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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

#921

Post by eloisant »

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 think the issue is multifold, but basically from what I've seen (including having multiple friends at Mozilla and visited their HQ multiple times), Mozilla is run exactly like any other Silicon Valley company.

Sure, there is no shareholders so there is this freedom, but people working there were basically hired after working in other tech companies, and they just work as they did in other tech companies. The fact that Mozilla Corporation is owned by a non-profit seems to be completely lost. Basically people are paid to improve metrics, whether it's the number of users, the ARPU, the "engagement" on whatever features they decided was important...

Add to that the fact that Firefox lagged technically behind Chrome for many years (it only recently cought up with Quantum) and UX wise also Firefox was stuck on the "IE6 but with tabs" look and feel and waited many years before accepting that the UX introduced by Chrome when it was released was superior.

As a result, now that casual users are on Chrome and the Firefox user base is mostly made of users who choose Firefox not because of its technical merits but because it's Open Source, supported by a non-profit, etc. There is a disconnect between that user base and the Mozilla Corporation who just thinks like any other SV company.

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

#922

Post by leshow »

leeoniya wrote: post #584
DivisionSol wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.) I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.

1000% this. i was literally writing the same comment. just have an easy way for me to selectively donate $15/month to Rust, Servo, Firefox, Thunderbird, whatever. instead you get some generic bucket with no possibility to really vote with your money. e.g. i would have never paid for the A/R stuff they distracted their Servo engineers with (plus the Magic Leap entanglement). i would have also withheld funding for the…

Apparently they fired the servo devs so you may not be able to support them at mozilla anymore anyway.

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

#923

Post by wwwwwwwww »

Vivaldi Browser.

Founded by former Opera devs, when Opera was sold to a Chinese company.

Vivaldi is a fully employee owned company, based on Norway.

The browser had tons of ready-to-use configuration options.

Very good privacy options, no external ad blocker needed.

A great option if you want to stop using Firefox (like I did a few weeks ago).

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

#925

Post by the_other »

macklemoreshair wrote: post #842
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…

Thanks for putting this all in perspective. Sounds like bad management to me, really unfortunate. Keeping the AI unit is nonsensical.

AI has been beset by problems of racial bias, and is currently only open to corporate giants. It makes perfect sense to try an manage core AI capability as an NGO exactly the same as it makes sense to manage an open, free browser.

You can argue that Mozilla specifically shouldn’t do this, and you might be right. But no-one else has their profile. No-one else is doing it.

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

#926

Post by zaat »

eloisant wrote: post #921
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 think the issue is multifold, but basically from what I've seen (including having multiple friends at Mozilla and visited their HQ multiple times), Mozilla is run exactly like any other Silicon Valley company. Sure, there is no shareholders so there is this freedom, but people working there were basically hired after working in other tech companies, and they just work as they did in other tech companies. The fact t…

Surely the option to have tabs organized vertically on the side of the windows instead of stuck crowded to uselessness on top can be considered as a technical merit.

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

#927

Post by fulafel »

contingencies wrote: post #333
jacquesm wrote: post #95

Mozilla 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…

Web is all mobile now. To get new users, Firefox needs mobile users. To differentiate, one idea is that Firefox create optional browser extensions to support local mesh networking over wifi or bluetooth and a container or VM for hosting servers as a safer and more portable alternative to native appstores. This would represent a step back from the FirefoxOS notion, but a step forward from the browser, and could drive…

Firefox is awesome on mobile today, it supports add-ons which other browsers don't and that alone is a huge advantage. Any mobile browser market share problems faceiing Mozilla don't seem technical to me.

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

#928

Post by yyyk »

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…

Don't take the complaints literally. It's all very simple.

Chrome is the technically better product, despite privacy issues (sorry). Many techies want to switch to Chrome. But it's against their self-described ideology. So they find some fault with Mozilla - there always will be - and that's the excuse they need, regardless of what Chrome does. Mozilla should focus about making a better product and ignoring minor complaints.

That said, Mozilla is mismanaged. Always was. I remember back before Firefox when Mozilla was the example of a mismanaged open source effect. It didn't change that much. It's just that IE stagnated and Opera was barely known (despite being by far better), so a trimmed Firefox could surge. Once actual competition got going, it was obvious FF would be a small minority. Linux prospered by getting community contributions from interested companies. Mozilla never managed to get to that stage.

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

#929

Post by craigsmansion »

missedthecue wrote: post #451
zobzu wrote: post #376

Mozilla 2010: "join us, don't work for the man, work for mankind!" (this was their actual slogan) Mozilla 2020: "well actually, work for the man" (or woman in this case) Sadly, even with Mozilla Foundation getting 40M in donations they need the Corporation to pay the bills (including Mitchell Baker's 2.5M/y salary) The fact that this makes it less likely Firefox continues to be competition for Chrome is bad news for…

This forum would be in uproar if the firm was offering their software devs $30k a year, but offering competitive pay for executives and managers is a sin incapable of restitution for some inconsistent reason.

> offering competitive pay for executives and managers

"competitive" is key here, it means they have to compete.

I know people on the work floor like to make jokes about executives golfing and yachting, but there is some truth to it that these executives are building and maintaining their network and that leads to contracts and revenue that keeps the company in business. That's what their worth is. That's the competition they have to be successful in.

Mozilla gets about 400M in free Google idiot money. If burning through that for a 2.5M salary but still having to fire 25% of your workforce means you are being competitive at the C-level, then most random people can do that for half the money; a quick 1.25M saved.

It's not about a C-level exec getting a large compensation. It's about them failing abjectly and not being worth a fraction of that money by normal management standards.

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

#930

Post by jefftk »

alex_young wrote: post #796

Mozilla, 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…

Apache projects are generally developed by a combination of interested volunteers and corporate-funded teams, not by employees of the Apache foundation.
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