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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

#651

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…

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, p…

I'd say if they wanted to do a moon-shot-but-actually-achievable non-browser project against a slow, bloated, closed, locked-in, shitty product that everyone uses anyway (so, like IE back when they took that one), they'd target Google's office suite. As a bonus it could give them the revenue they want, through paid business hosting with official support or something like that.

Being an as-good-as-the-competition web browser that's not the default on any major OS (yeah I use it, but the Linux desktop ain't major) and doesn't have something like Google's reach for massive promotion (like they did with Chrome) is gonna kill them as a viable product with broad appeal, at this rate. They need to find a way to make that so much better than the competition that people bother to install it (on others' computers, too, like how they got their start), and I'm not sure how they can do that, or they need to pick another crappy but super-popular web-related product and go for the throat.

[EDIT] for that matter, web chat/conferencing, and social. IMO the browser's a dead-end for them except as a supporting product, but they keep focusing on utterly dull, niche, or already well-served products. IE sucked, but everyone needed a browser. Firefox crushed it by thoroughly and entirely not sucking. Pick something else that sucks and do the same. Not... bookmarking or whatever Pocket does.

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

#652

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.

[deleted]

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

#653
What's the relation between Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation? Corporation is for profit and Foundation is non profit so they don't share revenues? But why they don't merge and become one for profit company, they would much stronger.

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crash safety. If Chrome crashes, you get one single, short lived pop up to restore your tabs. If you miss it or can't click it for some reason, though luck.

Firefox, on the other hand, will simply always reopen your tabs and prompt you, in case the crash was its fault. In fact, losing ~50 open tabs in Chrome was what made me switch.

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

#655

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…

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 bur…

You forgot something, Chrome was also significantly better than all other browsers technically.

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

#656

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…

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 bur…

> Chrome only did better with regular users because 1) it was OS-bundled,

What OS bundles Chrome? Do you mean ChromeOS?

> and 2) they could shove "try Chrome!" banners at the top of every Google property.

That happened way later.

Maybe you have forgotten since it was so long ago, but the original wave of power users migrating to Chrome and bringing their non-power user friends along was exactly like the wave of folks who moved to Firefox. Chrome came out in 2008, had process-per-tab isolation and custom Chrome (i.e. window decorations, that's where the name comes from) that used less vertical space.

Your statement is revisionist history.

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

#657
post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, better let Google do it. Yummy.

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

#658
post #507

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…

> casual users are more numerous and less demanding.

That makes zero sense.

Why Mozilla seems to be axing the Servo division? The only part that actually catered to casual users? Also by introducing a VPN and Pocket Premium is for casual users how?

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

#659
Are there any lists of people looking for work during this round of layoffs? It sounds like a lot of good projects got cut and there's some companies growing that are finding it hard to locate talent. The pandemic is making people weary of switching jobs and at my company it's been very difficult.

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

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bur…

> Chrome only did better with regular users because 1) it was OS-bundled, What OS bundles Chrome? Do you mean ChromeOS? > and 2) they could shove "try Chrome!" banners at the top of every Google property. That happened way later. Maybe you have forgotten since it was so long ago, but the original wave of power users migrating to Chrome and bringing their non-power user friends along was exactly like the wave of folks…

> What OS bundles Chrome?

Android.

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