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Comment Re:Not denying something is different from forcing (Score 2) 406

We at Mozilla do not regard popularity as an end in itself. Instead, we regard it as an essential part of our strategy for executing on our mission. The amount of influence we have to make the Internet better is, in many spheres, proportional to Firefox market share.

As to whether we'd lose users due to Netflix, Hulu etc eventually not working in Firefox ... nobody seriously doubts this.

Brad Kuhn misquotes Mitchell. She did not say "an approach", she said "MozillaÃ(TM)s fundamental approach".

Comment Re:Fantastic Google Chrome marketing (Score 1) 204

Certainly, in hindsight, it was a mistake to promote Brendan to CEO. But without hindsight, very few people can honestly say they saw this coming. Before this blew up, no-one was openly saying "OK, no-one on the pro-Prop-8 donation list can be a CEO in California now unless they publicly repent or the company is willing to take major damage". In fact AFAICT a large majority of people, even in California, were surprised and somewhat horrified to find out that's the case.

Comment Re:Fantastic Google Chrome marketing (Score 4, Insightful) 204

We did not "stand by and watch". Many Mozilla staff made public statements supporting Brendan as CEO, including (courageously) many LGBT Mozilla staff. Many more publicly supported Brendan than publicly opposed him. The media of course focused on his opponents because "Mozilla employees call for CEO to step down" gets more clicks than "Mozilla employees support CEO".

Maybe we could have done more. At the time the firestorm was hot enough that it was unclear whether speaking out (and what sort of speaking out) would help. Brendan's resignation came as a great surprise to almost everyone at Mozilla, including me, and up to then I honestly thought simply saying nothing and letting the controversy blow itself out was going to work and was the best course of action.

To all the people who are shouting about "free speech" now: did you speak up to support Mozilla while we were defending Brendan as CEO? If not, why are you more enthusiastic about bashing us now than you were about supporting us back then?

Comment Re:Sadly, sounds like I was right (Score 1) 204

That is totally absurd. If the board didn't want Brendan to be CEO, they wouldn't have appointed him in the first place!

The evidence is clear that the board, and almost everyone else at Mozilla, wanted Brendan as CEO. Then came the protests, the social media firestorm, and the boycotts, and he stepped down (and was not "kicked out").

If you believe differently from what's indicated by the observable facts and official statements, produce some evidence. No-one has so far.

Comment Re:The Re-Hate Campaign (Score 1) 1116

Those of us at Mozilla who haven't quit over this --- which is, as far as I know, all of us --- believe that pursuing our mission of the open Web is more important than quitting to express our disgust. And I think Brendan believes that too.

Sticking with Mozilla for the sake of our mission, in the face of all this turmoil, requires great strength of character, and I am proud to say that Mozillians have been demonstrating that in spades. Making angry comments on the Internet, on the other hand, requires no strength of character at all.

Comment Re:CSS variables? (Score 3, Informative) 256

CSS Variables are actually better described as CSS Custom Properties. They aren't just SASS-style global macros, they're far more powerful. Different elements can have different values for the same custom property, and custom property values set on an element are inherited by its descendants, respecting dynamic DOM changes etc. Custom property values can be set dynamically by scripts and those changes are of course automatically inherited.

Comment "Isolate from the Internet" is hard (Score 2) 245

Air-gap alone is not enough. Stuxnet travelled via USB sticks. And if your hardware (or anything connected to it) has a wireless interface on it (Bluetooth, Wifi, etc), you have a problem ... an operator might bring a hacked phone within range, for example.

Simplifying the hardware down to fixed-function IC or analog reduces the attack surface much more than attempts to isolate the hardware from the Internet.

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