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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
441–450 of 1001 posts
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#442This makes me feel worried. I have come to rely on Firefox as the antidote to Google's data collection machine and it would be unfortunate if Firefox also goes the same way with this new focus.
You may wish to consider Brave. https://brave.com/
The browser built around ad replacement and blockchain payments? Seriously?
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#443These posts always make me wish that hackernews has a way to block posts from certain users. These kind of posts always bring out the hateful comments and if I look at their posting history a lot of times they seem to post mostly hateful comments. Call it a filter bubble if you want but I would rather not waste my time trying to convince them they are wrong and would rather be able to block them.
I feel the same. A friend wrote an extension that allows you to do this and my life has been much better. It just kills threads made by users I don't like.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#444I find this sad, Mozilla is really an advocate for the open web and web standards. Since web browsers are free, they can't make much. They might be able to sell something like Thunderbird; if they improve it and make it more into a service, like Hey! for example. They could also try the sponsorship model that a lot of open source projects are doing. They already have sponsors, but maybe sponsors for their open source…
Mozilla made over $500M revenue in 2017 and $451M in 2018. Apparently the decline has continued, but it should still be enough to develop a browser. I would guess that Firefox is profitable but all of Mozilla's other things are dragging them down.
classic story of envy driving you to be worse than that what you envy - was shocked to get to know some Mozilla folks and find out that they _fly everyone to week-long "offsites" at resorts_. Because something something gotta be competitive...
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#445The cynic in me can't help but wonder if this "new focus on making money" is why they suddenly decided to cripple the android version of firefox.
Can you elaborate?
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#446Sounds like Servo, the next-generation browser engine that brought the world Rust, is one of the teams being destaffed: https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960
The whole thing is open source, isn't it?
I wonder if anybody else is interested in having it developed. Maybe if a couple of star developers currently being laid off, or redirected to other stuff, started to put more effort into it, and the community started supporting them with donations, that could speed things up?
Firefox is widely popular, and its popularity is also wide among the techs-savvy, well-paid people. Pledging to pay $10/mo for Firefox development would make a difference if, say 20k, or 50k people subscribed. I suspect there is a chance to achieve such numbers with a well-run campaign.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#447Why does Mozilla insist on Pocket?
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#448Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
So what are your suggestions? Let Mozilla die and enjoy Google monopoly in the web? No, thanks. I prefer a non-profit organization which "failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure".
By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#449Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
Do they have to be better in anything? I'm totally ok if they are just a little worse than Chrome but relatively independant. I don't see the browser space that endangered right now. As a casual user I din't see a problem if there even was a feature freeze for some time. I get that things are moving in some direction always but all this innovation about dumb websites is maybe overengineering
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#450[deleted]