Wow. I remember watching this fifteen years ago and seeing that young kid (Stuart Parmenter) join Netscape right out of high school and thinking, "Don't do it!". I, too, joined the industry early and by 2000, I'd pissed away the first half of my twenties pulling all-nighters working at tech startups while the rest of my friends were partying at college or backpacking around Europe.<p>Recently, I'd read something about Mozilla and wonder whatever happened to that kid. Well, looks like he's all grown up now. I'm impressed to see that he spent so many years with Mozilla. I wonder if he has any regrets at starting so young.<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartparmenter" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartparmenter</a>
That was really cool. Thanks for posting.<p>I think like a lot of you I probably can't watch a documentary without feeling "omg that guy was biased!" but I felt like they were pretty even-handed here.<p><pre><code> - long hours
- stock options are a lottery, a stupid tax
- "and I won the lottery"
- the countdown timer at the open-source launch, the last minute typo of domain name, the person who observed it and directed the fix - that was awesome
- the realistic portrayal of burnout and long hours
- the sale to the giant evil internet corporation
- the original reply to jwz's "AOL is buying us and here's why its not so bad" mozilla.org post
</code></pre>
I use Mozilla (Firefox) as my "daily driver". At work I recently had to switch to Chrome because they offer a USB/serial device API through extensions. If Firefox did too I'd maybe work overtime to port that shit over because I love Mozilla. What an organization.<p>I feel bad because these guys did waste a bunch of their time building a fucking web browser. But maybe, just maybe, the web would suck a lot less without mozilla.org and their free codebase. And then, I did start to get the idea, "hmmm, maybe it'd be good to write HTTP again... this time with sessions baked in..." and wander off into "Can I implement that?" territory.
This documentary glorifies the insane practice of working unreasonably long hours to meet a self-imposed deadline. What bad things would have happened if the Mozilla release date had just been pushed back? Probably nothing. And maybe the quality of that initial release would have been better, and the people working on it wouldn't be burnt out afterward.
Look closely and you'll see Don Melton ("Gramps") who was responsible for the Mac port at the time, then went to Eazel, then to Apple where he managed Safari from its creation. He's now retired from Apple and does some entertaining podcasts and speaking.
Just FYI for everyone... Andy Baio created a fully annotated version of this documentary on Viddler <a href="http://www.viddler.com/v/90571b61" rel="nofollow">http://www.viddler.com/v/90571b61</a>
It Mozilla on an upswing or a decline since the Brendan Eich / Firefox OS stuff happened?<p>They're kind of shifting more from technology into politics. I heard they were cutting employees and divisions a lot.<p>I know former employees have to sign a waiver not to talk about their layoff, but why hasn't Mozilla's layoffs gotten any press, but startups do?<p><a href="http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm</a> gives a clue.