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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

#141

Post by panpanna »

dblohm7 wrote: post #119
jacquesm wrote: post #95

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…

> standards compatible Yet we are increasingly seeing developers who won't follow those standards. What are we as developers going to do about that?

This was discussed recently in another post and the answer I got was basically "until Google and Apple force us we have no obligation to change anything"

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

#142

Post by mrweasel »

dblohm7 wrote: post #80
marmshallow wrote: post #55

If this makes you sad or pissed off, the best thing you can do is donate. I just donated for $15 for the first time. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

While donating to Mozilla Foundation is a great cause [1], none of those funds go to funding Mozilla Corporation, and thus Firefox. If you want your funds to go toward MoCo (and thus Firefox development), your best bet is to subscribe to Mozilla VPN or Pocket Premium. [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/

That’t kinda stupid to be honest. Just charge me $50 for Firefox... you know what make it $100 per year and I will pay, just to avoid Chrome.

I don’t know how many of us are out there, but a large number of people don’t mind paying for the tools they rely on. I have co-worker who pay $100+ to get the email client they want.

How such a payment scheme would work with an open source project I don’t know, but find a way for me to direct payments to Firefox.

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

#143

Post by kgraves »

soundnote wrote: post #139
kgraves wrote: 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.

> They have several new services,

Please name these revenue generating services from Mozilla.

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

kvark wrote: post #129
jacquesm wrote: post #95

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…

Firefox is the product of Mozilla mission. But mission is larger than just a browser. I'd love to see it extend to trusted email services and search engines, for example, but this requires a lot of engineering. If I understand this right, Mozilla tried to focus on FF only, and that didn't pay back. User base is still declining (in relative numbers), revenue stream gets narrower. So Mozilla is trying to transform itse…

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by panpanna »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #83
calvinmorrison wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How many people do you think a browser's team + all components + support + management + marketing + finances need? Chromium alone has 1700+ contributors ( https://github.com/chromium/chromium ), Firefox has hundreds of "core contributors" ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community#Core_Contributor ) and many more beyond those.

But what percentage of those 1000 are developers working on the browser?

Contributors can be external people including random guy fixing a typo.

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

#146

Post by stingraycharles »

kvark wrote: post #129
jacquesm wrote: post #95

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…

Firefox is the product of Mozilla mission. But mission is larger than just a browser. I'd love to see it extend to trusted email services and search engines, for example, but this requires a lot of engineering. If I understand this right, Mozilla tried to focus on FF only, and that didn't pay back. User base is still declining (in relative numbers), revenue stream gets narrower. So Mozilla is trying to transform itse…

If they cannot succeed in making Firefox better, the problem is bigger than I thought. So basically, they’ll try to gain income from other sources, because they have given up on increasing the Firefox market share, and anticipate losing the revenue that comes with it?

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

#147

Post by Spivak »

shock wrote: post #124
Spivak wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do get that the total compensation for 250 FTE's is probably in the neighborhood of $25 million/yr. She gets paid about $1m/yr which includes performance incentives. So if she just gave up her whole salary she would only have to fire 96% of the people let go today. C suite members raking in high salaries is the tiniest most insignificant issue when it comes to a large orgs finances. In most large orgs if C sites…

You do get that the CEO has the most power in directing where the company goes and the CEO is directly reponsible, at least in part, for the current situation Mozilla is in. As a result I think the CEO should have been the first to suffer the consequences of the reality they were (partly) responsible for creating, before the first employee would have been impacted. The way I see it, the employees that had almost no c…

Right but this makes no sense except as some weird punishment thing. Like it seems it would be the same to you if they still fired all 250 employees but also cut the CEOs salary as a slap on the wrist.

Like this stance is crazy if you apply it to anyone but the CEO. Can you imagine if you got punished for writing bad code or not making a project deadline by having your salary cut?

Regardless of whether you think she's doing a good job as the CEO, she's still doing her job and deserves to be paid. Your just asking for CEOs to be company whipping boys.

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

#148

Post by shock »

soundnote wrote: post #139
kgraves wrote: 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.

I present to you the Debian Foundation as a counter example. I posit they are surviving just fine without a contract with Google.

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

#149

Post by neltnerb »

panpanna wrote: post #141
dblohm7 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> standards compatible Yet we are increasingly seeing developers who won't follow those standards. What are we as developers going to do about that?

This was discussed recently in another post and the answer I got was basically "until Google and Apple force us we have no obligation to change anything"

I suppose even then they won't be obligated to do anything at all... I guess there's no way for them to really notice how many people don't even go to the trouble of making their websites load... that's what I observe tech newbies do rather than switch browser from whatever I installed.

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

#150

Post by Barrin92 »

kvark wrote: 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.

>it needs products that can pay the bills

the alternative is cutting the bills down somewhat. They made about 500 million in revenue in 2018, that's a healthy pile of cash.

They've got a pretty huge engineering team and still development on their products is painfully slow. Just take the password manager they've been offering, it can't even import or export passwords and it misses half of the features any of the free competitors have.

Adding even more stuff on top of it doesn't really give me a lot of confidence.

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