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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
601–610 of 1001 posts
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
I certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful. When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layo…
> inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls. That depends entirely on how the reader feels about diversity. EDIT: I made a claim that the reader's reaction depends on what the reader is thinking, and six people claimed I was wrong, which means they can read minds. Nice. Critical thinking means removing your emotional bias from analysis.
It really doesn't. I can support diversity while also not being impressed by corporate PR. I'm not sure how they are actually related at all?
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#603[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 Mozil…
> Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close...
Source? Based on which criteria? If you have even the slightest belief in the wisdom of the crowds, you'll realize that there must be something really appealing in Chrome which has resulted in its 68% market share. Compare that to Firefox's 7%.[0]
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#604[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…
Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favic…
Nerd and power-user evangelists are the only reason FF ever had any market share to begin with. We installed it on everyone's computer we had access to. We did this because even non-nerds could tell it was better than the OS' default browser, out of the box.
Non-nerds can no longer tell it's better, so I stopped doing that. No longer worth the effort, might even end up adding to my friends-and-family tech support burden rather than reducing it. I still use it myself anywhere Safari's not available, but yeah, it's a power-user-only product now.
Chrome only did better with regular users because 1) it was OS-bundled, and 2) they could shove "try Chrome!" banners at the top of every Google property. I don't think the product itself is significantly more focused on normal users. Google's just got a way, way better platform for promotion. They can snap their fingers and get a million installs of something in a day, if they really want to. But fact is FF doesn't have that. What they did have was power users doing all their marketing for them. Not so much, these days.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome." If you think that Mozilla not using "corporate doublespeak" is an impossible standard, I am left speechless.
> If you think that Mozilla not using "corporate doublespeak" is an impossible standard, I am left speechless. If you think that is a reason to abandon Mozilla, you've just proved my point.
> If you think that is a reason to abandon Mozilla
I have made no statement about abandoning or not abandoning Mozilla for corporate doublespeak. You're the second Mozilla employee that is putting words in my mouth in this thread. I think that is suggestive of what Mozilla has become.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#606Over 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…
I largely agree, but however far Mozilla is from the peaks it could theoretically be on, I still wouldn't criticize it like this without qualifying my complaint by adding the fact that it still has much lower to to sink before it's as bad as Chrome. I don't use Firefox anymore and I don't love Mozilla, but I appreciate the efforts they do make in favor of privacy and interoperability and especially the fact that stil…
Have you ever contacted an elected representative with your concerns that Google is a monopoly and that laws should be either enforced against them or re-written to abate that, in addition to changing your own behavior?
If not, why? What would make you do so?
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#607That's the last call for anybody who thinks "it's good that Mozilla exists, and its mission is important, but I'm still using Chrome and derivatives". Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.
I subscribe to Pocket Premium to support Firefox development because I think it's critical for it to continue existing, but I use Chrome as my daily driver because it's almost 2x faster on my Mac.
I give FF a try every few months and will happily switch if they ever manage to get it to having comparable performance to Chrome or Safari on my architecture.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#608[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…
Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favic…
There are definitely people like you are describing, but it's unfair to lump everyone who critisizes Mozilla, DDG, or any other privacy-focused company in with that crowd.
I will happily critisize Mozilla, DDG, etc when they come up short, but I will also happily celebrate their successes and continue to use and recommend their products as long as they don't stray too far. I want them to aim for perfection, but I completely recognize they will fall short.
There is a huge difference between critisism and condemnation.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
> 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". I know a couple of guys who posted their stuff here. They don't care about the complainers because the complainers don't have and don't offer to have skin in the game. They did the sensible thing, which is to be polite and respond noncommittally thanking them for the feedback or to ignore them. B…
I wish there was a term for these kinds of customers. "Cyber Karens", maybe?
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#610[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 certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful. When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layo…
> Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people. These are individuals of exceptional professional and personal caliber who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today. To each of them, I extend my heartfelt thanks and deepest regrets that we have come to this point.
From TFA.