I'm curious how Mozilla's finances are being impacted by covid.
Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
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Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#102Earlier 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.
Did you mean invasive?
Pocket isn't end to end encrypted. The Reading List it replaced was.
Protesting Pocket by using Chrome makes no sense but integrating Pocket objectively sacrificed user privacy for a revenue stream.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wish Mozilla would distribute their free software the way some museums charge entry. A “suggested donation” of $X. And when I go to download the browser prompt me to either pay the suggested donation or manually change it to $0. I’d gladly pay $10 for Firefox every major update and I’m sure I’m not alone. It’s just not something I really think about very often. The passive asks just aren’t that effective.
In theory it's a nice idea, but it's hard enough to persuade my friends and acquaintances to try Firefox (again, since many of them left between versions 4 through 56). If they visited the website and were asked to make a donation, they'd think Firefox has become commercial software and will leave immediately. This will hurt their market share even more, if anything.
Ubuntu tried that one, and it wasn't very effective.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#104ITT: "I'm fine with Chrome controlling the whole internet, as long as I never again have to read about Mozilla trying to fight racism." The irony of these folks whining about Mozilla's priorities...
Staying neutral lets every company reach the widest audience. Mozilla threw that one out the window though.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#105That'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.
Well, I want to use products from companies that I support. Mozilla is simply pushing too much politics that I strongly disagree with so I cannot support them. Brave is more private and respecting of the user, without the politics. It's all whats good with Mozilla leaving out the bad part. We could have had that in Mozilla today, but because virtue signaling they had to fire Brendan. This was probably the nail that l…
My reason for using Firefox and never trying Brave is the same: I strongly disagree with Brendan Eich's politics. If using Brave means Brendan Eich profits from it then I'll never use it.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#106"Focusing Firefox On Users In order to refocus the Firefox organization on core browser growth through differentiated user experiences, we are reducing investment in some areas such as developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team." So what is the impact on things like Servo/Rust, and the core browser?…
Strange, I can't see that sentence in the post.
It's in the linked internal message, second page:
https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Message-...
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#107It blows my mind that no company is currently able to challenge Chrome. Not even Microsoft or Apple is interested to challenge the status quo.
> It blows my mind that no company is currently able to challenge Chrome.
I think that as developers we could be doing more to help with that. Using Firefox, testing with Firefox, avoiding Blink-only APIs, etc...
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#108Add features to your smaller products (Lockwise, Notes, Monitor, Pocket, etc.) and put them behind a paywall, while keeping the core features free to use.
I'd pay triple the price of Pocket's premium / Mozilla's VPN ($15/month) for a Mozilla/Firefox app pack.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#109It is so refreshing to see an ethical company like mozilla when faced with financial struggle say "We at the top level have slashed our salaries to ensure we can keep paying as many contributors as possible as it is they who make our products great"
I thought I missed the quote when I first read the article, but I did a search now and it came up empty. Was the quote in the article and got taken out, or were you just being sarcastic?
Sorry I thought it would be obvious to anyone reading the article. My hope was that by setting expectations to where they should be, the terribleness of this corporate statement would be more apparent.
The only sacrifice Mitchell Baker admits to is firing people. Somehow the ones that stay are supposed to do more.
There is no statement that firefox should be the best browser out there to encourage more users to switch.
No rallying call against the ad industry which is internet users biggest enemy
All I got out of it is that they want to develop new services as a software substitutes and charge people for it, probably as a subscription.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#110That'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.
> 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. Absolutely. It has to stand on its own feet. Yet the only reason Mozilla is being kept alive is due to Google paying them to be the default search engine as part of a deal which is where the majority of their revenue is from. [0] Funny how their mission in…
Wow.
> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.)