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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#291

Post by flexd »

takeda wrote: post #270
pier25 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I don't know. I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev tools are great, it's simply not as polished as the competition. For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS. It also misses important features such as multil…

> It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO. Really? Do you learn a new language every day? I installed languages that I am interested years ago and forgot about it until you mentioned it.

A lot of us are bi-lingual. English is not my first language, so being able to use spell checking for my native language and English without things breaking is important to me.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#292

Post by hinkley »

icebraining wrote: post #241
kleer001 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly that kind of work ethic (and honor) is not present enough in the west.

Nonsense, there have been multiple cases in the west, e.g. John Chambers at Cisco, Michael Kneeland at United Rentals, Dan Price at Gravity Payments, Nicholas Woodman at GoPro.

Maybe it's like when a store has 20% off sale a couple weeks after they raised their prices 10%. Yeah, it's still a sale, it's just not as big of a price cut as you're making it out to be.

Raise your salary, sock some money away, then take a big public paycut now that your house is paid off.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#293

Post by pastor_elm »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #185
dman wrote: post #56

Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

It's crazy how much FF's marketshare has dropped. It's such a great browser.

Firefox Focus too.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#294

Post by summerlight »

saagarjha wrote: post #198
summerlight wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that Chrome team have thousands of engineers, designers and PMs (which is a pretty reasonable number as a modern browser is comparable to OS), I expect them to spend more than a billion each year. Mozilla is really in short of resources.

Other browsers do just fine with significantly fewer engineers.

And almost all of them gave up developing their own engine except Apple and Mozilla?

FYI, WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple (which would be roughly similar to Blink). And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase. Thus Apple is investing a comparable amount of engineering resource into Safari. Where are "Other browsers"?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#295

Post by mattlondon »

lizzard wrote: post #230

Well, it's been a truly amazing place to work, and I've enjoyed it so much, right up until being laid off today. Really the smartest and coolest engineers I've ever known and the best community! I have had my hand in shipping every version of Firefox since around version 30 and it's been great. Especially working in such an open environment. Onward to the next adventure.

Sorry to hear you were laid off today.

Good luck with your next adventure and thanks for your work with Firefox!

Yours,

An appreciative Firefox user.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#296

Post by musicale »

> “You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen

I don't want subscription garbage, and I don't want Firefox advertising stuff to me.

However, I have no idea how I'd try to fund Mozilla when most of their work is on a product that they give away for free.

I can't imagine that grants from foundations or the government could cover their budget, and I can't really see them being amazingly successful with apps (although I would pay for a bulletproof, high quality ad blocker for iPhone) or hardware (although Purism's phones and laptops seem kind of in Mozilla's ballpark, I doubt they are making much money.) Nobody wants to pay for web services, and it's hard to compete with the many cloud incumbents, so those don't really seem like a good options either. Running a consulting business to fund the browser doesn't seem like a winning idea. Development tools seem to be free from the likes of {Microsoft, Apple, Google} as well, so that doesn't seem like a great business. I can't imagine many people paying for Rust or webasm tools either. Perhaps web game development tools or platforms? Anyway, it's a hard problem.

So HN, does anyone have any actual, serious, good ideas on how Mozilla can make money and keep delivering a good Firefox browser (and Rust, webasm, etc.) for free?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#297

Post by pier25 »

takeda wrote: post #270
pier25 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I don't know. I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev tools are great, it's simply not as polished as the competition. For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS. It also misses important features such as multil…

> It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO. Really? Do you learn a new language every day? I installed languages that I am interested years ago and forgot about it until you mentioned it.

Yeah but you don't have spell checking on all these languages unless you manually switch between those.

I write in 4 languages so it's quite annoying to do that every time. In Chrome there is multilingual spell checking even when you mix languages in the same sentence.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#298

Post by leeoniya »

pastor_elm wrote: post #289
dman wrote: post #56

Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

Most stats I see put Firefox market share at around 5%. Am I reading the chart wrong?

taking into account mobile browser traffic (50% of all traffic)...in the US it's about half that based on our visitors. (home remodeling industry / DIY, e-commerce).

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#299

Post by hinkley »

coldtea wrote: post #141
throwawaypa123 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you are joking. If someone said I'll do full-stack dev for 150k instead 400k at google, how would you take that question?

If the position wasn't that challenging to begin with, like this one, I'd hire them!

You know those meetings you hate? Quadruple them, add more customers and some unsavory financiers. Then sprinkle it with a bunch of business trips where you never get to see the city.

Think about that the next time you're thinking how much of a paycut you'd be willing to take if it meant you didn't have to talk to that guy every week.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#300

Post by summerlight »

saagarjha wrote: post #233
simias wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like who for instance? Basically only Blink, WebKit and Gecko are usable non-toy web engines these days, and they're all backed by big companies with deep pockets and many engineers. Opera's long gone, now it's a chromium fork. Internet Explorer is gone, now MS uses a chromium fork. The hype new browsers like Brave and Vivaldi are just chromium under the hood. It's like the difference between making a Linux distro an…

I am responding specifically to the claim that Mozilla is short on resources because Google has a thousand people working on Chrome.

Google and Mozilla are competing in the browser market so it's pretty reasonable to compare their investments. I don't understand your reasoning here.
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