Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

techcrunch.com

71–80 of 187 posts

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#71
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The monkey's paw outcome is they re-focus on the browser, but follow Opera and Edge in pivoting to Yet Another Chromium Reskin, massively cutting their development costs while technically remaining in the browser market. Hopefully it doesn't come to that but I'm not ruling it out.

This would be very sad. One browser engine would be really bad for the web

Genuine question: why is it bad for the web?

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#72

So many people I know don't switch to FF because of missing tab grouping (and no, not a single addon gives the similar fast and nice experience). It's like number one feature and yet they waste time on stuff like this

I would love to use FF but dev tools in FF feels clunky and slow compared to Chromium. It also seems to have some kind of rendering slowness on my Wayland machine that Chrome doesn't have (i.e. 3fps). Not that dev tools is on par with something as fundamental as tab grouping, but I share the frustration of Moz doing silly shit instead of polishing the basics.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#73
post #53
post #39

The new CEO, Laura Chambers, is an MBA and a former McKinsey consultant ([1]). I would not hold my breath about the future of Firefox. 1. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/details/experience...

Maybe time to fork Firefox.

Those already exist. The problem is the Mozilla organization has all the money and they piss it away because they are controlled by corporate types who care more about not pissing off their past and future bosses at Google more than pushing open and privacy protecting web standards.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#74
post #69
post #60

I will ditch Firefox the moment they introduce some shitty chatbot no one asked for. I'm already absolutely fed up with the constant problems, missing features and pages failing to work properly.

Interested what problems you’re experiencing? I use Firefox daily on Mac and Windows and can’t think of a single problem or failing page?

I use Firefox on Android and, although I love having extensions on mobile, it bothers me that it freezes about once per day. Granted, it restarts automatically on the page I was reading before, so it isn't that annoying.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#75
"AI"

Well, the company is fucked. I wonder who will pick up the pieces of the browser tech.

There are two pieces of tech that AI might apply to:

1) Semantic ad-blocking (this will fuck up their only source of reliable revenue so it won't happen)

2) content filtering for a child-friendly mode. This actually is a good idea, but it won't happen because it'll be easily repurposed to perform bullet point #1.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#77
post #39

The new CEO, Laura Chambers, is an MBA and a former McKinsey consultant ([1]). I would not hold my breath about the future of Firefox. 1. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/details/experience...

How soon before she gives herself a raise? Sorry hackernews, I mean her friends on the board give her a raise?

Because as far as Firefox can tell, that seems to be the job of the Mozilla CEO.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#78
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 - pock…

They do have their own software for connecting to their VPN, and it is worse than the one from Mullvad. I don't think any significant developer time is spent on improving the software.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#79

So many people I know don't switch to FF because of missing tab grouping (and no, not a single addon gives the similar fast and nice experience). It's like number one feature and yet they waste time on stuff like this

Sideberry provides basically this feature. Its fast. I have over a 100 tabs open right now. I can read the name of every tab, and can group them however I want.
Post reply on HN