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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

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Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#581

Post by luckylion »

Santosh83 wrote: post #290
dblohm7 wrote: post #258

[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…

> And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product.

I'm not sure how many there are that would pay for it, but I'm sure it's not zero.

I believe a browser is like an IDE, and I'm quite happy to pay for mine, as are plenty of other people apparently, JetBrains & Co are making good money. They are focused on their users though, which Firefox isn't.

I'm pretty sure that Firefox could get plenty of paying users at $100/yr even just by focusing on good developer experience. They don't though, and Chromium does.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#582

Post by mulmen »

wtetzner wrote: post #222
spinningslate wrote: post #210

I feel for everyone who will lose their job here. That's never a pleasant thing, particularly so in current circumstances. Notwithstanding that though - and with no disrespect to anyone being laid off - I'm actually really encouraged by this. The key quote from the announcement is this one: "Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire la…

I would also happily pay for Firefox. I'm not sure if it would be better or worse for the browser though, in terms of market share. If they don't charge for it, hopefully they can cover costs with other paid services, like their VPN service. Honestly, it would be great if Mozilla could provide privacy focused cloud services like storage, email, etc. I'd gladly pay for it, knowing they are not interested in collecting…

How long do you think Mozilla can resist the temptation to monetize your data? Personally I prefer they don't try to run these services because the concentration of data is too much of a temptation for anyone. You already have email and storage options. Mozilla just needs to offer a way to pay for Firefox directly.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#583

Post by Silhouette »

est31 wrote: post #513
segphault wrote: post #432

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 failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME I agree about the EME point, but for h.264 they did stand up and lost. I can remember h.264 not working in Firefox for a long time while it did work on Chrome. It probably cost them a lot of users, but at some point you have to stop and realize that you are harming yourself more than advancing the cause.

As a point of interest, Google had announced that Chrome would not be supporting H.264 around that same period, but then backtracked and never removed it.

Edit: IIRC, it may have been the built-in support/licence for H.264 on Windows and Macs that kept the support in Chrome, so those running Chrome on other OSes might not have been so lucky.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#584

Post by leeoniya »

DivisionSol wrote: post #293
Santosh83 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.) I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.

1000% this. i was literally writing the same comment. just have an easy way for me to selectively donate $15/month to Rust, Servo, Firefox, Thunderbird, whatever. instead you get some generic bucket with no possibility to really vote with your money.

e.g. i would have never paid for the A/R stuff they distracted their Servo engineers with (plus the Magic Leap entanglement). i would have also withheld funding for the non-removable Pocket integration fiasco. and the jack-in-the-box Mr. Robot promotion - once my tools start to become Mozilla's agents rather then user's agents, they cease to be my tools.

i should add that people who choose to use firefox rather than the default are those who are most likely to pay. not listening to them is absolute nonsense.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#585

Post by xxs »

lazyjeff wrote: post #492
discardable_dan wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a large gap between "focus on the browser" and "make Firefox slightly better." People forget that Firefox gave the world tabbed browsing. Sure, it was around before, but Firefox was the drive and impetus that moved it from a niche idea to the default option across every browser . That was over a decade ago. Firefox has the opportunity to execute a vision of modern web-browsing again. And, frankly, we really…

I seem to remember that Opera was the first stand-alone browser that brought the world tabbed browsing. People switched to Opera for that and its fast performance. Other browsers including Mozilla copied the feature to catch up. Opera was the source of browser interface innovation and I wish we could replicate that process. They also invented popup blocking, speed dial (the default blank tab UI now on every browser),…

>Chrome+Firefox iterated on that concept.

Chrome, of course. It integrated google straight in the URL. To this day, I still don't use URL as a search bar, and press ctrl+K (instead of ctrl+L)...

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#586

Post by mulmen »

Nightshaxx wrote: post #76

While I definitely think Mozilla is great for the internet, their main product is terrible from a business perspective. Trying to monitize a piece of free software that you are selling on this privacy benifits is a loosing battle. The reason free software is free is _because_ it can sell more valuable ads by using your data. Products that you pay directly for don't need to worry about selling ads so they don't have t…

It's especially a losing battle when you offer no way to pay for the product.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#587

Post by yarrel »

dblohm7 wrote: post #258

[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…

> Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?

No.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#588

Post by xxs »

Blake_Emigro wrote: post #308
DCKing wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. This is short term thinking. A slightly better Firefox tomorrow is nice I guess, buy I care way more about being able to use Firefox in 2030, or 2040. Making a browser is not looking like a business model that is going to make you last forever - not when Google is your competition. Their business model already depends on…

The only 10X browser improvement that can be made these days is if it cuts RAM use by 1/2 compared to the others, (and isn't tied to crypto). I would pay for this!

>RAM use by 1/2 compared to the others

That's javascript mostly. Hard to optimize it away.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#590

Post by betterunix2 »

Santosh83 wrote: post #290
dblohm7 wrote: post #258

[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…

"the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal"

It is more like people are willing to dismiss bad behavior when there is a clear profit motive, since it seems obvious that when someone is in it for the money they will ignore other considerations. Take the profit motive out of the picture and people start to imagine other motives or attribute bad behavior to negative character traits, even when the behavior is generally better than the for-profit counterparts'.

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