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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

#691

Post by [deleted] »

DivisionSol wrote: post #293
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…

How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.) I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.

[deleted]

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

#692

Post by GuB-42 »

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 also hate the privacy argument. Anyone can write super-private software, it just needs to do nothing.

Anyone can do better than Google when it comes to privacy, especially if you define "privacy" as "don't do what Google is doing". It is almost a tautology: we first define Google as the opposite of privacy and then market yourself as private by not being Google. In order to drive the point, you add some kind of blocking feature and, yay, private!

In order to be relevant, you need to do more than that. Firefox used to be a great browser not because it was private, but because it was a great browser. It had great support for the latest web technologies, tabbed browsing before IE, it was fast, etc... And because of that it managed to make a dent in IE market share. But now, what does it have that Chrome doesn't besides not being from Google? Firefox even lost most of its identity by discontinuing XUL (for good reasons, I know) and updating its UI to look more like Chrome. I use both browsers on a day-to-day basis and Chrome tends to work better on average, though Firefox seems to be slowly catching up. I don't know what the situation is with Servo but it might be what Firefox needs.

Another example would be DuckDuckGo. Again, it caught the "privacy" virus. Please, no, "private" just means you are a proxy for inferior Bing results in this case. The worst part is that DDG has more to offer than "privacy", like instant answers and bangs. Why not market these instead?

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

#693

Post by jiggawatts »

dependenttypes wrote: post #688
jiggawatts wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 support…

> MSI Installers Why was that important? I was under the impression that exe and msi installer had no real difference between them. Obviously I am incorrect but I am wondering why.

True, there's a spectrum. There's the "download wizard" stub installers, then "interactive only" installers, then the ones with unattended command-line flags, and then there's native support for the operating package management format.

In Windows there are further nuances, such as installing per-user, per-machine, or both. Similarly, MSI support often implies support for transforms (MST files) and patches (MSP files) also, which is important on large networks. Back in the days of constrained bandwidths, MSPs were great for rolling out updates without killing the WAN, but few vendors would provide them.

Firefox tended to prefer the interactive install wizard installers and hence deploying it at scale was an enormous pain in the arse.

For example, the Enterprise CA thing actually interacted with the packaging. You had to crack open the Firefox files, download some obscure NSS command-line tool that they regularly moved around on their website to spite admins, and inject your corporate certificates into the Firefox-specific Root CA file. After this, everything had to be put back together in some way for deployment, typically by repackaging the files into an MSI.

Similarly, instead of ADM Templates that allow settings to be pushed out via Group Policy, you had to do hideous things to JavaScript files. These also changed regularly and had all sorts of limitations.

There was just no way anyone in their right mind would do this every few weeks to keep up with the Firefox release schedule. IT admins have other things to do, not just babysitting Firefox, the one special and unique flower that refuses to play nice with Windows.

The only other obstinately anti-admin products I can think of that were this bad were the Java Runtime and the Adobe suite of products. Even Adobe provided an ADM template at least, even though they published it as a PDF.

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

#694

Post by [deleted] »

dblohm7 wrote: post #438
blihp wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get flogged for things for-profit companies don't because Mozilla claims the moral high ground and then leaves something to be desired in its actions and results. The rather dodgy non-profit/for-profit hybrid while effective from a business standpoint, doesn't help your cause: while originally presented as the for-profit serving the non-profit, the reality appears to be the other way around.

> while originally presented as the for-profit serving the non-profit, the reality appears to be the other way around. Would you care to elaborate?

[deleted]

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

#695

Post by bitwize »

war1025 wrote: post #683

> I'm just disappointed about what Mozilla has become over the years. I think that train started rolling when they forced Eich out as CEO. Ever since then, Mozilla seems to be less about best-in-class technology, and more about virtue signalling.

They forced Eich out because maintaining him in a leadership role and "face of the company" was at odds with their values as a company and foundation.

And usage of "virtue signalling" in the manner you used it is strongly associated with bigotry.

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

#696

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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…

> The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen.

You have to be able to pay the bills first IMO. I don't fault them for that at all.

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

#697

Post by sdenton4 »

Vinnl wrote: post #191

I wonder what this means (and fear) for important projects like https://commonvoice.mozilla.org , that do not seem to have been concerned with a business case at all. Best case I can currently see is that some other organisation will take it on, though I'm not sure which. And I'm also curious how the pandemic has impacted them. As I understood it, still by far their major revenue sources were the search engine deals…

I am very interested to know what's up with common voice... Please chime in if anyone knows anything!

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

#698

Post by aslfksdfl »

jacquesm wrote: post #95

Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge. "But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests" Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There a…

If they keep focusing on the browser at the rate things are going they'll be dead as a company. They need to think ahead and work on a strategy that keeps them afloat.

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

#699

Post by throwaway189262 »

acdha wrote: post #277
throwaway189262 wrote: post #261

Can they just focus on the browser? Firefox has been falling behind for years now, especially on mobile. And it's not all because of Google's questionable advertising. Chrome is simply better in many ways. Mozilla is failing it's core mission chasing so many vanity projects. It's a non-profit, not a startup. Flush management and start over

If you actually use Firefox it's really hard to support the belief that there's some quality or speed gap like there was in the mid-2010s. They're neck and neck on quality and features but it also highlights the degree to which Google uses their other businesses to promote Chrome: everywhere you go you'll be hit with suggestions to switch to Chrome, not to mention various QA “lapses” like lowering performance on YouT…

This is true. I set firefox to spoof Chrome user agent because otherwise many Google properties are near unusable.

I really hope Mozilla survives. Were growing close to a Chrome monoculture at it would be worse than IE days

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

#700

Post by supernovae »

GuB-42 wrote: post #692
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…

I also hate the privacy argument. Anyone can write super-private software, it just needs to do nothing. Anyone can do better than Google when it comes to privacy, especially if you define "privacy" as "don't do what Google is doing". It is almost a tautology: we first define Google as the opposite of privacy and then market yourself as private by not being Google. In order to drive the point, you add some kind of blo…

Bing results are quite good.

But i still didn't buy DDG's privacy stuff

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