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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

#801

Post by tracker1 »

ploxiln wrote: post #640
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 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 find that I agree and disagree on a few points. I do wish they'd kept their focus on the technical over the marketing. I don't think they really needed the swaths of MBA types in charge of the organization, and wish they'd stayed closer to their technical roots which is what survived from the earlier Netscape through AOL and into Mozilla. I was also an early fan from Phoenix, though I think the Firebird name (also a fan at that time of Firebird SQL) was a misstep.

I think some of the more encompasing efforts haven't all been bad. Rust as a language has been a great thing to come from Moz. Firefox OS could have been interesting as well.

For that matter I'd have been happy to see broader adoption of Mozilla's identity efforts, and don't so much mind them trying to get VPN as a secondary funding source.

I do wish their structure was more geared towards keeping the technical and developer teams as a focus of the organization over the more commercial aspirations.

I will say I did switch to Chrome around 2010 mostly because I really do prefer it's UI/UX ... FF is getting closer to that, despite some really not liking it and I've considered switching back.

I also find it ironic how popular electron has become, when XULRunner was such a great platform well over a decade before. I do think there's opportunity to create the next npm in concert with deno and firefox for supporting a greater module approach. There's still some unanswered bits there. Similarly, still would like a way to do bundled application packages; similar to jar or silverlight that's just a zip file of assets with a manifest and modules.

If often feels like Mozilla is doing their own thing to try and gain market share instead of working with the broader community.

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

#802

Post by gonational »

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…

Impossibly high standards?

Like, not lying to users about data collection, not opting users into third-party products, not censoring add-ons for political reasons?

Gimme a break. The foundation is given a big break as it is, being tax-free. Then there is this huge greedy corporation bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars while resting its brand on the perceptions most users (outside of HN) have about Mozilla and Firefox being a non-profit thing in general.

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

#803

Post by alex_young »

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…

Mozilla (the for profit subsidiary) received $436 million from search deals in 2018 [0].

Your CEO took home more than $2.3M and your treasurer (who only worked 6 months) $1.2M in 2017 [1].

Why don't you hold these people to very high standards?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google [1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017-fo...

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

#804

Post by rl3 »

coffeefirst wrote: post #681
KingOfCoders wrote: post #315

The "make Firefox a secondary goal" faction has won again. "Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this. 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. Over the last while, it has been clear that Mozilla is not struc…

This would bug me less if their big ideas weren't Pocket and a VR chatroom.

>This would bug me less if their big ideas weren't Pocket and a VR chatroom.

It's probably just Pocket; developers working on the latter were hit with layoffs today, too.

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

#805

Post by d3nj4l »

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.

It's great that a user-centered protest against a CEO who literally donated to ban gay marriage is considered "virtue signalling". And that's not even considering that Eich was a CEO for all of 11 days before he quit.

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

#806

Post by d3nj4l »

prepend wrote: post #771
bitwize wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that’s when their values changes from being a technically excellent product to being a friendly company that values harmony over function. So it did stick to their values, but their values seem superficial rather than functional. As a user, I would rather have a better browser than a company full of people who think that being against gay marriage 10 years ago means they are dangerous to coworkers or whatnot.…

> I think that’s when their values changes from being a technically excellent product to being a friendly company that values harmony over function.

What part of this announcement is valuing "harmony over function"? How does laying off 250 people compute with that?

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

#809

Post by camgunz »

blihp wrote: post #309
camgunz wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty ignorant about how they monetize Firefox, but isn't it pretty hard? The attempts I (think I) know of are selling the search box, putting some ads on the home/start page, and that mr. robot ad thing. I'm skeptical FF alone could fund Mozilla's mission to build an open, free web, and doubly skeptical when you consider its adversaries (Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, heavy hitters for sure).

Selling the search box brings in on the order of hundreds of millions a year. This alone puts them in a singularly unique category of 'well funded' open source software. Granted, their 3-year billion dollar deal may have been the high water mark (edit: it wasn't, revenues have increased since then), but a lot of valuable work can be funded with even $100 or $50 million a year. Sure, they need to constantly be on the…

Firefox is super fast in almost all the ways that matter. It consistently does great in benchmarks and plenty of users (myself included) use it as their daily driver for some pretty intense use cases (I... admit to hoarding tabs... sigh).

I just find it hard to believe that it's possible to be significantly faster than Chrome, to the degree that it would be a notable differentiation--especially when the apps Firefox is loading are largely (again) controlled by their adversaries--Google, Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft. For an extreme (albeit non-performance issue) case, look at Widevine. What was Mozilla realistically supposed to do there?

> They seem more interested in playing the role of a nonprofit quasi-startup and social issues advocate than maintainer of the most viable and valuable open source browser.

I think this is where I disagree with most of the people who say Mozilla should stick to Firefox. I don't think you can make Firefox sufficiently "better" than Chrome engineering-wise--certainly not to the degree where people would notice, and I absolutely don't think you could do it with the owners of the most popular web properties having an incentive to work against you, most of whom have a competing web browser.

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

#810

Post by coffeefirst »

Nightshaxx wrote: post #76

While I definitely think Mozilla is great for the internet, their main product is terrible from a business perspective. Trying to monitize a piece of free software that you are selling on this privacy benifits is a loosing battle. The reason free software is free is _because_ it can sell more valuable ads by using your data. Products that you pay directly for don't need to worry about selling ads so they don't have t…

That's a funny idea. Suppose there were a Firefox Pro option?

It's the sort of thing a lot of people here might pay for regardless of what's in it just because they believe Firefox is essential to the open web.

But what could it be?

What if all it was to start was bundling their existing VPN service, Scroll, and Pocket Premium for a single price, and even if technically you can use them in Chrome or as iOS apps, it's marketed as a better browser. And then the door is open to add new things, maybe pinboard-style bookmark archiving would make sense?

Is it a hit? Hard to say. But it feels like a better bet as a feature set that ALSO supports the open web than marketing each of those services individually.

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