was "anti-gay" it was that he donated $1000 to Prop 8 in 2008, a California Proposition that made gay marriage illegal in CA until Obergefell struck it down 7 years later.
This is important because it is a clear delineation between "privately disagreeing but allowing individuals their freedom" and "actively campaigning to take away rights from Mozilla employees and users".
Did he not donate to a legal political cause, without publicizing it?
I doubt funders care about your opinions on gay marriage, but they do care a lot about the stink the cancel culture raised around him.
The poison seems to be applied externally.
Legality and morality are very often unrelated; in this case, the implication is not that he did something illegal, but that he is an asshole for spending his money for the purpose of making other people’s lives worse to the benefit of nobody.
Personally, I think that’s a perfectly good reason for not giving him more money.
“Cancel culture” is many people (many of whom matter to investors in one way or another) stating that they also feel that that is a bad place to put money.
Don't lie: Mozilla itself says they didn't fire me, why don't you believe them? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
In fact per CA labor law it would be illegal to fire me for "being anti-gay": https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... et seq.
And of course, once I got Brave started outside the valley, we got "funders" in the valley to invest, including many top VC firms (who now constitute <10% of all funds we raised to date so don't switch horses to argue we are VC-controlled).
So being fired for holding a particular view is okay now? Regardless of your views, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of corporations having a de facto role in enforcing public morality, through who they chose to hire and fire. People okay with this have obviously learned nothing from the days where you could be fired for being gay. Other way around? Nothing wrong with it according to some people. This whole trend is worrying.
Having said that - corporations do have a right to hire and fire who they please. But it is important to at least acknowledge "cancel culture" as a legitimate and immature trend that is happening. Often the pressure to fire somebody comes from the outside, not from within.
Conservative != bigot/anti-gay.
We do have a brood of reactionaries attempting to blur that distinction like they always do, but there are plenty of conservatives who do not share that particular bias.
Bigot: a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions. (http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/bigot)
I have met plenty of bigots on both sides of politics. But immediately trying to call me out on labeling this man a conservative by saying he is actually a bigot is, ironically, bigotry itself.
__jal's comment was ambiguous. I think they may have been saying the opposite: that not all conservatives are bigots, and that it's unfair on conservatives to brand bigotry as conservatism.
Creating a language 20 years ago doesn't mean you're responsible for everything the language produced. If javascript didn't exist something different would have taken it's place and produced just as much value.
Not to mention the original Javascript was pretty much only good at making snow animations on your website when winter was coming.
Microsoft tried with VBScript, but JS was fit enough to survive, and no one wanted a second language after it. No point in speculating, we know JS matters. Asserting it could have been Blub means nothing. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155.
Also, I kept working on JS, while doing other things. I worked on JS in both Netscape and Ecma TC39 through late 1997, then co-founded mozilla.org with jwz and others. For mozilla.org I was chief architect, but I still kept working on the Mozilla JS engine, SpiderMonkey, adding features such as getters and setters that became important in 2005 due to use by Microsoft's Live Maps.
Live Maps emulated the IE DOM in Firefox via those same getter and setter extensions that I'd added over the years since 1997. In IE, Live Maps of course used the native DOM. This left Safari and Opera failing unless they reverse engineered the getter and setter extensions from SpiderMonkey in Firefox quickly. It took them about a week, and then Live Maps worked in Safari and Opera too.
This shows how quickly browsers can evolve, based on innovation in just one browser's engine, even in the wake of a monopoly period of stagnation.
HN itself wasn't affected by JS in the life of HN readers, LOL
If it wasn't obvious from my tweet, in a thread on "cancel culture", many valley investors were scared of being mobbed if they invested in me.
Yes once learning the back story via the comments here it's clearer/obvious.
Maybe I should delete my comment too...seems a lot of HN members in this thread did the same once you popped in ...lol
Most stats I see put Firefox market share at around 5%. Am I reading the chart wrong?
taking into account mobile browser traffic (50% of all traffic)...in the US it's about half that based on our visitors. (home remodeling industry / DIY, e-commerce).