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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

#121

Post by autoexec »

mozempthrowaway wrote: post #29
rvense wrote: post #16

Is there any sort of corporate structure around one of the forks? There's no doubt in my mind that if it were organized somehow the community would be able to fund a few developers to work on Firefox alongside Mozilla. I don't want an aggressive split, but I'd like to be able to support the project. I've donated to Mozilla in the past but it apparently was not going to Firefox directly.

You shouldn’t donate. The donations don’t go to MoCo which is the for profit subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation under which FF is developed. All the donations go to MoFo, where they barely covered Mitchell’s salary and what was left went to her pet political projects. People are pretty unaware/misled about how Mozilla is structured/funded. The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep and use Google as the…

> The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep and use Google as the default search engine.

You could contribute with code I guess, or if you just want to throw money at the project hire a developer to fix a couple bugs. As a bonus you get to pick the bugs.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#122

Post by perilunar »

pwb25 wrote: post #95
xuhu wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop linux market share is below 2% yet people aren't talking about it being on its last legs like with Firefox. How does Firefox's 3.5% market share prevent people from using it ? Is the 180,000,000 number of monthly active users simply too low ?

wow you are right, they have 3,5%. I thought they had like 25-30%. Safari had 18% apparently, I know 0 people who use Safari

iOS is about ~30% of the global mobile market and ~60% of the US market, and most iOS users use Safari as their browser. So you probably do know people who use Safari.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#123

Post by perilunar »

egberts1 wrote: post #116

First job of next Mozilla CEO is to fire the board and move the corporate headquarter to Germany. There, I've gone and said the quiet part.

I like this idea. Germany (10.2%) and Romania (16.6%) have the highest use of Firefox.

https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/browser-usage-statistics/#Web-...

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#125

Post by Tagbert »

pwb25 wrote: post #95
xuhu wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop linux market share is below 2% yet people aren't talking about it being on its last legs like with Firefox. How does Firefox's 3.5% market share prevent people from using it ? Is the 180,000,000 number of monthly active users simply too low ?

wow you are right, they have 3,5%. I thought they had like 25-30%. Safari had 18% apparently, I know 0 people who use Safari

Isn’t that because it includes mobile which is heavily incumbent oriented. I think the FF share on desktop is higher.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#126

Post by doix »

pcwalton wrote: post #83
antisthenes wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's future was written when they abandoned the rich add-on ecosystem and tried to compete with Chrome by being user-friendly to normies. In the end, they lost both the power users and the regular crowd (which will use Chrome or Edge, because those come bundled or are advertised on front page of Google).

It'd certainly be convenient if it were true, but the rate of Firefox's market share decline was completely unaffected by the switch to Web Extensions. There are Firefox forks out there that still keep the legacy add-on interface around, and they of course get comparatively very little use, because very few people actually care. And, of course, "being user-friendly to normies" has always been among Firefox's chief go…

It's what got me off FF for a long time. I stuck around on FF 52 ESR(I think?) for ages, the last version to work with pentadactyl.

Then I finally switched to Chrome because it was much faster than FF and my extensions were dead anyway. I switched back a few years ago because FF became good enough again. I wouldn't be surprised if others did the same (and possibly didn't switch back).

When I switched, everyone I provided tech support in my family for also switched. I did not switch them back because I don't think it's worth inconveniencing them at this point.

Obviously my case is a miniscule amount of people, but it wouldn't surprise me if the story wasn't somewhat common.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#127

Post by msub2 »

mardifoufs wrote: post #111
msub2 wrote: post #46

While I always marveled at how Hubs survived the 2020 layoffs (which included the people working on WebVR/WebXR at the time), seeing it shutting down is a shame. We used it to run monthly meetups for the WebXR Discord for just about the last 3 years. Very curious what's going to happen to it now, whether it gets handed off to another entity (i.e. Firefox Reality to Igalia) or left to the community somehow.

Is it open source? If so, could it be realistically hosted somewhere else?

Yes, both the Hubs client and related backend services (Reticulum, Dialog, etc) are all open source, but it's somewhat difficult to stand up manually. There's Hubs Community Edition which launched late last year that lets you spin up everything necessary in a Kubernetes cluster, which is what I've been working on getting set up on a small Hetzner VPS.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#128

Post by jwrallie »

pdimitar wrote: post #104

AI in browser? Time to move on after all this time then. Is librewolf good? Or any other browser? I recently provisioned a Linux workstation and I'm very reluctant to install Chrome. The super insecure X11 will not help it stop practically scanning my every key stroke. Any good ideas for a browser on Linux XFCE?

Are any of the forks targeting the long term release of Firefox?

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#129

Post by pdimitar »

jwrallie wrote: post #128
pdimitar wrote: post #104

AI in browser? Time to move on after all this time then. Is librewolf good? Or any other browser? I recently provisioned a Linux workstation and I'm very reluctant to install Chrome. The super insecure X11 will not help it stop practically scanning my every key stroke. Any good ideas for a browser on Linux XFCE?

Are any of the forks targeting the long term release of Firefox?

I have no clue, that's partially why I am asking.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#130

Post by Lockal »

Welcome to the train: Companies Say 'Layoffs' Without Saying 'Layoffs' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352293

In this week's episode:

* Grammarly Restructures Business to Align With Company Strategy and Accelerate Growth

* Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo

* SAP shares surge to all-time high after results, plans to restructure 8,000 jobs in push to AI

* "JPL Workforce Update" (hey! what about AI???)

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