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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

#911

Post by jaylittle »

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…

Whats got me bent out of shape is that your bosses fired the entire threat management team. That's why I'm spending hours switching to UnGoogled Chromium today.

So long Firefox and thanks for all the fish!

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

#912

Post by mikorym »

komali2 wrote: post #256
mikorym wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with this: > Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There is also this: > As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation. [1] (January 28th 2020) I think that proper email and calendar is what people need too. It's a big market and something you would more obviously pay for than a browser. Pro…

We had an issue where my mom's company had email set up through like, godaddy or some shit. And to have calendar invites work (including people sending google calendar invites, or my mom sending them invites), it was some extra charge that her boss wasn't willing to pay. I explored a bunch of possibilities, then on a whim threw Thunderbird on her machine, set up IMAP/SMTP, and tried sending her a calendar invite. It…

Yes, you are right, Thunderbird is the good workaround for Protonmail too. Some people are just too lazy to go beyond a web app.

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

#913

Post by mikorym »

iaml wrote: post #768
mikorym wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with this: > Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There is also this: > As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation. [1] (January 28th 2020) I think that proper email and calendar is what people need too. It's a big market and something you would more obviously pay for than a browser. Pro…

> Protonmail doesn't have a good calendar That's about to change though, beta is already out for payed users.

Do you have a link?

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

#914

Post by s0l1dsnak3123 »

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 think your critique is the only reasonable one I've read so far. Mozilla need to go back to their radical roots, refocus their energy for the new decade, above all find a way to survive which doesn't compromise their integrity.

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

#915

Post by Nextgrid »

dfabulich wrote: post #523

Mozilla should have a Mozilla club. Today, you can go to https://donate.mozilla.org/ and you can donate monthly, but you get nothing for it except the warm glow of helping Mozilla. Instead, Mozilla should have a private Discord for dues-paying club members, where participants have direct access to Mozilla decision makers, who should show up on a regular basis and do AMAs. Furthermore, the Mozilla club should nominate…

Donating to Mozilla goes to the foundation, not the company. This funds various initiatives that you may find useful or not but does not go directly to the browser. As far as I know there is no actual way to pay/donate and have that money allocated to the browser only.

On the other hand, I disagree with your proposal. When I pay for software, content or a service I pay because I want the service/content, not because I want to join some kind of social club or receiving useless merch cluttering my wardrobe.

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

#916

Post by acdha »

DoctorNick wrote: post #632
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 don't hold Mozilla to higher standards. I just expect Mozilla to make a decent browser. Firefox is not a decent browser anymore compared to its competition. Its performance and security is lagging severely behind Chrome, and it doesn't really respect privacy any more than Chrome does in its default configuration. Pretty much the only two advantages it has right now are containers, and the fact that it's not Chrome.…

> Its performance and security is lagging severely behind Chrome, and it doesn't really respect privacy any more than Chrome does in its default configuration.

The first two points haven’t been true for years and the second is debatable - Firefox’s tracking protection certainly seems to be more effective.

The problem for Mozilla is that this doesn’t matter enough: Firefox feels faster than Chrome, but both are fine in normal use and your web browsing experience will be most affected by the site you’re using needing a ton of JavaScript rather than the browser. Similarly, their developer tools have a bunch of nice features but the developer experience is pretty decent in every browser so it’s not a distinguishing factor the way it used to be.

Browsers have been commodified and that’s the core of Mozilla’s business while Google has a ton of ad revenue to support Chrome no matter what happens.

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

#917

Post by iaml »

mikorym wrote: post #913
iaml wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Protonmail doesn't have a good calendar That's about to change though, beta is already out for payed users.

Do you have a link?

https://protonmail.com/blog/protoncalendar-beta-announcement...

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

#918

Post by jopsen »

stonogo wrote: post #715
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…

It's not withering away because of minor mistakes; it's withering away because of major mistakes. Those mistakes are largely in corporate governance -- this is the reason so many are furious about the $2.5MM salary for a CEO at the helm of a market-share death spiral. Every single product line except Firefox is an also-ran from a revenue standpoint. How does Baker respond? Fire the Servo team, and tell an interviewer…

The argument for DRM is that it ships in a sandbox built by Mozilla.

But hey, I'm sure that if Mozilla didn't ship DRM, video codecs, etc, the browser would have been more popular.

Firefox is actually useful.

DNS lookups are safer with a provider vetted by Mozilla. They were able to negotiate a contract you wouldn't have been able to get. Ensuring you more privacy.

But sure bash Mozilla for trying to be pragmatic, privacy and features is not a trivial thing to balance.

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

#919

Post by def_true_false »

mda wrote: post #655
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…

You forgot something, Chrome was also significantly better than all other browsers technically.

Maybe the internals.

Chrome UI was (and is) total shit compared to Opera (Presto Opera, not the new Blink one). The tab bar was literally unusable for like 10 years if you had more than ~20 tabs open.

Last time I used Windows without an SSD, Chrome kept stalling on IO every couple minutes (for some profile or temp files bs), fixed by symlinking to a ramdisk.

Chrome still can't properly VSYNC, can't keep a stable framerate and has unnecessary frames of input lag.

When (if) they make ad blocking impossible, they will lose every single tech savvy user they have.

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

#920

Post by TheBobinator »

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…

What you advertise your product as will always stick with people.

History Lesson. Back in the early 00's we all used IE and Proxomitron to block undesirable web elements. Firefox, Safari, and Netscape all existed, but IE6 was constantly forcing companies to break them.

Then, Firefox came out with Tabbed browsing and plugins, something that took IE years to catch up on. You could use adblock with firefox as early as I believe version 2 or 3 and that was very effective at blocking web advertising and undesriable elements as well as making the web more convenient to work with.

Then late 00's Google decided it wanted to be an advertising company, and its interest in Firefox changed and firefox was was pulled down the path of becoming an company selling advertising.

Today, they do things like quietly implimenting DNS in HTTPS, which we all know is aimed at ads and ad targeting. All while putting up cutsie pages with animated animals in them about their product with undertones about sticking it to the man.

The reason people flog you and your organization on the internet is they have very, very long memories and know what bullshit looks like.

Try forking firefox into a ruthlessly ad-removing, DRM abusing, secure, privacy protecting, enterprise quality version of what it is today with vastly simplified configuration options and sell it for $25 a year. Then you'll get some attention, otherwise, you're being paid to not compete.

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