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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

#631

Post by craigsmansion »

petters wrote: post #615
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 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.

So this was because of the tabs?

"MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 15th, 2004 – [..]The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation’s fundraising campaign to support last month’s highly successful launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.

Spread Firefox is the volunteer-run Mozilla advocacy site, with over 50,000 registered members, where community marketing activities are organized to raise awareness and to promote the adoption of Firefox."

(https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...)

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

#632

Post by DoctorNick »

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 don't hold Mozilla to higher standards. I just expect Mozilla to make a decent browser. Firefox is not a decent browser anymore compared to its competition. Its performance and security is lagging severely behind Chrome, and it doesn't really respect privacy any more than Chrome does in its default configuration. Pretty much the only two advantages it has right now are containers, and the fact that it's not Chrome. The former matters a lot less now that the newest version of Cookie AutoDelete can remove cache and indexedDB per-domain.

The one thing that could save it, Servo, doesn't seem to be a priority. Instead, Mozilla seems to be focusing on offering cloud services that nobody wants or cares about, which also don't really respect privacy any more than other cloud services. The only significant revenue stream Mozilla has is through Firefox, which keeps steadily losing users and market share.

And even that is almost entirely dependent on people using Google search with the browser. Given that Google is Mozilla's primary competitor who has intentionally broken their apps on Firefox and is pushing them down in search results, and that Firefox is marketing itself to privacy-conscious people who wouldn't use Google anyway, it doesn't seem wise or sustainable at all.

Unless things seriously change, I have no faith that they'll be able to turn this situation around. We may just have to live with a Blink/WebKit web monoculture until we get some serious anti-trust legislation.

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

#633

Post by tanilama »

I don't find this that surprising as well.

Good intentions or ethicality aside, I don't find Firefox as a browser convincing. It is just not as good as Chrome in handling navigating web pages.

I'd say focus on making Firefox better experience wise should always been their priority, but the neglection of it has been lasting too long. Now Chrome becomes the even bigger monster than IE uses to be, Firefox will have a much harder time to justify its own existence in a financially substainable way

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

#634

Post by rubber_duck »

kvark wrote: post #2

That'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 spent the last month switching to FF because Chrome is getting dog slow and I wanted to support it, despite multiple issues since switching I stuck along.

Seeing this "diversification" strategy I just installed Edge and am giving it a try, FF wasn't a great experience but I was willing to stick with it to support Chrome alternatives - but it's obvious it needs a lot of work - and removing focus is a signal people should be moving off not coming back to it.

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

#635

Post by mdoms »

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…

There is no company that gets a bigger pass on HN than Mozilla, are you kidding me?

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

#636

Post by liability »

MikusR wrote: post #569
yborg wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funniest thing is that LibreOffice itself will soon also need a fork.

Do you have more information about this? I haven't heard anything about LibreOffice in quite some time.

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

#638

Post by rleigh »

dblohm7 wrote: post #343
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…

Sometimes it feels like there are people out there who want Mozilla to fail and gleefully seek ways to make that happen (even by doing something as simple as amplifying misinformation), even though it is not really in their interests to do so.

I've never seen any indication that anyone wants Mozilla to fail.

But after seeing several years of repeated strategic blunders and bad management, and Firefox slip from being the most popular web browser by a comfortable margin to a single digit percentage market share, which is still sliding down, I think the available evidence shows that they have failed quite badly, and for the most part through problems of their own making. Now, I'd like to use Firefox again, but they have regain strong technical focus first. They are all over the place doing irrelevant stuff. I'm surprised they even have that many staff to lay off in the first place given their financial situation. There must be a large percentage of non-jobs amongst that thousand, because they certainly weren't all dedicated to making a good web browser.

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

#639

Post by filleokus »

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

Safari is Safari (WebKit). On iOS everything is Safari (WebKit).

iOS is probably, actually, our last chance for a major second browser engine.

(Safari on Mac is of course WebKit as well, and I use it and love it, but I would guess it's a rounding error compared to WebKit on iOS...)

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

#640

Post by ploxiln »

renewiltord wrote: post #339
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…

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…

I use Firefox. I have used it since it was called Phoenix, and I still use it today, extensively, on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

I'm just disappointed about what Mozilla has become over the years. It wasn't supposed to be an "agile" tech company, with slick marketing and UI/UX, making deals to try to get market share.

It was supposed to be a non-profit foundation, making an open-source cross-platform browser engine, pushing for open protocols and standards. It enabled a few niche open-source operating systems to have a viable browser, it put a big dent in IE's market share, I would say it paved the way for Safari on iOS to be viable way back in 2009, and that obviously changed the world.

It still could have done that. It was making 100s of millions of dollars per year from the default search provider deal, for over a decade. It could have saved most of that money, spending it only on 50 to 100 browser engineers. Branching out to MDN and websocket or webrtc libraries would also make sense. But the rest of the crap, the marketing, the rebranding, the Pocket purchase and integration, Firefox OS, the voice recognition and AI stuff (and notice the announcement, they're keeping the AI division, really need that part apparently), stuff that nobody remembers, that's all a waste of money that could be saved by the non-profit foundation to just support the low-level engine keeping the open web viable.

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