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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

blog.mozilla.org

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

#81

Post by henriquez »

s9w wrote: post #34
henriquez wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems a little extreme. You'd prefer Google/Chromium to be a complete monopoly because you don't like the political views of the company that develops Firefox?

On the contrary. I want FF to succeed and reclaim its rightful throne. But that's not going to happen with the current hyper-politicized Mozilla

I don't agree with all of Mozilla's politics either, and yes it's Free/Libre software and anyone could fork it, but there is no group more well-positioned to make Firefox a success than the people who built it. It's the Internet, you've got to take the good with the bad; in Mozilla's case the good far outweighs the nuisance of their often-partisan fundraising.

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

#82

Post by hu3 »

marmshallow wrote: post #55

If this makes you sad or pissed off, the best thing you can do is donate. I just donated for $15 for the first time. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

Now repeat that donation another 164000 times and you'll have donated their CEO's income in 2018.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo...

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

#83

Post by Cthulhu_ »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #28
sciurus wrote: post #7

250 people, roughly 25% of the company, were laid off today. This is on top of the 70 laid off in January (discussion of that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737 )

Why Mozilla has almost 1,000 employees blows my mind. Isn't this an project for an open source web browser?

How many people do you think a browser's team + all components + support + management + marketing + finances need? Chromium alone has 1700+ contributors (https://github.com/chromium/chromium), Firefox has hundreds of "core contributors" (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community#Core_Contributor) and many more beyond those.

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

#84

Post by esarbe »

justapassenger wrote: post #18

This announcement is very strong in corporate speak. Main takeaway is that they’re out of money and need to are going to focus on making money?

Making a browsers requires developers, developers cost money.

Since not enough people are donating, they have to figure out how to make money otherwise.

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

#85

Post by shock »

calcifer wrote: post #45
user1980 wrote: post #21

"New focus on economics": It was bad enough seeing terrible clickbait in the "Recommended by Pocket" section displayed on every new tab. Now I have to go into settings to opt-out of Sponsored Stories so I don't have to see ads for Honey. All to fund the so-called "internet activist movement"? I just want a web browser, not an ideology.

> I just want a web browser Excellent! How much are you planning on contributing?

Can you make a financial contribution that goes solely towards Firefox and not towards some other Mozilla activities?

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

#86

Post by input_sh »

shock wrote: post #78
fsflover wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, please make a monthly donation to Mozilla if you can. You will contribute to saving the world. https://donate.mozilla.org/

I wonder how many more people would donate if they knew the donation would be spent on making Firefox better and not on political activism.

That doesn't work with their current structure. Foundation can receive donations, Corporation (itself a subsidiary of the foundation) can sell products (like Mozilla VPN).

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

#88

Post by rvz »

kvark wrote: post #2

That's the last call for anybody who thinks "it's good that Mozilla exists, and its mission is important, but I'm still using Chrome and derivatives". Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.

> Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.

Absolutely. It has to stand on its own feet. Yet the only reason Mozilla is being kept alive is due to Google paying them to be the default search engine as part of a deal which is where the majority of their revenue is from. [0]

Funny how their mission in "supporting internet privacy" also somehow means we must have deals with companies with the likes of Google who don't believe in Mozilla's own mission in order to survive.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/

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

#89

Post by thefrog »

Sorry, but Mozilla started their downhill slide after the situation that forced Eich out. Mitchell Baker is complicit in this backstabbing.

I haven't used a Mozilla product since- until their leadership and mission change meaningfully to remove themselves from identity politics, I will continue to not use them.

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

#90

Post by emptyparadise »

rswail wrote: post #5

"Focusing Firefox On Users In order to refocus the Firefox organization on core browser growth through differentiated user experiences, we are reducing investment in some areas such as developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team." So what is the impact on things like Servo/Rust, and the core browser?…

Strange, I can't see that sentence in the post.
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