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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

#571
post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Computers are powerful enough these days to have multiple browsers installed and running simultaneously. One could have used Firefox for general browsing and just used Chrome for Netflix.

I don't want to use Chrome though

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

#572

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…

Do you use their browser? If not, why not?

FTR I do and never stopped.

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

#573

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?

This is where these guys lose me. There is no way you get Netflix or Hulu or Disney in Firefox without EME or something similar. Ultimately the question is do you want to be a mainstream browser or not? Obviously Mozilla does and most people want it to be and don't care about it. If you don't like copy protection then don't buy stuff with it or torrent instead. This is such a tired argument to be having in 2020 and boring complaint about Mozilla.

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

#574
I find this sad news. I highly recommend mozilla to others due to its focus on user privacy and open nature of organization. I know it is not an option for a complete browser with its own js engine, rendering tool kit and kind of whole app eco-system is not possible to survive on donations and small income channels.

But, I would have highly recommended mozilla do it in a way to release a community and enterprises services. where Enterprise will lead the future path of browser with its own industrial/enterprise offering to customer sets like governments, Developers and big companies, parallel maintaining the community version of browser as its now, may be two feature cycle behind with some less but fully open features.

If I had an option to buy a paid version of mozilla service which gave me better functionality for application support and development I would have gladly paid for it. I wish, It is the path they chose.

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

#575

Earlier 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…

Your counterpoint is a little confusing to me. Apple reversed their sinking fortunes when they released the iPhone. That seems to make the exact opposite of your point.

>when they released the iPhone.

You mean ipod and itunes, perhaps?

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

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are your suggestions? Let Mozilla die and enjoy Google monopoly in the web? No, thanks. I prefer a non-profit organization which " failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure ". By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.

For what it’s worth I just signed up for the VPN service today. Hopefully that helps a bit.

Their VPN is a bit pointless at the moment though. They're basically reselling Mullvad. You can get the same servers & more connectivity options (e.g. bypassing their client) for the same price by just going direct.

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

#577

[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…

For me, the feeling of getting kicked in the shins by a diva designer every-other update has risen dramatically in the past few years, as has the prominence of (at least the feeling of) 'closed wontfix dontagree' issues for common and longstanding gripes on the bug tracker and GitHub. The unfortunate nature of a bad feeling is that it will outweigh a positive feeling from another change of equal consequence. I would…

> I would not be surprised if it was the same for other users.

Yep, you can count me in this group as well. The Firefox team goes out of it's way to make so many changes that just seem useless or annoying; it's baffling to me. It really feels like a team with too many devs and designers sitting around needing to create work. I very much doubt that's actually the case, but that just means it's a widespread management issue.

That said, it doesn't make me want to stop using Firefox because the only other option is Chrome which has bigger issues.

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

#578

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…

"The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen. "

Maybe you have not noticed that money actually matters? Mozilla maintains a global infrastructure for serving Firefox updates and new installs; they have to pay developers to keep up with bugs, vulnerabilities, and new web standards; they have to pay lawyers to deal with the various legal issues that come up when a project has millions of users across multiple jurisdictions; etc. Donations have never been sufficient for Mozilla to do the core development work on Firefox, which is why they signed those search deals.

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

#579

[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'd grant you that Mozilla is being held to a higher standard, to high perhaps. That's not really my complaint about Mozilla. The thing is, I freaking love Firefox. Developer can't speak highly enough about MDN, and with good reason. Yet, the thing we see as users and donors to Mozilla is Pocket, FirefoxOS, an idiotic VPN and other pointless project. Thunderbird can apparently just roll over and die for all the Mozilla Corp. cares.

What annoys me with Mozilla, again as much as I love Firefox and the spirit of Mozilla, is that the corporate leadership seems to ignore the project that works. New focus my ass, Mozilla needs to refocus on Firefox. Maybe you do, but it certainly doesn't seem like it from the outside.

Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close, yet corporate Mozilla seems to have forgotten about it, it's never a highlight in Mozilla Corp. communications, but it should be.

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

#580
post #176

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…

Really? Firefox continues to become more pleasant to use, and chrome less so.

I think they should just have their own app store for extensions, handle payments and take a good cut.

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