They should license their UI framework.
Isn’t it all js/html? Who would pay for it when electron is free.
You still need to render that js/html with something. Chromium based on skia. IIRC Firefox was based on it as well, but migrated from it.
Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#412>Mozilla will initially focus on products such as Pocket, its VPN service, its VR chatroom Hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools.
"It's not working, so let's fire everyone else and do it some more!"
Mozilla is disgrace to the values it was founded upon. Get your shit together already.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not wrong, but why do you suspect the "something people won't like" is anything more than this massive layoff?
Section 5: " New focus on economics. Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges. " A kind reading would be that they'll try to move to a consultancy or subscription based model, like Red Hat. An unkind reading is that they will make portions of their products and code proprietary and charge…
I think it's pretty obvious they mean they (like Brave) want to participate in building an Internet where you can monetize not using ads.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is a losing strategy because this is a rearguard action. There are only losing strategies, nothing will turn Mozilla around to be some kind of powerhouse besides what it already is. And that's fine . It doesn't need to be the next singing, dancing platform with bells and whistles. It's a tool. It should do one thing and do that one thing well. FireFox is not a failing product, it is the only product they have…
I loved Firefox Send and really hope they can find a way to address the malware problem [1]. It was the only large file sharing service I fully trusted both because of the encrypted zero-knowledge aspect of the system and the organization behind it; I used it several times a month personally and told others about it. To me it was a "win" under the Mozilla/FF brand. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-f…
I like https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole as an alternative.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: Apple when Jobs came back. Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly. It's very hard to do psychologically, though. IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be pr…
I think one challenge is a lot of Mozilla's users see Mozilla as a browser company, whereas Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company. The users may be right. Your Apple analogy is a tough one - if Apple had just stayed focused on PCs, and not the higher level mission of the company around comput-ing-, they would have not invented new kinds of computers. Focus makes sense, once you've locked in on something. The tri…
> I think one challenge is a lot of Mozilla's users see Mozilla as a browser company, whereas Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company.
Spot on. In fact, I think that without FireFox Mozilla might as well be dead, even if it survives as a legal entity and employs people. That's it's whole reason for existence as far as I'm concerned.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#416So this affects rust-lang too I guess ? I found it strange that people started trusting a language with no open standard and one implementation.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#417Sounds like Servo, the next-generation browser engine that brought the world Rust, is one of the teams being destaffed: https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960
Servo showed there was plenty of room for browser perf beyond optimizing JS engines
Mozilla getting rid of their main product's most relevant R&D makes me fear they'll eventually announce Firefox replacing its internals with chromium
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#418I find this sad, Mozilla is really an advocate for the open web and web standards. Since web browsers are free, they can't make much. They might be able to sell something like Thunderbird; if they improve it and make it more into a service, like Hey! for example. They could also try the sponsorship model that a lot of open source projects are doing. They already have sponsors, but maybe sponsors for their open source…
If downsizing the organization and bringing some revenue in from a VPN service helps them be less financially beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive. I don't know that they would need to sell Thunderbird as a whole bundled product/service like Hey; they could launch a paid email service (in the "it's not Gmail" market occupied by Proton, FastMail, Posteo, etc.) and use that money for work on Thunderbird. N…
>beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive
For the Mozilla Management, not the Company itself.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#419This makes me feel worried. I have come to rely on Firefox as the antidote to Google's data collection machine and it would be unfortunate if Firefox also goes the same way with this new focus.
You may wish to consider Brave. https://brave.com/
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you feel that it is better to do many things and fail at all of them than it would be to do one thing and succeed at that because that one thing has no meaning in the world that would result? All those other things that Mozilla has done to date have not moved the needle for me even a little bit. But the browser is something that touches me every day, for multiple hours of the day. Maybe this is just my personal pe…
> So you feel that it is better to do many things and fail at all of them than it would be to do one thing and succeed at that because that one thing has no meaning in the world that would result? I feel it is better to do many things in the hopes that one or more of them succeed, than it is to succeed at a meaningless task. The former takes courage, the latter can be interpreted as cowardice. > All those other thing…
Ok. I'm not an idealist. I like my browser, would like to keep it, even if that means that some of Mozilla's loftier goals will not be reached. Because once the browser battle is over those goals will be even further from reach.
So I think we want the same thing in the longer term, just disagree about what the order of execution is.