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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

#301

Post by floatingatoll »

Santosh83 wrote: post #290
dblohm7 wrote: post #258

[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…

I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. The tragedy…

What they want is for {product X} to solely focus on their needs {set Y}, disregarding everyone else's needs that conflict.

This selfishness is expressed for lots of things, not just Mozilla, but things like Ubuntu and Homebrew too.

I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".

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

#302

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pjmlp wrote: post #35
giancarlostoro wrote: post #20

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…

I love how those people complain about telemetry and other stuff while most likely typing those complains from a laptop running ChromeOS.

So Firefox should aim to only be marginally better than Chrome, degrading itself along the way?

Firefox: 'I know we used to do cool stuff but Google rips it's users a new one on the regular so we need to be more shitty too, what're they going to do leave and use Chrome, lolz' /probably

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

#303

Post by foobiekr »

shock wrote: post #78
fsflover wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, please make a monthly donation to Mozilla if you can. You will contribute to saving the world. https://donate.mozilla.org/

I wonder how many more people would donate if they knew the donation would be spent on making Firefox better and not on political activism.

I hate to say it, but this is one of the reasons I stopped donating. Mozilla was getting a bit like EFF-lite and I've had enough of the EFF's non-mission nonsense as well.

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

#304

Post by dblohm7 »

DivisionSol wrote: post #293
Santosh83 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. The tragedy…

How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.) I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.

It would also help MoCo funding simply if more people used Firefox.

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

#305

Post by insin »

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.

I feel the same, so I'm currently adding this feature to my HN Comments Owl user script/extension:

https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/issues/2

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

#306

Post by DivisionSol »

dblohm7 wrote: post #304
DivisionSol wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.) I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.

It would also help MoCo funding simply if more people used Firefox.

I’m just curious as to why. Bigger market share == bigger marketing/advertising share, specifically? Or something else?

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

#307

Post by pbhjpbhj »

shock wrote: post #78
fsflover wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, please make a monthly donation to Mozilla if you can. You will contribute to saving the world. https://donate.mozilla.org/

I wonder how many more people would donate if they knew the donation would be spent on making Firefox better and not on political activism.

I'm not sure why anyone would donate to a company paying an exec a $2.5M salary. They're exploiting donors.

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

#308

Post by Blake_Emigro »

DCKing wrote: post #249
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…

> Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. This is short term thinking. A slightly better Firefox tomorrow is nice I guess, buy I care way more about being able to use Firefox in 2030, or 2040. Making a browser is not looking like a business model that is going to make you last forever - not when Google is your competition. Their business model already depends on…

The only 10X browser improvement that can be made these days is if it cuts RAM use by 1/2 compared to the others, (and isn't tied to crypto). I would pay for this!

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

#309

Post by blihp »

camgunz wrote: post #269
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…

I'm pretty ignorant about how they monetize Firefox, but isn't it pretty hard? The attempts I (think I) know of are selling the search box, putting some ads on the home/start page, and that mr. robot ad thing. I'm skeptical FF alone could fund Mozilla's mission to build an open, free web, and doubly skeptical when you consider its adversaries (Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, heavy hitters for sure).

Selling the search box brings in on the order of hundreds of millions a year. This alone puts them in a singularly unique category of 'well funded' open source software. Granted, their 3-year billion dollar deal may have been the high water mark (edit: it wasn't, revenues have increased since then), but a lot of valuable work can be funded with even $100 or $50 million a year. Sure, they need to constantly be on the lookout for alternate revenue streams should their primary dry up but a lot of the things they've been trying have been contrary to their users interests and marginal at best. (i.e. if they become the thing that many of their users flocked to Firefox to get away from, what is the point of its existence?)

The problem was/is, they take the money their primary product brings in and invest it into some arguably bad, or at least irrelevant, ideas rather than just reinvesting most of it into Firefox and services consistent with what Firefox represents to users. Part of the reason Firefox lost so much market share was that for several years it had been seriously neglected (presumably so that Mozilla could focus on those arguably bad ideas) while the competition continued to improve. (hint: the #1 metric is performance) They seem more interested in playing the role of a nonprofit quasi-startup and social issues advocate than maintainer of the most viable and valuable open source browser.

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

#310

Post by godshatter »

gfodor wrote: post #176
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 perha…

> the tech is being commoditized (WebKit, Chromium)

An aside from the discussion at hand: is it possible to repackage Gecko so that it uses the same API calls that WebKit uses, basically translating from WebKit calls to Gecko calls? The problem with WebKit and Chromium is that all new browsers are going that direction and Gecko is being left behind. This isn't good for the web as a whole. A version of the Gecko API that could be a drop-in replacement for WebKit would be very helpful here, it seems to me.

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