Seems like Mozilla still hasn't learnt their lesson. Cut the crap and focus on Firefox. Too bad browsers became too large to maintain an independent community fork.
Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
131–140 of 187 posts
Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
That certainly wasn't Microsoft, they're still full on the "CoPilot" hype train, launching a confusing spectrum of different services all under the same name and all before they're actually ready
> launching a confusing spectrum of different services all under the same name .net all over again.
Yes indeed!
Microsoft is so incredibly bad at marketing. And really not great at products too. People don't pick them because they're the best at what they do, but because they're what everyone else uses and they're acceptable. The whole reason for Teams being adopted so heavily is because it comes with office and it's not bad enough to justify paying for something better. But when having used other products that were actually leading in their class, it's sometimes sad being stuck with it.
In this light I do understand their rush to capture the AI market, being first is just how they work.
Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
#133An org like Mozilla making a real effort to bring open, privacy-focused AI to Firefox is interesting for sure. But I hope they don't get too distracted by the AI hype train. Interesting that they are still as focused as ever on Pocket.
I'm actually shocked that even before these layoffs there was anyone working on Pocket. I have not noticed a new feature in this product for maybe 3 years, with numerous things getting worse. How big is the team? What are they doing all day?
Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
#134Backing 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…
and here I was, getting ready to sign up to their VPN service
Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
#135Backing 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…
I love firefox but I'd never support those initiatives. If I want a VPN I'll just get the full mullvad (in fact I did). The relay is not what I want, I'd want the same thing for web (similar to iCloud private relay for web). Mozilla was working on that but killed it and it was only ever US only so I couldn't use it anyway. Just let me pay for sync, or just let me donate to the firefox project directly (not the founda…
I get what you're saying about mullvad, but firefox having a VPN is one more way to get revenue.
Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
#136The 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...
Laura Chambers is only the interim CEO. In the original announcement post, it was stated that she would stay for the "remainder of this year", and Chambers later said that she would move to Australia in 2024 [1]. [1] https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-cha...
Usually somebody serving in an interim position doesn’t make big strategic changes.
Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
#137The 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.
Hey now, Google paid very good money for that antitrust testimony.
Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
#138"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.
#2 is just a document classification task, you can do it with DistilBERT.
Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does mobile Chromium still not have extensions? Why was Manifest v3 pushed so heavily? It's not for lack of resources: those are deliberate decisions made for business reasons. Brave pushed back as hard as possible against Manifest v3, Google refused to budge, and ultimately Google got its way, because Google, the corporate entity, completely controls Chromium's development.
>Brave pushed back as hard as possible against Manifest v3, Google refused to budge, and ultimately Google got its way OK, thanks for that, but Brave's decision might've been informed by the fact that Manifest v2 seems to make the user too vulnerable to purveyors of shady extensions, and is not really needed except for adblocking (or at least I'm unaware of any use cases except adblocking where Manifest v3 does not s…
Brave continues to ship Manifest v2. Technically Brave is a fork of Chromium for this reason, albeit one that hews close to upstream. The reason why Brave had to fork Chromium is that, again, Google completely controls Chromium's development, so they had no choice. Google couldn't care less what Brave thinks if Brave's goals run counter to their own business motivations.
Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is what is so frustrating about this technology. Everyone seems completely convinced this is going to be bigger than sliced bread but a year later, I haven't seen a truly good killer app. A year ago we had chatgpt, co-pilot, mid journey, and stable diffusion, and today we have basically the some products. I've seen a lot of bad code, a lot of boring prose, and a lot of bad art. Meanwhile there's people breathles…
The loudest people have the least to say, but I think there’s a lot of smart use cases beyond variation on chat bots.