Not a great sign: There are five new focuses each of which is sweepingly vague.
Sorry to those who just lost their jobs.
Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
851–860 of 1001 posts
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#852Earlier 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…
It is also the reason why GNU/Linux desktop will never go beyond 2%.
Android and ChromeOS pack a Linux kernel on their bottom layers, but nothing of it gets exposed to userspace neither for users nor for devs.
Android NDK explicitly doesn't have anything Linux related as part of the official stable APIs contract, and on ChromeOS Linux support is exposed via a container, WSL2 style.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#853Earlier 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.
> I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose.
I didn’t think it was well written at all. The sheer number of words is a red flag. There are five focus areas that are all extremely vague. Good writing is clear and concise.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#854[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…
> 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.
People talk as if Mozilla and others could exist in their magic bubble outside of a world where all comes down to money.
Being a non-profit means they still have to pay rent, loans etc. so there has to be enough money to do that. While many use Mozilla products without donating it is strange for me that the same people wonder about Mozilla not having enough money to keep all their employees and infrastructure.
Focusing on other actions that promise an increase in revenue is necessary if people just take without giving back.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#855[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…
Only one thing lingers in my mind about Mozilla.
When Brendan Eich was made CEO, Mozilla employees did everything possible to make sure that he wouldn’t stay; all due to a single political donation from six years beforehand.
While I don’t agree with his position, the whole fiasco tarnished Mozilla and the people in it, at least in my mind.
Far from being held to an impossible standard, I feel like it suffered from a form of monoculture.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#856Earlier 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…
The two biggest features that made firefox what it is were extensions and tabbed browsing, both aimed at power users. Take those away and it never would have been used by power users and no one else ever would have heard of it.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#857Earlier 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…
> And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. I'm not sure how many there are that would pay for it, but I'm sure it's not zero. I believe a browser is like an IDE, and I'm quite happy to pay for mine, as are plenty of other people apparently, JetBrains & Co are making good money. They are focused on their users though, which Firefox isn't. I'm pretty sure that Firefox could get plenty of paying users at $1…
That's a good point. A business plan along the lines of, for $8/month you get the pro edition which has all the latest features and updates, which the free tier would get 6 months later or so.
I use FF (dev edition) as my primary dev browser, and it's made a lot of progress on DX. Chromium has a smoother experience overall, but FF is not too shabby nowadays.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#858Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and a few related applications [0]. Apache meanwhile, has revenue of less than $1M, and has over 350 projects with huge adoption like Cassandra and Kafka and Lucene and Maven and that eponymous HTTP server [1]. In 2017 Mozilla paid their CEO $2.3M and their treasurer (who only worked 6 months) $1.2M [2]. Mozilla is a foundation which owns a fo…
Revenue: $27M; CEO pay: $2.3M
Are these numbers accurate? The first seems very low and the last seems very high? Is it still like this?
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#859Mozilla 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…
After several years at Mozilla I eventually realized that the leader, not to name them, cares about fame, power and money, even more than "evil big corporations". That it makes a browser that is good for the web is a side effect. The people that brought balance got gradually left go or left out of disgust, allowing that leader to grow their compensation unchecked (2.5M a year now). I had a lot of respect for them whe…
2.5M/year?! That's insane!
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#860[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…
There is no company that gets a bigger pass on HN than Mozilla, are you kidding me?
No,
DRM, DNS over HTTPS, VPN, Pocket... Just to name a few.