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Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

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Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#31

Post by skywhopper »

chmod775 wrote: post #26

> its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run This always bugged me. Are they expecting Firefox to die? If that happened, there would be little reason for Mozilla to exist. The project lives and dies with the browser. Having a "plan B" is complete nonsense and an unnecessary distraction. I'm glad they're shifting focus back on…

Agreed. The goal was to create and maintain an open web browser. If the goal of Mozilla is now to ensure Mozilla continues to exist, that's a bad sign.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#32

Post by wmf »

chmod775 wrote: post #26

> its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run This always bugged me. Are they expecting Firefox to die? If that happened, there would be little reason for Mozilla to exist. The project lives and dies with the browser. Having a "plan B" is complete nonsense and an unnecessary distraction. I'm glad they're shifting focus back on…

I hope the idea is for the profits from other products to fund Firefox but so far every attempt has failed.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#34

Post by coryrc »

noirscape wrote: post #22
Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicting: swappable on "nightly" versions only and release versions are 100% "I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that"

That's more a Chrome thing than a Firefox thing.

I see you aren't a Firefox Mobile user.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#35

Post by zuminator »

skywhopper wrote: post #27

Sure sounds like they haven't learned any lessons from past trend-chasing. They are shutting down their VR world and their Mastodon instance. This content-free AI promise just sounds like more of the same desperate grabbing for hype, while also cutting jobs and notably not mentioning any actual initiatives to prop up the core product and actual reason for Mozilla's existence. The main difference between the past hype…

Not quite shutting down mozilla.social yet, just scaling back for now it seems.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#36

Post by chasd00 »

jsheard wrote: post #33
pupppet wrote: post #25

The new CEO mantra...nobody got fired for pivoting to AI.

Not yet, at least.

I was on a call this morning where a team had decided to break it to their leadership that genai was not the answer they thought it was going to be. I bet there's going to be a lot of that this year.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#37

Post by [deleted] »

elric wrote: post #23
Dwedit wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already AI in there, see the current Translation feature.

Perfect example of why this is a bad idea. There is no immediately obvious way to turn off this obnoxious feature, which insists on hogging part of my precious screen real estate. By default, it only has a poorly worded way to disable it for a single language, but no way to simply turn it off forever. (Yes, you can disable it in about:config). If I want something translated, I'll ask for it. Feel free to add a menu i…

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#40

Post by mozempthrowaway »

pavon wrote: post #30

Backing off of VPN, Relay and Monitor sounds like bad news. They are the Mozilla's only source of income if the Google search deal goes away. Mozilla's financial statements never detailed how much money they were spending on their different segments, so perhaps those projects weren't generating profit, and thus weren't worth keeping even though they brought in revenue. I can certainly see how it would be hard to comp…

It fluctuates a little bit but 80-85% of revenue comes from search deals with Google being the dominant one. Everything else has a lot of overhead because nothing is developed in house; it’s just white labeled. VPN is Mullvad, Monitor is OneRep, etc. So even that 15% of revenue doesn’t/barely covers all the product/marketing/etc personnel that work on those teams.

Every quarter that segment is behind forecasts - pocket too - mostly because the forecasts are widely optimistic. It’s not a viable business strategy to pursue them much further.

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