Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to "step down" http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/mozilla-employees-to-brendan-eich-step-down/

The dude became the CEO of Mozilla only this month, causing half of the board to step down. Does anyone know the background better?

Ben Goodger is the former lead developer of Firefox, when Firefox was at its best. Then again, he is also the man behind making Mozilla a corporation from foundation and community. And when Google began making Chrome, Ben Goodger became the head of that project/team/department, resigning from Mozilla.

So, Ben Goodger is the actual author of both the best and the worst in Firefox. The best was there when Mozilla was a community without a corporation. Things have irreversibly turned for the worse ever since the corporation was put up.

Ah, another thing I remember is the naming trouble of the Firefox project. It was originally called Phoenix, then Firebird, and had to be renamed due to overlapping names with other software projects. I don't know who is behind the poor ability to put names on things, but it shows some poor ability. But the software itself used to be good. It became my system default on Windows at version 0.7.

Yeah, their poor google-fu was the target of a lot of jokes back then.
I mean seriously, did they expect to just grab someone else's established name and run with it or did they really not bother?

I imagine they never planned for this Phoenix thing to become anything -- Firebird, on the other hand...

Well, Brendan Eich is squeezed out now. I don't know him that well, met him a couple times, can't say how good CEO he would have been, CTO and CEO are quite different jobs, but the process was sad.

Wait, this can't be right http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/after-eich-firing-conservatives-slam-mozilla-and-call-for-boycott/

Media coverage of Mozilla and its Firefox Web browser over the past week has largely focused on new CEO Brendan Eich and his 2008 opposition to gay marriage (in the form of a $1,000 donation to California's Prop 8 campaign).

It was some gay rights issue? I thought it was some professional decision or some such views. I may have been wrong, but certainly it could not have been some gay rights thing either. Maybe the guy just has a bad personality and pisses underlings off easily.

Bad personality would make sense to motivate opposition to his promotion. Other things don't make sense.

Bottom line: Corporations suck.

Mozilla is a non-profit, which makes it a special kind of beast.
Like I said I don't know him well enough to predict if he would be a good CEO or not, or know whether he squeezes kittens for his breakfast juice, but he didn't stay long enough in this job to show (of course he has been in Mozilla and in public discussions since before there was a Mozilla and about as long as there were a Netscape). I know him as sharp and decent, two qualities I appreciate.

There may not have been much of a choice. These are slow news days, it's not that often somebody I know (if in the passing) were in the BBC World 5 minute top of the hour segments. Reportedly (on Twitter of course, where the whole debacle played out) ABC illustrated it with the Westboro church. When he resigned that was of course an excellent opportunity for America's right, and then it was all politicking as usual. It all leaves a foul taste.

The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation will continue to own the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property and will license them to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation will also continue to govern the source code repository and control who is allowed to check in.

Mozilla is a non-profit. That has given them an arguable unfair business advantage over for-profit browser vendors (like Opera). That wasn't really much of an issue as Opera and Mozilla were basically aligned between the corporate giants Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

As a foundation Mozilla isn't particularly democratic, but then again is Microsoft or Google?

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/web-push-arrives-in-firefox-44/

Have you ever wished that a website could notify you when something important happened, even if you didn't have the site open?

Nope. Not even once. But now I'll have nightmares about it...

Luckily, you can turn it off.

g
I do suppose there will be a configuration item to unconditionally turn this crap off, right?

Dan Callahan
Right now, user-visible settings are on a per-origin basis. E.g., you can dismiss prompts with "never ask me again [on this site]." If you want to turn Push off altogether, toggle dom.push.enabled in about:config.

I kind of share the sentiment of several other comments in the same vein.

epk
"Have you ever wished that a website could notify you when something important happened, even if you didn't have the site open?"

Uggh, no, never. Nu-uh.

But I do wish for a browser which continues to embrace dynamic functionality extension via XUL and XPCOM. And for a serious investment of developer time in Thunderbird and its underlying core. How about that?

Mozilla publishes its Firefox user data

The new Firefox Public Data Report will include information about yearly and monthly active users, how many hours per day those users spend with Firefox, how long it takes users to upgrade to the latest version, how many Firefox users install add-ons, which add-ons are the most popular and more. That data can be segmented by region and by the top 10 countries where Firefox is most popular.

The data that's available in the report today goes back just over a year and Mozilla plans to update the site at least once per week. Mozilla stresses that this data doesn't come from some kind of real-time monitoring system but that it's aggregated and anonymized data from a subset of its users. Indeed, if you are a Firefox user, you can simply go to about:telemetry and see what data is sent to Mozilla.

It doesn't come as a surprise that this data shows a downward trend for monthly active Firefox users, which now measure about 250 million, down from well over 300 million last April.

true developer from mozila now in pale moon project

true developer from mozila now in pale moon project

Which one?

Which one?

I read it on their website.

SeaMonkey 2.53.1
[...]
This version makes changes to your profile that can't be reverted in case you want to go back to a previous version of SeaMonkey. You MUST absolutely do a full backup of your profile before trying SeaMonkey 2.53.1.

The Mozilla backend code SeaMonkey is based on, now usually incorporates breaking changes in every release. This is especially true for the Mozilla Gecko add-ons code and the JavaScript interpreter.

Seriously, now you are forcing me to hate Seamonkey too?

Mozilla announced a paid VPN service https://vpn.mozilla.org/

Totally transposed into a barely surviving corporation.