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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

#611

Post by TAForObvReasons »

dblohm7 wrote: post #278
shock wrote: post #274

Earlier 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.

https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 exemplifies how Mozilla employs "corporate doublespeak" to compromise its core values:

> Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs

To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse. There's no reason to believe, after missteps like embedding cliqz tracking or using update channels to push booking.com ads, Mozilla actually appreciates those values. At that point, it's no better on a privacy front than Chrome.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/aax1r5/fire...

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

#612

Post by spanhandler »

School-Cotton wrote: post #535
craigsmansion wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. It might be the other way around in this case. Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot. Throughout the years when choices had to be m…

Mozilla rose to the top because IE6 was obsolete trash, Opera cost money, and Chrome didn’t exist. The “promise of an open web” didn’t enter into it.

... and the installer would download very quickly on your mom's dial-up, unlike the full Mozilla Suite which was huge, and it was much lighter-weight, better-performing, and had better default features for people who didn't need all of Mozilla Suite, so you could install it on there so she'd stop getting 500 pop-unders and then ending up with a virus and ten "browser bars" you had to fix.

Otherwise, yes, you've nailed it.

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

#613

Post by albertzeyer »

John Carmack (https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1293227109738061826):

> Just last night I was thinking about how it was possible that, given the relative trends, Mozilla’s greater legacy might turn out to be Rust, not Firefox.

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

#614

Post by qzw »

kibwen wrote: post #507
renewiltord wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users…

Sure, power users can be a pain in the ass, but if everything were up to casual users, we'd all still be on IE 1x, i.e., whatever that wraps the same broken, insecure, non-standard-compliant MSHTML engine in the shiny Windows UI toolkit-du-jour. Power users were the first to pick up Firefox when it was split off from the old Mozilla suite, and power users were the ones who began using and recommending Chrome when it was the upstart browser. If Firefox survives and (hopefully) returns to a reasonable market share, it'll probably be thanks to power users who stuck with it or gave it another chance.

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

#615

Post by petters »

craigsmansion wrote: post #479
Santosh83 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. The tragedy…

> is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. It might be the other way around in this case. Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot. Throughout the years when choices had to be m…

> Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot.

No, they had a free browser with tabs.

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

#616

Post by Hackbraten »

mrweasel wrote: post #579
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…

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

In what sense? Feature set, user experience, security, stability, performance, developer experience?

Genuinely curious. I switched from Chrome last year and have yet to find a single aspect in which I’d say Firefox would lead, with the exception of privacy.

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

#617

Post by sp332 »

m0ck wrote: post #541
sp332 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's self-defense. It does no good to focus on the tech if the people writing the code are being murdered or deported.

>if the people writing the code are being murdered Source?

Well neither you nor the letter mentioned any specific "political/social issues" so I just picked my own.

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

#618

Post by [deleted] »

surround wrote: post #548
fsflover wrote: post #448

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.

Does the Mozilla foundation fund browser development?

[deleted]

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

#619

Post by pjmlp »

School-Cotton wrote: post #535
craigsmansion wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. It might be the other way around in this case. Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot. Throughout the years when choices had to be m…

Mozilla rose to the top because IE6 was obsolete trash, Opera cost money, and Chrome didn’t exist. The “promise of an open web” didn’t enter into it.

When IE6 came into the market it was the best on its class, the only problem was Microsoft declaring victory and dismantling the team to create Avalon (WPF), which is also the background why CSS Grid came from WPF.

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

#620

Post by andor »

0xDEEPFAC wrote: post #594

Without Firefox though everything is Chrome. Skype, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Chrome itself, Safari, Edge, Opera, VS Code, Atom... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SCfNhyIo_U We need to encourage competition even if companies continue to spew this kind of cringe. Firefox is the last holdout. Good luck Mozilla, you're our old hope.

Safari is still Webkit. Zoom is a native application.
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