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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

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

#961

Post by notyourday »

ivalm wrote: post #772
gfodor wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common refrain, but is anything but obvious. Focusing on the browser could be a losing strategy. I'd argue it probably is. The trajectory is terrible: the tech is being commoditized (WebKit, Chromium) and the market share picture is bleak. The opportunity cost is huge: maintaining a web engine, one which basically just tries to keep up with the others put out by Google et al, takes armies of people that could perha…

Mozilla is a non-profit which, in my view, is valuable only as a chromium alternative. Why must it be big/etc? Being a megacorp shouldn’t be Mozilla’s goal.

Without being a mega corp, Mozilla execs won't get mega bonuses and become mega rich.

This is the fundamental problem with Mozilla.

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

#962

Post by jmnicolas »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #957
vages wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 If the purpose of Mozilla is to fight systematic racism, then I'm sorry building a web browser and running a VPN is a terrible way to go about it and the leadership team should be removed.

Yeah, somehow I thought their mission was to build the best web browser, silly me!

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

#963

Post by xg15 »

jopsen wrote: post #918
stonogo wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, pr…

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

Actually, I was long since wondering how exactly that sandbox works, so if you have some more information about that, I'd appreciate it.

Henri Sivonen's general explanation of EME and CDMs[1] tells the following:

> A CDM could be bundled with the browser, downloaded separately, bundled with the operating system, embedded in hardware as firmware running in a second domain of computing (such as ARM TrustZone) or wired into hardware. EME leaves this aspect implementation-dependent. [...]

EME does not specify the output abstraction for CDMs. It leaves open several options. The CDM could:

- Merely perform decryption and hand back the encoded media (e.g. H.264) to the browser.

[...]

- Perform decryption and decoding and then work together with the GPU so that not even the operating system gets the opportunity to read the pixels back from the GPU.

Meanwhile, Mozilla's implementation of EME seems to be substantially more restrictive[2]:

> Firefox does not load [the CDM] directly. Instead, we wrap it into an open-source sandbox. In our implementation, the CDM will have no access to the user’s hard drive or the network. Instead, the sandbox will provide the CDM only with communication mechanism with Firefox for receiving encrypted data and for displaying the results.

[...]

in Firefox the sandbox prohibits the CDM from fingerprinting the user’s device. Instead, the CDM asks the sandbox to supply a per-device unique identifier.

However, if the sandbox works as explained, the DRM seems to be trivially defeatable: I can simply fork Firefox and modify the sandbox, so it lies to the CDM about the fingerprinting and/or captures the decrypted media stream and writes it to a file - so then, how did Mozilla get Hollywood to agree on this?

On the other hand, if the CDM has some means to verify that Firefox has not been tampered with, then it can escape the sandbox - so then, what is the point of the sandbox?

[1] https://hsivonen.fi/eme/ [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/reconciling-mozillas-missi...

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

#964

Post by ldiracdelta »

ZekeSulastin wrote: post #442
ldiracdelta wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may wish to consider Brave. https://brave.com/

The browser built around ad replacement and blockchain payments? Seriously?

Soo... don't do the blockchain stuff. They have a built-in ad-blocker and I see very few ads. You install a blank page chrome extension and you don't see their new tab ads either. Practically, a chrome downstream-mod that strips as much telemetry and google spying as possible is a simpler way to get rid of the parts of chrome one doesn't like.

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

#965

Post by [deleted] »

johnsea wrote: post #846
vages wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The opening, coming from a super well paid CEO, pissed me off. I need a good browser, maybe with accompaigned products but no save the internet, racism, bl, etc. Most likely won't ever support Mozilla with such language.

[deleted]

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

#966

Post by nec4b »

staktrace wrote: post #193
stingraycharles wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for capturing my feelings around this so well. I absolutely love Firefox, but I can’t help but feel Mozilla’s ambitions are hurting them rather than helping them. Don’t get me wrong; their “distractions” have given the world a lot of nice things (Rust comes to mind). But first and foremost, Mozilla’s mission should be to ensure a great, competitive browser, and they’re losing the competition badly. And imho th…

Mozilla's mission is to make the internet a better place for everybody. Having an open web browser is a part of that, but nowhere near sufficient to accomplish the goal. The "vanity ambitions" you are talking about are the things that actually make a long-term difference in people's lives. Having a great competitive browser with a silo'd, broken up Internet is not a desirable end-state.

Besides the browser, in what way do they make the internet a better place?

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

#967

Post by dependenttypes »

galacticdessert wrote: post #10
s9w wrote: post #3

Seeing Mozilla burn fills my heart with joy. Maybe they will be forced to be an actual software dev company instead of a political activist group. But even in this post they had to shove in 'racism' in the headline.

Fighting racism and fighting for human rights is something that happens to be important when your focus is not only making profit

Sadly considering their behaviour regarding ads, the default search engine, telemetry, sending the sites that you visit to google, pocket, etc it seems that they no longer care about making the internet a better place and that their focus it profit.

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

#968

Post by dependenttypes »

DonHopkins wrote: post #903
nobodyandproud wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody claimed that.

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

#969

Post by JohnBooty »

themacguffinman wrote: post #848
JohnBooty wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind any of Mozilla's mistakes. Like you say: Mozilla is exemplary when it comes to getting things right when they screw up. What I mind is that I can't take Mozilla seriously at all. They keep trying new projects. I laugh every time because I know it will be gone in six to twelve months. Right now Mozilla is offering VPN service. Theoretically, I am the ideal customer. I care about privacy and security and m…

> So I can have the rug pulled out from me in six months? This reasoning is silly and bizarre. What, exactly, is the massive risk you're taking when you use a VPN that could go away at some point? Not only is a VPN a commodity that many other service providers can easily fill if the worst was to happen, Mozilla's VPN is just a rebrand of Mullvad which would be a cinch to switch to. So much for trusting Mozilla and ca…

You are factually correct, of course - of all their random, scattered efforts, the "cost" of finding another VPN provided and switching to it is not large.

I still disagree greatly with your conclusions.

    What, exactly, is the massive risk you're 
    taking when you use a VPN that could go away at some point?
I didn't say it was "massive." I

In reality, the cost to me would be "only" a few hours of research to find a suitable alternative if/when Mozilla folds their VPN service.

Still, like most people, I rely on a lot of software and a lot of services in my life. I work many hours per week. I don't like to spend my limited free time fixing crap and making lateral jumps to alternative things and services if I can help it, unless there's some sizable advantage. If I had to spend an hour or three on everything in my life every six months, it would add up to a lot and I choose to spend the finite hours of my life differently.

    So much for trusting Mozilla and caring about privacy and security.
This doesn't follow. Mozilla has a history of introducing and subsequently shuttering many services, so therefore I don't care about "privacy and security?"

For whatever it's worth: I care deeply about Mozilla (and privacy and security) and I do support them financially via donations.

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

#970

Post by contingencies »

fulafel wrote: post #927
contingencies wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The features described are not present in any browser today. People will install any app with "the cool new thing". Never underestimate the power of mass psychology / herd behavior.
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