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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

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

#661

Post by tinco »

will4274 wrote: post #427
dblohm7 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to invalidate what you've said, so please don't interpret my comment that way. I would encourage you to think a bit more about a few things: > For example, Google executives don't release statements after employees die trashing the employee because of an underlying difference in personality and/or political views. While I agree that it was probably a mistake for Mitchell to have made that post, I think t…

Please don't worry about offending me / invalidating what I say - it's an internet forum, I don't take it that seriously. Please take my response in the same frame of mind. Your defenses... aren't. It's not airing the letter to the general public that was problematic. It's thinking that those are appropriate things to say out loud that's a problem. One of my coworkers passed from cancer a few years back. Frankly, a l…

"I don't use Firefox because it sucks. And it sucks because Mozilla can't hire good people with decades of experience."

Why do you think it sucks? It's been absolutely epic the last couple years in my opinion. They're making some awesome technical choices. They've repeatedly gotten themselves into trouble on the social level, but frankly I don't see how you could say they're not doing well technically. I'm pretty sure Firefox is outperforming Chrome on multiple aspects, and they're positioning themselves to become the best browser period.

I don't really care for its "smart" features like the anti-tracking or other services they offer, so unfortunately I won't be paying them any money any time soon, but to me it's incredible that there's a company out there paying people to rewrite their rendering engine in rust, while also having to pay/support people to actually make that same language suitable enough to become a critical part of an app with such a large user base.

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

#662

Post by jiggawatts »

anonymousab wrote: post #493
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…

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…

The 'closed wontfix dontagree' attitude, or letting important requests sit there open for over a decade -- some with tens of thousands of comments -- is what killed Firefox more than anything.

In the enterprise world, Firefox lacked a few, small, but critical features:

1) MSI Installers

2) Group Policy Administrative Templates

3) Proxy configuration from Windows

4) Enterprise PKI integration

Some of these are supported now, but for about a decade there was at least one person in Mozilla with a philosophical opposition to doing anything that is seen as helping an enterprise Windows network deployment.

I'm pretty certain that Firefox still doesn't work properly in a large corporate environment. At any rate, I've given up trying, as have millions of other administrators. We installed Chrome, which "just worked", and moved on.

The result of this is that enterprise web applications were written for Chrome, not IE or Firefox. Chrome became mandated and automatically pushed to every machine. It has become the new IE6, for better or worse.

Firefox missed that boat.

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

#663

Post by spanhandler »

rrdharan wrote: post #656
spanhandler wrote: post #604

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? Do you mean ChromeOS?

Android.

[EDIT] and Chrome was better enough that it got power users switching (this is before "Google has become very obviously evil" was common geek opinion yet, which helped), but I'm not sure it would have gotten them installing it on normal folks' computers with quite the fervor we did Firefox, back in the day. The banner ads are what got them on normal people's computers.

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

#664

Post by f1refly »

behnamoh wrote: post #603
mrweasel wrote: post #579

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... 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] [0]: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx

There's no secret sauce to chrome. It's single super power which made it the standard for non-tech users is googles ability to slap a bar on every single one of their sites telling users to use chrome. Google told them, so that's what they did. End of story.

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

#665

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

fsflover wrote: post #448
segphault wrote: post #432

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…

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.

We have heard this argument many times from Mozilla advocates on HN. I don't buy it. To me, this sounds like an argument for the status quo. It may be a rational descriotion of the reasoning what Mozilla is continuing to pursue, but essentially it argues, "No one can do better. Therefore, don't change anything". Well, if the comments in this thread (and many others) are any indication, there are some users who want change. Mozilla is not "good enough" for these users. Things could be better.

No one knows what would happen if things changed. Sometimes we have to take risks, experiment. The portrayal of Mozilla as being like a little boy with his (Firefox) finger in the dike saving us all from being flooded over by the (Google) sea is an oft-told fairy tale.

It is arguable that Mozilla is already "dead" and has been for quite some time.

Google already has a "monopoly in the web", and they in fact control Mozilla by being its essential source of revenue.

The "non-profit" bit is also getting old. Is it supposed to mean something by implied comparison to other non-profit organisations? Mozilla is a corporation, it has employees doing the same work as Google as it tries to maintain faeature parity, including gathering data on users through telemetry. It is dependent on Google, it relies on the sale of web advertising in order to be able to pay those employees. Web advertising is the very thing that Firefox users want to be protected against.

How is that preventing Google from enjoying a "monopoly in the web"? Google could pull the plug on Mozilla at any time. As others point out, it probably prefers to prop Mozilla up instead.

My suggestion is to release a different sort of browser, smaller. In fact, release multiple browsers, each with a different focus. These specialised browsers could use pieces of Firefox code but would be small enough any user could compile in a short time on an underpoweered computer. Of course they could also be more secure what with reduced complexity and attack surface.

There are so many annoyances with the web that could easily be solved by going in a different direction, away from advertising and the idea of a web browser as an "all-in-one" program.

I believe there are markets for this, although no one knows the size of them, because users are coerced to use the same handful of overgrown, corporate-sponsored web browsers, forever increasing in complexity, insecure and in need of a patch.

At this point in web history, trying to achieve 100% feature parity with a corporate-sponsored web browser funded by advertising is a waste of time, IMO. What is worth the time are features that those corporations will never pursue. These are the most interesting things Mozilla has been doing with Firefox.

I am typing this using a text-only browser that I can edit and re-compile in minutes. Much faster than Firefox; no ads, tracking or telemetry. I certainly do not need a major web browser to read HN or the sites posted to it. Using the same program to read HN as I use for, e.g., internet banking, is silly, IMO. I actually have better ability to read sites posted to HN than some readers who consistently get thwarted by crazy web designs, phoney paywalls, etc. There should be many browsers in between linemode and "modern" browser. There should be a spectrum of choice of user-agents, each with different feature sets, not always the same ones.

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

#667

Post by tingol »

vages wrote: post #627
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #547

Earlier 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…

I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance. I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

What if we all liked this player for not playing the game?

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

#668

Post by mrkramer »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #567
kibwen wrote: 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. 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…

> never, ever, ever market to power users; casual users are more numerous and less demanding. Truth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It's not even about technical vs casual people it's about Moore's Law. Memory became so cheap that it makes sense to store everything in an internet cloud.

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

#669

Post by kibwen »

qzw wrote: post #614
kibwen wrote: 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. 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…

Absolutely, but the truth of your words is also the tragedy. Having engaged and demanding users might have positive externalities when these users demand things that improve the products in the market as a whole, and thereby improve the experience for casual users as well. But companies don't want to improve their products, or improve society, or improve experiences for users; what they want is to collect rent. An established company becomes more cost-efficient by embracing casual users and ignoring power users. An upstart company might want to leverage power users to compete against a well-funded opponent, but that debt eventually comes due as we see now with Mozilla.

At enterprise prices (i.e. thousands of dollars per user per year) it makes sense to accept the cost of dealing with power users. But not for a product that you give away for free.

I say this as someone who has been using Firefox for years, and you'll need to pry it from my cold, dead hands. I'm impressed that Mozilla has survived for as long as it has, I was sure they'd be financially kaput by 2016; at this point I think Google only keeps their search deal up as an attempt to avoid antitrust action. I don't know what the future holds for Firfox, but I hope it remains competitive. We need alternative competing implementations for the health of the web.

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

#670

Post by floatingatoll »

mxuribe wrote: post #323
frabbit wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/That/ I would pay for. Add in Matrix server(s) , email hosting and I'm a subscriber.

Pay Mozilla for email hosting and matrix homeserver hosting!?! YES, PLEASE! Oh, and in my monthly fees, i can simply add $1 or $2 per month to donate directly to the browser team s well? YES, PLEASE, where do i sign up!?!?!?!?! While I'm serious about the above, forgive my capitalization and excessive punctuation...but this is honestly a great idea. For Mozilla - which is a company that i trust - to offer a paid serv…

Would it be acceptable for the third-party provider (whether Mozilla or not) that you're paying email and matrix hosting services to run automated content scanners on the email and chat server to detect known malware and child pornography content signatures?

A lot of people take for granted that "I pay you money" implies "I have the right to use your service without you having any right to inspect my usage of your service", and it'd be useful to know your views on that.

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