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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

#481

Post by shock »

staktrace wrote: post #193
stingraycharles wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for capturing my feelings around this so well. I absolutely love Firefox, but I can’t help but feel Mozilla’s ambitions are hurting them rather than helping them. Don’t get me wrong; their “distractions” have given the world a lot of nice things (Rust comes to mind). But first and foremost, Mozilla’s mission should be to ensure a great, competitive browser, and they’re losing the competition badly. And imho th…

Mozilla's mission is to make the internet a better place for everybody. Having an open web browser is a part of that, but nowhere near sufficient to accomplish the goal. The "vanity ambitions" you are talking about are the things that actually make a long-term difference in people's lives. Having a great competitive browser with a silo'd, broken up Internet is not a desirable end-state.

> Mozilla's mission is to make the internet a better place for everybody.

"Don't be evil".

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

#482

Post by jacquesm »

nine_k wrote: post #453
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…

Two words for you. (1) Rust. (2) Thunderbird. Each represents a huge value to the community. New and untried consumer products? Well, maybe. You never know which could be a big hit. Still it's not obvious how to make money on any of these :(

Rust can be stand alone, Thunderbird is already stand alone and the way Mozilla handled that pretty much killed Thunderbird in the marketplace.

I also think that Thunderbird's position can no longer qualify for the adjective 'huge' when coupled with community value, it is well below 1% of the market.

After using it for years I gave up because the bugs were no longer fixed timely, the performance simply terrible and the upgrades were just as likely to cause you trouble as they were to fix something.

Rust has the future, I'm pretty convinced about that. It will take a very long time to materialize, but let's be honest here: without FireFox Rust would have never even seen the light of day, it only exists because a large amount of money earmarked for FireFox was diverted into developing Rust which led to further diminished marketshare for FireFox. The breaking change around plug-ins was another big negative in the near past.

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

#483

Post by ofrzeta »

gfodor wrote: post #454
shajznnckfke wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a browser is Mozilla’s purpose. If Mozilla can’t do that, it doesn’t have a reason to exist and will fail. If the Feed the Children charity decides that feeding children is too hard and decides to water plants instead, I expect it will fail too.

The Mozilla Manifesto says nothing about web browsers. If you think they should throw it out and focus on making web browsers (and abandon their mission as an organization) you'll have to take it up with them I guess.

Well, 99% of "the Internet" is the web, so a free web browser is the vital part in that. And not some tool about "remixing HTML" or open badges or something [1]

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/artifacts/

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

#484

Post by brnt »

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…

We're not all blind to the trap certain Mozilla users (and certain Floss users in general) set up for authors who try to be sincere Floss players but naturally need to make real world compromises.

Just wanted to let you know I appreciate what you and Mozilla are doing, regardless of these certain purity-zeolots. May Mozilla live long!

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

#485

Post by modo_mario »

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?

"Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed"

Aka the browser will no longer bring them any money to sustain themselves. It's sad but we're basically seeing a chromium near-monopoly coming.

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

#487

Post by marcinzm »

mistrial9 wrote: post #456
wmf wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla made over $500M revenue in 2017 and $451M in 2018. Apparently the decline has continued, but it should still be enough to develop a browser. I would guess that Firefox is profitable but all of Mozilla's other things are dragging them down.

the American system of employment is demonstrably broken; Mozilla in SF is bound by hundreds of contradictory and expensive rules for employment, originally designed to make safety and stability for workers, that are now spaghetti-code and are routinely worked around using international channels

The US has a generally simple set of employment rules compared to the rest of the world. Most of which you outsource to some third party company and pay them a fixed fee per employee. The cost of employment comes from capitalistic competition for talent. Also, the fact that so many minimum wage workers exist in the US (at a minimum wage below most developed nations) is direct contradiction to your point. Employees are cheap in the US, engineers are expensive everywhere.

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

#488

Post by sedachv »

yborg wrote: post #467
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…

The "new focus" isn't that new, it's been the same since Baker became CEO, and it's a focus on making Mitchell Baker really, really rich. Mozilla's privacy branding is in direct conflict with Baker's vision of some kind of corporate entity that can pay her a lot of money. Apple can do this because they are filthy rich themselves, Mozilla's puny market share means that increasing their revenue will require them to use…

> I think a LibreOffice-style hard fork will be necessary at some point with a nonprofit carrying Firefox forward.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

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

#489

Post by news12klm »

segphault wrote: post #432

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 h…

They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?

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

#490

Post by modo_mario »

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…

"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?"

Are you gonna give them the money to replace that income? Is anyone at all?

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