501–510 of 1001 posts
4.5 months severance for the laid off employees. Doesn't say anything about any cuts to executive compensation however. https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Message-...
Every single C-suite executive should be required to take a (2 * % of employees laid off) pay cut. Lay off 25% of your company? Enjoy your 50% pay cut. Have to lay off 50%? Enjoy working unpaid for a year while you rebuild.
Over 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…
They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I donate $20 a year to Mozilla. I like the product. I hope they will keep focus making great browser and not get distracted with other things.
While donating to Mozilla Foundation is a great cause [1], none of those funds go to funding Mozilla Corporation, and thus Firefox. If you want your funds to go toward MoCo (and thus Firefox development), your best bet is to subscribe to Mozilla VPN or Pocket Premium. [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/
So while i think i will get the VPN, Pocket on the otherhand... is just meh to me. Products where i give some cloud company a ton of data, even if a good company, is just not an interesting problem for an honest company to solve.
VPN is meaningful. Privacy in general is meaningful. Basic necessities like identity and communication are meaningful.
Pocket is a really nice feature and a good UX, but just not interesting to me for the company goals. If it makes them money i'm happy, but it's just mildly more interesting to me than Mozilla Tiktok might be.
I really hope they embrace the essentials to the web, and make a profit doing so. VPN seems like the right direction (though i'm dying for it on desktop). Pocket, less so... to me.
Over 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…
They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?
Over 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…
Like an addict, Mozilla became dependent upon the revenue they earned from their Google and Yahoo search deals. Search compliance requirements then prevented them from innovating in the areas you mentioned (and others). Mozilla had an opportunity to reduce the search dependency and transition to a subscription business around 2014-2015 when the paid consumer VPN market started to scale, but based on the internal ince…
I view Mozilla as a privacy leader in a very small market dominated by giants. Microsoft gets users for free thanks to Windows, Apple does the same twice as well thanks to iOS, Mac and the browser not being complete cancer. Chrome has Google and YouTube to drive its users, not to mention first mover advantage in the industry. What does Mozilla have to drive Firefox users? Nothing, it's not a tech giant.
The shear fact alone that they exist and can swing with the big boys is an unbelievable accomplishment in my book, certainly worthy of praise and a more nuanced interpretation of events. Privacy is their only angle as it's all that's left to them to compete. They're getting better and better and marketing this fact but that's also because the general population is getting more educated to the value of their data thanks to Snowdon and The Zuck.
To assert with confidence that they should have started charging users a subscription fee 6 years ago is ludicrous, you can't know that would have worked out. It still may not.
Additionally the VPN boom we've seen - and Mozilla is only now capitalizing on - is largely a symbiotic evolution which coincides with the rise of the streaming giants. e.g. The only reason my parents know what a VPN is, is because they want access to Netflix's US catalog which is far superior and geofenced.
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…
Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favic…
Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users; casual users are more numerous and less demanding. Chrome won the war a decade ago when it decided to focus aggressively on casual users, leaving Mozilla to deal with the fractious dregs of the power user market.
Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge. "But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests" Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There a…
If we're lucky the thing we want will be spun off of them before they wind down. Like, you know, how Firefox (Phoenix/Firebird) was born in the first place.
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…
I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. The tragedy…
Yes, you have perfectly described what I want.
To be fair, I also want this from typical, corporate, for-profit entities ...
Over 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…
They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?