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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

#131

Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge. "But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests" Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There a…

How much are you willing to pay for a browser?

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

#132
These posts always make me wish that hackernews has a way to block posts from certain users.

These kind of posts always bring out the hateful comments and if I look at their posting history a lot of times they seem to post mostly hateful comments. Call it a filter bubble if you want but I would rather not waste my time trying to convince them they are wrong and would rather be able to block them.

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

#133
post #75

Did anyone find anything in this post about Mozilla refusing to take money from Google? I can’t find it. Mozilla, stop taking money from Google and letting them be the default search engine! Please don’t enable and legitimise surveillance capitalism.

Thanks for the downvotes, I know you don't like the facts, but here they are:

> 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.) [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/11/30/mozilla...

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

#134

"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 just want a web browser Excellent! How much are you planning on contributing?

Already contributing by allowing all the telemetry & data collection and by having unchanged the default search engine (Google)

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

#135
post #5

"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?…

I'm really worried about Mozilla's participation in standards now, WebGPU in particular :/

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

#136

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…

Thing is, Google doesn't try to sell itself otherwise. Mozilla talks a good game about privacy and users-first, but then it goes and does things like Pocket, Mr. Robot, etc. that make it clear it is all just marketing. Edit: Uh, my memory was faulty on this one. See below.

What was the actual, real problem with Pocket? Adding an easily-removed link to the UI didn't leak your private data or otherwise cause problems.

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

#137
post #131

Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge. "But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests" Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There a…

How much are you willing to pay for a browser?

How did people pay for opera back in the days?

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

#138

Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge. "But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests" Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There a…

Thanks for capturing my feelings around this so well. I absolutely love Firefox, but I can’t help but feel Mozilla’s ambitions are hurting them rather than helping them.

Don’t get me wrong; their “distractions” have given the world a lot of nice things (Rust comes to mind). But first and foremost, Mozilla’s mission should be to ensure a great, competitive browser, and they’re losing the competition badly. And imho they are prioritizing their resources badly as well.

The one reason that I don’t donate to Mozilla is simply because I feel that my money will be used for vanity ambitions, rather than to the core product. I wish there was a way to donate to Mozilla and say “only use this money for Firefox, because that’s the mission I support, and I don’t really care about the other 90% of the things you’re doing”.

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

#139
post #75

Did anyone find anything in this post about Mozilla refusing to take money from Google? I can’t find it. Mozilla, stop taking money from Google and letting them be the default search engine! Please don’t enable and legitimise surveillance capitalism.

To do that now would be financial suicide. They have several new services, if they manage to get revenue from them they could survive cutting Google. But not before.

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

#140
post #131

Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge. "But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests" Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There a…

How much are you willing to pay for a browser?

For loyalty to Firefox? Probably $10/month.
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