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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

#901

Post by ksec »

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…

Same here, been using Netscape, Mozilla, Phoenix and Firefox. Watched the development of Firefox 0.x to 4, e10s, MemShrink, SpiderMonkey, xMonkey, Firefox OS, Rust and Servo.

Witness Firefox ran an Ad on the front page of newspaper with thousands of supporters names on it. It sure made us proud, the battle against IE. ( Which is why I get pissed when people say Safari is the new IE ) I dont know how long ago was that, early 2000? Must have been nearly two decade.

Pushed Firefox installation in a University Campus to thousands of PCs. Pushed through hundreds of installations in a few enterprise. Along with dozen of other things, communities, Mozillazine ( I think it is now in Read Only Mode) .

There are lots of help from others too. I am sure I am not the only one. I dont know and dont think Chrome ever got that much support.

If you are IBM or Intel, you can afford to do silly thing like acquiring McAfee. You can afford to waste money and inefficiency. The whole reason why Startup were able to compete with some of the big players is that they could get $10 out of $1 spend, while Enterprise could barely move even with $10. The inefficiency is real, the only exception to that is possibly Apple.

Mozilla has a large cooperate mentality, enterprise inefficiency, non-profits ideals and startup's moon-shot strategy. I dont know of any possible worst combination than that.

So after nearly three decades of Netscape / Mozilla, I moved on to a different browser. It was just too painful to watch.

Edit: I forgot to add, Google has yet to renew their contract with Mozilla. Given their new low in marketshare ( Judging from Apple, terms are likely paid per Active User basis ), I suspect the negotiation terms is substantially lower than previously. Hence the layoff.

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

#903

Post by DonHopkins »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #855
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…

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…

Allowing other people to marry who they love is not an "impossible standard" to hold Brendan Eich to.

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

#904

Post by m4rtink »

icefo wrote: post #748
anonymousab wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA. The navigation bar on the bottom is an interesting expiriment but still I quickly moved it back up. The new tab layout is worse. Each tab need much more space so you can display about half the number of tabs on the same space. The top sites when you opened a new tab also disappeared. It seems you can put bookmark or something to replace them but t…

Also they basically removed the tablet mode - here I am with a 10 inch tablet and no tab bar, no back button on address bar & no keyboard shortcuts, perfect! :P

More things the dropped in lates "stable" Firefox for Android: - save as PDF - print support (!!) - downloade manager - full URL display - about:config (!!!) - extensions (other than 9 extensions they carefully cherry-picked)

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

#905

Post by gsich »

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…

>which HN billed as some sort of nefarious tracker

Because it was.

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

#906

Post by 72deluxe »

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…

Very informative! I remember using Mozilla alongside Netscape with the entire suite for editing etc. versus Frontpage.

And when Phoenix/Firebird came out how it was very basic but a slimmed down version of Mozilla.

It seemed they lost their way and just became the old Mozilla browser but with lots of features nobody wanted (Pocket??) and a tonne of other things I have no idea why they got involved in. Perhaps they just employed developers who liked writing new things.

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

#907

Post by DonHopkins »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #829
DonHopkins wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common. Obviously you're referring to Brendan Eich. But you're wrong: Eich was not fired, and he was not forced to resign. In fact just the opposite: the board tried to get him to stay. This should not be news to you: it was in the FAQ on CEO resignat…

I think people are so used to corporate "oh he was resigned" doublespeak that they can no longer take any such assertion seriously, regardless of facts.

I don't take statements like bigoted "oh I don't hate gay people, I just don't think they should have the right to marry who they love" doublespeak seriously.

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

#909

Post by mathfailure »

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…

1. That's how Mozilla positioned itself. "We are so non-profit, non-evil and so better than others, because we think about ecosystem, rights and all the good stuff". You went after this high bar - you should comply with it.

2. Sounds logical: no one wants to get stuck with abandonware (or semi-abandonware). Browsers are the #1 by importance piece of software. Competitors in this field just HAVE TO keep up with the current state of things and global expectations/demand. If you don't - goodbye, then.

4. No, Mozilla never apologized for its mistakes properly. It doesn't even admit most of them. And it clearly didn't learn anything as it still is deaf to peoples opinions/expectations/feedback. Just as an example: take a look at your issue tracker and the managerial approach at what should gain the focus of developers. Issues live there unsolved for more than a _decade_. Mozillians don't care what people want, they work on things THEY are interested in. Or maybe in what their nutjob of a manager tells them to work on.

5. I was a firefox user since it's quite early days and it's Mozilla's actions that made me switch to Chromium. With Google Chrome (being the base for Chromium) I at least know what evilcorp Google is. And they do. They don't claim to be the defenders of the weak.

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