Not sure if it s a language issue (non native speaker), but seems we have the same goals.

So sorry, if I misunderstood your position/point!

My point is mostly, that it seems every browser is mostly US controlled directly or transitively, and it should be in the interest of every other country/nation to have a free, open source, not US controlled browser on the market… but given the sad reality in my country, I’ll probably be long dead before corruption/lobby-ism and sheer stupidity of the the government will come to this conclusion. :-(

The CEO is for a good reason an easy target: Show me another company where this level of incompetence is rewarded with steady salary increases?!? (I am afraid you’ll be able to. ;-))

Given your calculation is correct, you are correct that paying the CEO nothing would not make a big difference for Mozillas income. Although it would hopefully open the road for a better CEO.

Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all. If all is a function of the environment and the tides of the market, we can easily replace her with ChatGPT and have the same results w/o wasting money.

At the end of the day, we are exactly where we have been literally a decade ago: Finding a sustainable business model for Mozilla/Firefox. Once more: This core problem of Mozilla/Firefox has been well known for over a decade by now, and again the CEOs only answer is advertisement. Why do we pay money for the bullshit every first semester MBA student would come up with a brainstorming within the first 3 minutes.

Mozilla survives thanks to Google and their (rightful) fears of being outed as a monopoly.

The discussion is always if Mozilla could survive on donations. I do not now if they could. I still think there are a lot of actors with an interest of an independent browser, even whole governments. What I know for sure is, I won’t donate to Mozilla as long as incompetent CEOs are payed.

Are you kidding?

Nah, didn’t mind the meme!

I totally accept that Eclipse doesn’t work for and life is too short to waste it on tooling.

In that sense, good luck with your current & future setups and happy coding! :-)

Eclipse has its share of problems (and outdated UI and workflows), still I’ll happily use it over IntelliJ w/o hesitation.

Funnily enough, a lot of other (Java)Senior developers who tried both are fine with Eclipse, too.

Besides the astroturfing from IDEA which is really annoying, Eclipse integrates far better with standard build tools and is our last descend Open Source IDE (Netbeans effectively being a zombie at this time).

IDEA is already pushing/forcing their own solutions/build tools/etc. to up sell their shit, once Eclipse is gone, there will be no alternative and IDEA/IntelliJ will start the entshittifaction…

People really forgot what a shit show were the 90s, paying lots of money for commercial IDEs.

Look at the shit Apple produces and understand it is not only a function of money.

Amen! One thing which drives me crazy is that most people confuse beginner friendly and user friendly, the two things are absolutely not the same thing. There is nothing wrong with having tools which are beginner friendly, especially for stuff one does once in a while. There is everything wrong with nerving tools which are for pros or even everyday usage: If I use something everyday I have rather an optimization for the mid or long run, than for the first few hours…

TDD as in religion is overrated. TDD done right is IMHO extremely effective.

The problem is, writing good tests is really hard, and I have seen/committed/experienced a lot of bad tests… just the top of my mind problems with TDD done wrong:

• testing the implementation instead the interface
• creating a change detector
• not writing / factoring the tests in a good way
• writing tests / TDD w/o having an overall design for the software

For every non trivial piece of software written w/o TDD, I always saw the same pattern: First few hours/days/weeks, rapid progress compared to TDD, afterwards: hours/days/weeks wasted in debugging, bug fixing etc… and the people can not even catch up with tests if they wanted.

Is TDD always the answer? Of course not, it is a tradeoff like everything else in technology. OTOH I have yet to see a project which benefited from not using TDD by any metric after a few days in.

“WEI can potentially be used to impose restrictions on unlawful activities on the internet, such as downloading YouTube videos and other content, ad blocking, web scraping, etc.”

WTF. Most of these activities are actual lawful in the country I life in. (Especially with adblockers, the content mafia tried to outlaw it and failed in court, several times.)

IMHO we have several really big problems with the web as it is today, which are intertwined:

1. The web (standards) is by far too complicated. If even Microsoft doesn’t have (or isn’t willing) to provide the resources to implement a browser, there are not many players left with the resources and the motivation

2. Google Chrome and Safari are the only game in town. (My main browser is Firefox, but seriously, we have such a small market share that nobody gives a damn)

3. Most people/governments/companies don’t care or don’t understand the problem of the mono culture for browsers

4. The value of the web is everything which is already on the web and that one can access anything with the browser - for this reason, we can only grow in the direction of more complicated while keeping backwards compatibility

5. Besides lip-service to the contrary, our politicians want to control communication and supervise their citizens, so for politicians it is better to have a browser controlled by a company like Google, than a really free web

Given how fundamental important the web is for modern human basic infrastructure, we (as a society) should find a better way to protect our infrastructure, freedom of speech and basic freedoms.

I fully agree about the damage done at universities. I also fully agree about the teaching professors being out of the game too long or never having been at a level which would be worth teaching to other people. A term which I heard from William Kenned first is ‘mechanical sympathy’. IMHO this is the big missing thing in modern CS education. (Ok, add to that the missing parts about proper OOP, proper functional programming and literally anything taught to CS grads but relational/automata theory and mathematics (summary: mathematics) :-P). In the end I wouldn’t trust anyone who cannot write Assembler, C and knows about Compiler Construction to write useful low level code or even tackle C++/Rust.