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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

#811

Post by mesaframe »

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…

Can you cite those mails? Is that the only argument behind the claim that Mozilla has bad leadership?

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

#812

Post by tomc1985 »

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'm not sure that asking Mozilla not to couple commercial initiatives (like Pocket) with their browser platform product is setting a high standard. Surely you can see how taking that kind of stance actively erodes the company's reputation as a privacy-focused nonprofit.

Why can't a platform simply be a platform?

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

#813

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

spanhandler wrote: post #604
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…

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…

At the time Chrome took off, Firefox had gotten bloated and slow, and Chrome was lightning by comparison. (I'm sure part of it was simply due to having enough features out of the box, thus requiring less add-ons / extensions.)

Firefox of course got much better eventually, but by then the damage was done, and Chrome's ability to sync with the rest of Google products (and Android devices) made the browser extremely sticky.

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

#814

Post by tomc1985 »

zmix wrote: post #734
ploxiln wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Each time somebody mentions, that 'libxslt2' is on an XPath 1.0 level (20 years old, we are at v3.1, currently) and how nice an update would be, the common agreement is the same: " lots of work, which nobody pays for." Just thinking about all the money they burned through, how great would it have been, to bring XML up to current standards, and to support it well in Firefox. I mention this, because it is important, th…

Especially ironic considering that Firefox's UI chrome markup language (XUL) is (was?)... XML. And javascript. It was like a not-shitty Electron ahead of its time by like 20 years. I'm still bitter about XUL being irrelevant now.

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

#815

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

zmix wrote: post #734
ploxiln wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Each time somebody mentions, that 'libxslt2' is on an XPath 1.0 level (20 years old, we are at v3.1, currently) and how nice an update would be, the common agreement is the same: " lots of work, which nobody pays for." Just thinking about all the money they burned through, how great would it have been, to bring XML up to current standards, and to support it well in Firefox. I mention this, because it is important, th…

They bought pocket and, in my opinion, overpaid for it significantly (quite a few of us were mad at that at the time).

There was some relationship between the creator of Pocket and one or more Mozilla executives and/or board members that made the whole purchase stink in more ways than one.

First thing i do on a new Firefox profile (for the one machine I have still running Firefox) is disable Pocket.

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

#816

Post by tomc1985 »

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…

It was power-users. That process isolation thing was a big part of its selling point. IIRC they put out a comic strip touting how technically awesome it was

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

edit... I'm sort of amazed the whole thing is licensed as CC

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

#819

Post by mellow2020 »

craigsmansion wrote: post #479
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…

> 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…

> We need the clout we would lose, otherwise we won't be big enough to have any say when the next thing comes around.

As John J. Chapman said in 1900:

> I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

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

#820

Post by michaelmrose »

war1025 wrote: post #726
gurumeditations wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Virtue signaling” meaning standing against homophobia. Just say what you mean.

I was going to say "virtue signalling to West coast liberals", but I decided to shorten things up a bit. Mozilla doesn't have any more business interest devoting resources to LGBT causes than Chick-Fil-A has a business interest in funding anti-LGBT causes. The difference is Chick-Fil-A makes money hand over fist and can afford to take its eye off the prize a little. Mozilla doesn't have that same luxury.

Chicken sandwiches and web browsers are not a moral purpose for being. It is difficult to imagine both the priorities you have identified and the idea that you find love and hate to be equivalent purposes like rooting for different sports teams.
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