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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

#171

Post by rebelwebmaster »

macspoofing wrote: post #73
ForHackernews wrote: post #31

ITT: "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...

Their priorities are out of wack. Firefox is their golden goose. It's the thing that gives them clout and revenue. Their job is to increase adoption because increased adoption means more clout and more revenue. You do that by constantly reinvesting in the platform and making it your core singular focus, especially performance and tooling (because developers are a big driver for browser adoption). Where is the Firefox…

Firefox Quantum was a pretty significant investment in Firefox. It made literally zero impact on their market share decline.

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

#172

Post by gpanders »

jccalhoun wrote: post #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.

Seems like something you could do manually with Tampermonkey or something similar.

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

#173

Post by alsdkfjkqjwer »

Vinnl wrote: post #166
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…

> Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. But they did that, and now Firefox market share is almost negligible because it wasn't the default browser on mobile OS's. For example, I'm sceptical about the potential reach of XR, but if it grows big, it is vital that Firefox plays a bigger role there, instead of everybody being reliant on apps and Chrome once again.

> Firefox market share is almost negligible because it wasn't the default browser on mobile OS's

"Working on the browser" includes allying with ACLU/EFF/etc to sue google/apple, just like Google itself sued microsoft for the very same reason in the 90s.

That's the whole point of having an "ecosystem" corporation like mozilla, instead of a few loose devs like most open source projects!

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

#174

Post by drosan »

They're already knee-deep in some ideology bullshit (instead of working on actual browser that people want to use) and now they cover laying off 250 people with corporate garbage talks.

I really hope that Firefox has a future, but that kind of events make me thing otherwise.

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

#175

Post by takluyver »

stingraycharles wrote: post #146
kvark wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think they've given up on it - they're still making pretty big technical changes. But they would be daft to bet that they will somehow manage to win back significant market share from Chrome, given the resources Google can put into it.

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

#176

Post by gfodor »

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…

A common refrain, but is anything but obvious. Focusing on the browser could be a losing strategy. I'd argue it probably is. The trajectory is terrible: the tech is being commoditized (WebKit, Chromium) and the market share picture is bleak. The opportunity cost is huge: maintaining a web engine, one which basically just tries to keep up with the others put out by Google et al, takes armies of people that could perhaps otherwise be leveraged elsewhere towards creating something disruptive which could carry Mozilla forward into the future. The entire revenue model is held up by, of all companies, Google. And that model is backed up by market share which is going down continuously, is under attack on all sides, and is morally compromised by being powered by by ads. The biggest counterincentive to Google pulling the plug isn't one of ending a transaction of mutual value exchange, but potential legal impact by regulators. Not exactly the most robust business model.

When companies struggle with a failing product, the answer usually is to evolve. Not to double down on what has (thankfully for us) worked for several decades but now is starting to fail systemically.

What you're saying here presumes to be the answer to the most important question Mozilla is struggling with: in 10 years, is a browser-focused Mozilla viable? Nobody knows the answer to this, there are strong reasons to think the answer is a strong "No." So stop pretending like you know the answer.

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

#177

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Vinnl wrote: post #166
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…

> Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. But they did that, and now Firefox market share is almost negligible because it wasn't the default browser on mobile OS's. For example, I'm sceptical about the potential reach of XR, but if it grows big, it is vital that Firefox plays a bigger role there, instead of everybody being reliant on apps and Chrome once again.

> But they did that, and now Firefox market share is almost negligible because it wasn't the default browser on mobile OS's.

Firefox has never been a default browser on any OS, mobile or otherwise, and I don't see how that could ever change short of Firefox developing their own OS. Which is in fact something they tried a while back for mobile, and it didn't go so well.

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

#179

Post by takluyver »

burkaman wrote: post #156
eamsen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much are you willing to pay for a browser?

I would pay $100 or $5/month or something for Firefox. I don't really understand why they don't have a pay-if-you-want model. I donate to nonprofit news organizations I read even though I can get their news for free, and I pay for a couple Android apps I want to support even though the "premium" versions don't have any meaningful extra features. I'm sure they wouldn't get enough revenue to replace Google's support, b…

They do take donations: https://donate.mozilla.org/

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

#180

Post by BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #91
esarbe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a browsers requires developers, developers cost money. Since not enough people are donating, they have to figure out how to make money otherwise.

Yup; Google / Chrome, Apple / Safari + webkit, and Microsoft / Edge get away with it because their browser is not their product, it's an extra. For Google its original intent was to make the internet faster so that people would see more ads. Firefox needs a company behind it whose income is not tied to the browser. I don't believe you can monetize a browser, not without doing some dodgy shit like forcing search engin…

So that leaves us with FB or Netflix.
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