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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kills me is when people say they use Chrome cause they don't trust Mozilla cause they embedded Pocket, but like Chrome is literally shoved with a million Google bits, even Chromium (the open source variant of Google Chrome which is the proprietary variant almost everyone installs) has Google crapware at a much larger scale. Mozilla's Firefox still feels like the lesser of the two evils. Edit: Added clarification…

Well i think Mozilla made very clear in the past that they did all they can to avoid Pocket to be evasive, and they made it to respect your privacy, in case you choose to use it. Of course you can always turn it off on your Firefox and never come across it again.

I actively enjoy the Pocket integration, and I especially appreciate that it's suggesting things locally.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#34
post #3

Seeing Mozilla burn fills my heart with joy. Maybe they will be forced to be an actual software dev company instead of a political activist group. But even in this post they had to shove in 'racism' in the headline.

That seems a little extreme. You'd prefer Google/Chromium to be a complete monopoly because you don't like the political views of the company that develops Firefox?

On the contrary. I want FF to succeed and reclaim its rightful throne. But that's not going to happen with the current hyper-politicized Mozilla

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#35
post #2

That's the last call for anybody who thinks "it's good that Mozilla exists, and its mission is important, but I'm still using Chrome and derivatives". Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.

What kills me is when people say they use Chrome cause they don't trust Mozilla cause they embedded Pocket, but like Chrome is literally shoved with a million Google bits, even Chromium (the open source variant of Google Chrome which is the proprietary variant almost everyone installs) has Google crapware at a much larger scale. Mozilla's Firefox still feels like the lesser of the two evils. Edit: Added clarification…

I love how those people complain about telemetry and other stuff while most likely typing those complains from a laptop running ChromeOS.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#36

Are we now stuck with this vacuous corporate virtue signalling forever, or just until the globalist/leftist/whatever-ists finally achieve the absolute tyranny they seem to be seeking?

Yes they could have gone with a much clearer message: "People still aren't using Firefox much, so we've had to lay off part of our workforce. However we have lots of great technology almost ready so expect that to change soon" sort of thing.

Instead: In these COVID times, COVID COVID unprecedented COVID systemic racism. COVID. Btw we fired 250 people. Uncertain times, COVID.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#37
post #7

250 people, roughly 25% of the company, were laid off today. This is on top of the 70 laid off in January (discussion of that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737 )

Why Mozilla has almost 1,000 employees blows my mind. Isn't this an project for an open source web browser?

Not really. It's an organization dedicated to promoting lofty ideals for the Internet as a whole. It was pretty cool while it lasted.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#38

"New focus on economics": It was bad enough seeing terrible clickbait in the "Recommended by Pocket" section displayed on every new tab. Now I have to go into settings to opt-out of Sponsored Stories so I don't have to see ads for Honey. All to fund the so-called "internet activist movement"? I just want a web browser, not an ideology.

I'm totally with you on "Recommended by Pocket" thing, it's very sad. But I think you are confusing Mozilla with something it's not.

Mozilla is not a software company today that tries to be an internet activist. Mozilla is an activist company that also happens to develop software to prove their point. So no, it's not just about the web browser.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#39
post #4
post #2

That's the last call for anybody who thinks "it's good that Mozilla exists, and its mission is important, but I'm still using Chrome and derivatives". Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.

Also, please make a monthly donation to Mozilla if you can. You will contribute to saving the world. https://donate.mozilla.org/

Indeed, I do an occasional one every now and then, also for Thunderbird.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#40

This has wayyy too much corporate doublespeak in it. I try not to be negative on companies with a good mission, but this fluff-filled announcement tells my spidey senses that they're about to do something that people won't like.

It's right there at the bottom :

> Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges.

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