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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

#181

Post by Santosh83 »

The browser space is extremely competitive because it has been driven for decades by corporations seeking to dominate the field, and that naturally leads to Byzantine complexity and high barrier for any competition.

Mozilla really needs to find ways to generate profits and in turn, channel the lion's share of those profits into their browser. But this is a hard proposition when giant corporations give away their browsers for free and even bundle it hard with their operating systems. The unfairness of Mozilla's browser endeavour is stark when you stop to think about it.

Maybe we the collective really do deserve our corporate overlords because we can't be bothered to pay for something when a free version also exists. This not only applies to Firefox but is a big reason why nearly all the top OSS are struggling to reach parity with their commercial counterparts.

How many of us will pay Office/Adobe licenses but if LibreOffice or Gimp ask for payment, we won't? The reason is vendor lock-in and feature-wise inferiority of the open source counterparts, but if no one uses them, then like the proverbial chicken-and-egg, they will never be able to compete, and will only slowly fade away.

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

#182

Post by macspoofing »

takluyver wrote: post #153
macspoofing wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Counterpoint: Firefox is the thing they're best known for, but it's been inexorably losing market share for years to a direct competitor with vastly more financial muscle and access to very prominent advertising space. At the same time, they're dependent on that competitor for most of their revenue. It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on…

>but it's been inexorably losing market share for years to a direct competitor with vastly more financial muscle

If you remember, they gained market-share by competing and beating another direct competitor with vastly more finical muscle.

>It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it.

Have they tried? Why isn't Firefox front-and-center in this blog post. Why wasn't Firefox listed in their five areas of focus?

But if their attitude is that they will never be able to compete with Chrome, maybe they should just adopt CEF and move on to building all those new products they alluded to.

>Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy.

They have one egg, one basket. Firefox is the only thing that makes them relevant. Without Firefox they have nothing. That they have delusions of grandeur is their problem. To me, not having Firefox be the core focus of Mozilla is considerably more risky than trying to figure out new products.

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

#183

Post by stingraycharles »

takluyver wrote: post #175
stingraycharles wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But if they’re not betting on winning market share from Chrome, then what are they doing that’s worth betting on?

From my perspective, the Chrome monoculture is one of the largest threats of the Internet right now, and I don’t see how Mozilla could be relevant without challenging that.

But I guess this goes back to Mozilla the corporation, rather than Mozilla the non-profit org. They want to maintain some form of independence, at the cost of making bit bets.

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

#184

Post by saagarjha »

MattGaiser wrote: post #170
panpanna wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla management is getting paid top dollar, they are trying to act as they deserve it by starting and killing projects they clearly don't understand. I would love to see a small dedicated team concentrated on the browser and led by manager who are not playing SV hotshots.

I can see a lot of the problems being those providing the funding to Mozilla or even how we praise people or judge them successful on here. When is the last time a bug fix rose to the top of Hacker News? When is the last time a cool new library or project rose to the top of Hacker News? Virtually nobody would consider a fixed browser a success and unsurprisingly, nobody wants to do that kind of unrewarded work.

> When is the last time a bug fix rose to the top of Hacker News?

10 months ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21324273

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874139

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20857892

Another fix:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21995055

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

#185

Post by kgraves »

Yoric wrote: post #161
kgraves wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just get Google to fund them, i’m sure they will be glad to write a big cheque.

Apparently, that wasn't sufficient.

They could still work out a way to renew the Mozilla-Google contract, if they are extremely desperate.

I would be against it and prefer them to focus on their own products and strike alternative funding deals with multiple companies like what letsencrypt does and NOT solely rely on one source like Google.

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

#186

Post by 0xffff2 »

frankjr wrote: post #157

> I've been told that a large part of Mozilla's security team has also been laid off, which seems like a big issue especially after Mozilla launched a VPN offering last month. https://twitter.com/campuscodi/status/1293200453736570881

Mozilla VPN is just a rebranding of Mullvad. I doubt the Mozilla security team was involved in any significant way.

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

#188

Post by mishftw »

This means a 1/3 reduction from where they were last year. And now with remote work being the norm, I could see a company like Mozilla preferring that to save further costs.

Their Google deal has not be renewed yet and that has accounted for a lot of their revenue in the past (the article mentions a 90% figure).

I just hope Mozilla Co & Mozilla Foundation survive.

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

#189

Post by kgraves »

Yoric wrote: post #165
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.

So what you're saying is... since Mozilla has cash difficulties, let's get rid of the main income source? Or am I misunderstanding?

YES

I wouldn't do a deal with the devil that is also competing with you. Especially in the name of privacy.

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

#190

Post by kvark »

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?

> If they cannot succeed in making Firefox better

They can make Firefox better, and have been doing that a lot. The problem is - it doesn't make the users to come. Google, Apple, Microsoft - all own platforms that people use, and they heavily push the users towards their own browsers.

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