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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

#431

Post by blihp »

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…

You get flogged for things for-profit companies don't because Mozilla claims the moral high ground and then leaves something to be desired in its actions and results. The rather dodgy non-profit/for-profit hybrid while effective from a business standpoint, doesn't help your cause: while originally presented as the for-profit serving the non-profit, the reality appears to be the other way around.

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

#432

Post by segphault »

Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior.

In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't hills worth dying on. And now, because Mozilla didn't choose a hill to die on, they are going to die on no hill at all.

When they aren't the browser that is standing up for interoperability and the freedom and privacy of their users, they have no way to differentiate themselves. Firefox is just another browser, and it's one that is architecturally dated and under-resourced compared to its rivals.

I had assumed that when Mozilla had nothing left to lose as Firefox marketshare crashed, they would go back to being the scrappy underdog who advocates for the right thing. The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen.

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

#433

Post by crazypython »

lenkite wrote: post #416

So this affects rust-lang too I guess ? I found it strange that people started trusting a language with no open standard and one implementation.

Dlang has three implementations, one front-end, and a specification you can learn in a day. https://dlang.org/spec/statement.html

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

#434

Post by bogomipz »

zobzu wrote: post #376

Mozilla 2010: "join us, don't work for the man, work for mankind!" (this was their actual slogan) Mozilla 2020: "well actually, work for the man" (or woman in this case) Sadly, even with Mozilla Foundation getting 40M in donations they need the Corporation to pay the bills (including Mitchell Baker's 2.5M/y salary) The fact that this makes it less likely Firefox continues to be competition for Chrome is bad news for…

>"Sadly, even with Mozilla Foundation getting 40M in donations they need the Corporation to pay the bills (including Mitchell Baker's 2.5M/y salary)"

I remember a headline in 2006 that Mitchel Baker's salary at Mozilla was $500k which I thought was a lot for non-profit but her salary has increased 5X since then? Based on what exactly? I understand the need to pay competitive wages but $2.5 million when the organization is in such a state that you are laying off a significant chunk of your workforce? Is she giving up any salary?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12link.html

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

#436

Post by giomasce »

prophesi wrote: post #372
solarkraft wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they may eventually be able to remove Google as Firefox's default search engine IIRC the financial woes are precisely because the contract with Google is running out. Aren't they?

That's news to me. Their contract has been consistently renewed for years, and I'd imagine that would give Google some pretty bad PR if they didn't.

Possibly. But Google gets the bad PR and stays in the dominant position anyway, while Firefox more or less disappears. I don't say Google necessarily wants to be evil towards Firefox, but in their position it is enough to not care.

Also, even if the contract is renewed, the number could be smaller.

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

#437

Post by jldugger »

tyrankh wrote: post #401
echelon wrote: post #352

They were doing fine until Chrome ate up all the market share. Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins that support adblocking. Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse.

> They were doing fine until Chrome ate up all the market share. Like, 10+ years ago...? > Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse. What in the heck are you talking about. Google doesn't directly make money from Chrome - it's free! In fact, Mozilla's bills are being paid in large by Google paying for them to use google.com as the default browser. Mozilla has always struggled to make money…

> What in the heck are you talking about. Google doesn't directly make money from Chrome - it's free!

I appreciate the breath of fresh air Chrome brought in when it entered the market but: every percentage point Chrome takes in the market is a dollar Google doesn't have to pay for search traffic acquisition. Google absolutely profits from the chrome userbase. In the same manner, Android is valuable as a means of avoiding paying Apple for defaults on iOS.

Chrome has always represented a threat to Mozilla's business model, even though it was seemingly more and more profitable with less and less market share (shades of "The Producers"). It'll be interesting to see how 2021 shakes out; Yahoo! outbidding Google for default search engine momentarily put to rest the idea that Mozilla was an antimonopoly figleaf funded by Google. However, the minute Mozilla legally could, they flipped back to Google, and, frankly, that undercuts their bargaining position with Google. And with Yahoo.

> It was faster than all the competitors at the time - including firefox - and had much better word-of-mouth traction. Firefox always had a "techie expert" connotation back in the day, and it bit them in the butt when it came to the average joe deciding which browser to use.

Given how strongly Mozilla's fate is tied to market share, it seems like they should be leaning harder on advertising. I'm told Mozilla has a huge marketing department but IDK what they do TBH.

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

#438

Post by dblohm7 »

blihp wrote: post #431
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…

You get flogged for things for-profit companies don't because Mozilla claims the moral high ground and then leaves something to be desired in its actions and results. The rather dodgy non-profit/for-profit hybrid while effective from a business standpoint, doesn't help your cause: while originally presented as the for-profit serving the non-profit, the reality appears to be the other way around.

> while originally presented as the for-profit serving the non-profit, the reality appears to be the other way around.

Would you care to elaborate?

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

#440

Post by discardable_dan »

panpanna wrote: post #130
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…

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.

So would I. The last time I used Firefox, they couldn't keep the entire browser from crashing because a single tab broke. They've got a long way to go to get Firefox up to its competition.
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