Uh, you know where he works, right? (Mozilla) And where he worked before (Microsoft), working on what (Explorer)?
Are you saying @albill works for Mozilla? Then ânaiveâ probably isnât the right wordâŚ
is not as smart as you? But which of you is making presumptions about the other, in order solely to be correct, and is that wrong when they do it, but not when you do?
I find your logic to be flawed. Itâs your right. So is the arrogant tone. I seek no recompense. Please reconsider the assumptions you punish others for.
1 Like
I was told that IE was an integral part of the system architecture. No wait, that was a judge that was told that, by MS. sorry.
1 Like
Actually, we donât. We ended that contract.
You do realize that the Mozilla Corporation is owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which is a mission driven Federal non-profit, right? We donât get stock in the company and no one is getting rich on the work we do. We donât monetize people to get rich. We use search revenue and other contracts to get the money we need to fulfill the manifesto by working on Firefox, Firefox OS and other projects.
Try to be less jaded.
2 Likes
That actually wasnât a lie. Trident, mshtml.dll, was fully incorporated into the windows shell which is why âweb viewâ and similar things were part of Windows. I think that was a bad idea but it was true. In the two or so versions of Windows since then, things may have been disentangled or encapsulated better though.
1 Like
So, when they said they could not disentangle it, but then did so, they were fully truthful. Okay, nice talk.
Yes, strangely, over the next decade, they were able to do it. The point at the time, and it was valid, was that you couldnât simply uninstall it. It was integrated into those versions of windows. You could hide the icon but you couldnât remove mshtml.dll because parts of the shell, the help system, and other things would break.
You can scoff and roll your eyes but I actually worked there then and was in Windows Shell later when the IE team was recreated (and I worked on IE during the trial). It was a truthful statement because of engineering and design decisions that were made in Windows for integration.
2 Likes
Iâm the Security Program Manager on the Platform Engineering Team and I manage the Platform Engineering Fuzzing team, which employs five engineers to do software fuzzing on various parts of the platform, JavaScript, and Firefox as a whole. I write the security advisories and act as the little shepherd for security fixes as they get reported to us, internally, or by external security researchers.
2 Likes
I believe so.
https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/abillings/
Amongst other things he does.
Sniped by the Target! Thatâs what I get for trying to do more research! At least I donât have to worry about doxxing him (I was just going to send him a PM when I saw just post).
1 Like
Mozilla may be mission driven, but that doesnât mean that it is completely trustworthy. I mean, the only reason Mozilla Corporation had to be created was because the nonprofit was actually profiting from relationships with search companies, right? And maybe Mozilla isnât taking money from Google anymore, but thatâs only because itâs taking more money from Yahoo for exactly the same service; delivering search users who are monetized through data and advertising.
Iâm not saying Mozilla is evil or anything, but I think itâs disingenuous to suggest that Mozilla is somehow this pure-of-heart company while everyone else is evil.
Iâm pretty public and use my real name everywhere.
Generally, I make it clear that âmy opinions to not represent those of my employerâ but on browser focused threads, Iâm pretty comfortable with how clear it is. Since I spent almost the entirety of my 20+ year working career working onâŚfour (!) different web browsers (technically five though one never shipped) at two companies, I think I have a perspective on that as a topic area.
No. The corporation was created because of our understanding of IRS tax regulations at the time. Mitchell Baker has said that if we knew then what we know today, we wouldnât have done it because weâve learned the ins and outs of the tax and other laws enough to realize that we could have kept it all under the foundation. Of course, we learned this through a multi-year audit (!!) by the IRS but people kvetching about our structure never seem to notice how heavily Mozilla got audited for daring to exist.
You can choose not to trust Mozilla but none of us are becoming billionaires working on Firefox. We get a salary and we take in money to pay for it, infrastructure, and ongoing projects. I turned down a potential job at Apple working on Safari to work on Firefox (and I voluntarily ended my career at Microsoft because I was tired of the company and the cognitive dissonance of working there). The Apple job would have made me a millionaire by now based on the stock back in the mid-2000âs. A lot of people are at Mozilla for similar high reasons, not simply for a paycheck.
Search revenue wound up being the obvious way to do it (and one that most browser projects have used).
Name another browser company driven by a manifesto (not by shareholders) focused on public good and the good of the Internet.
4 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
