Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products (opens in new tab)

When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layoff announcement is just inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls.

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 favicon service (which HN billed as some sort of nefarious tracker).

Vanta bypassed all this by not playing to the Security Puffery crowd. Usually a quick way to do that is to require money because the Security/Privacy Puffery crowd doesn't have any.

I'm a happy Firefox and Chrome user. Honestly, it's been working fine for me.

The tragedy of Mozilla is a very human one, with special embellishments added by the prevailing culture in the US, its home...

I would not be surprised if it was the same for other users. It results in implicitly giving less benefit of the doubt when another potential controversy comes up.

Other application developers are held to a lower standard because they have already come out the other side - people already simply assume the worst about them. The paradoxical anger comes from the fact that they don't want to do the same with Mozilla, but feel more and more that they'll have to.

What annoys me with Mozilla, again as much as I love Firefox and the spirit of Mozilla, is that the corporate leadership seems to ignore the project that works. New focus my ass, Mozilla needs to refocus on Firefox. Maybe you do, but it certainly doesn't seem like it from the outside.

Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close, yet corporate Mozilla seems to have forgotten about it, it's never a highlight in Mozilla Corp. communications, but it should be.

All this from an organization with the audacity to solicit donations from end-users.

So no, I would not say Mozilla has learned anything or worked to prevent it happening again. What has changed since the January layoffs except for the scale of the layoffs? In no world is running a company such that you have to boot a quarter of your workforce 'minor mistakes.'

The silver lining is that Mozilla's race to receivership won't make much of a difference. They haven't done much for web standards beyond co-signing Google's railroading of the standards bodies, and they couldn't even stand up for video or DRM standards either. Every download of Firefox ships Google Analytics, installer stubs for Cisco and Google video blobs, and a configuration that shunts your DNS lookups to yet a third private corporation. With friends like Mozilla, who needs enemies?

In short, the organization is utterly rudderless (and has been for nearly a decade), incapable of supporting itself without search engine subsidies, and not achieving any of the ideological goals it espouses. What we're witnessing now is what happens when you can no longer coast on branding. What's down this road, after some deck-chair rearranging, will be cessation of operation of the for-profit arm and a new direction for the non-profit arm, which might survive that. Time will tell.

Your CEO took home more than $2.3M and your treasurer (who only worked 6 months) $1.2M in 2017 [1].

Why don't you hold these people to very high standards?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google [1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017-fo...

A common pattern I see when companies are struggling is that the refocus back on the core product. They cut side projects, they move away from what ever broad vision plan that got them into the current mess and refocus narrowly back to a handful profit earning core products.

The reaction to Mozillas announcement would likely look very different if instead of talking about go beyond the browser into a different world they would had done the opposite and refocused efforts exclusively to the handful of products that bring the core of users to Mozilla. Such announcement would clam people and make them hopeful that firefox would gain a strong competitive edge in a time where chrome only get older, slower, more privacy invasive and heavier practitioner of dark patterns. Some would naturally complain that their pet side project would be discontinued, and there would likely be people lamenting the loss of the advocacy work, but users would understand that sometimes a company need to go back to the core product in hard times.

1) Make a good browser. Get market share. Use it to push the envelope for what can be done on the web.

2) Respect user privacy.

3) Don't spam me with push notifications, in-browser advertising, or any other marketing communications unless it helps goals 1 or 2.

4) Don't spend most of your money on projects that aren't your browser.

Mozilla keeps getting into partnerships that send data to third parties, advocating for things that have nothing to do with browsers or the internet, investing money into every new trend[0][1], and not focusing on their core selling point: a browser that's fast, safe, privacy-focused, extensible, standards-compliant, and stops Google from acquiring a total monopoly over browsers so they can remove adblockers.

This press release hints that they're going to continue tilting at windmills: their new direction is "diverse, representative, focused on people outside of our walls, solving problems, building new products, engaging with users and doing the magic of mixing tech with our values." They're "a technical powerhouse of the internet activist movement", and rather than donors who support their browser, there are "hundreds of thousands of people who donate to and participate in Mozilla Foundation’s advocacy work". I read this as "we're going to spend time and money on things that are not Firefox".

I haven't donated to them for years, because I'm sick of seeing their money go to projects that don't integrate with Firefox and won't ever reach a significant number of consumers while they bleed market share, or to American-centric policy advocacy that also doesn't relate to the internet. I don't think this is an unrealistic expectation, because there's no way in hell I'd donate to Google or any of their competitors in the first place. Hopefully their lay-offs are an opportunity to focus their efforts on providing a browser across all platforms and adding features to that browser.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products#Aband... [1] everything involving VR on https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products

The one thing that could save it, Servo, doesn't seem to be a priority. Instead, Mozilla seems to be focusing on offering cloud services that nobody wants or cares about, which also don't really respect privacy any more than other cloud services. The only significant revenue stream Mozilla has is through Firefox, which keeps steadily losing users and market share.

And even that is almost entirely dependent on people using Google search with the browser. Given that Google is Mozilla's primary competitor who has intentionally broken their apps on Firefox and is pushing them down in search results, and that Firefox is marketing itself to privacy-conscious people who wouldn't use Google anyway, it doesn't seem wise or sustainable at all.

Unless things seriously change, I have no faith that they'll be able to turn this situation around. We may just have to live with a Blink/WebKit web monoculture until we get some serious anti-trust legislation.

It gets worse with every updated. More options are stripped back in favour of "simplicity".

Firefox made a name for itself by giving users control to make it their own browser; saying it has become a "clone of Chrome" is clichéd now, but that doesn't change the fact that it's true.

Firefox needs to stop chasing the Chrome user base and build back a user base of its own.

Sure, there is no shareholders so there is this freedom, but people working there were basically hired after working in other tech companies, and they just work as they did in other tech companies. The fact that Mozilla Corporation is owned by a non-profit seems to be completely lost. Basically people are paid to improve metrics, whether it's the number of users, the ARPU, the "engagement" on whatever features they decided was important...

Add to that the fact that Firefox lagged technically behind Chrome for many years (it only recently cought up with Quantum) and UX wise also Firefox was stuck on the "IE6 but with tabs" look and feel and waited many years before accepting that the UX introduced by Chrome when it was released was superior.

As a result, now that casual users are on Chrome and the Firefox user base is mostly made of users who choose Firefox not because of its technical merits but because it's Open Source, supported by a non-profit, etc. There is a disconnect between that user base and the Mozilla Corporation who just thinks like any other SV company.

What I mind is that I can't take Mozilla seriously at all.

They keep trying new projects. I laugh every time because I know it will be gone in six to twelve months.

Right now Mozilla is offering VPN service. Theoretically, I am the ideal customer. I care about privacy and security and make good money and have been a devoted Firefox user for nearly 20 years -- ever since Phoenix 0.2! And I trust Mozilla 100x more than the competition.

But I've never even glanced at that service. Why? So I can have the rug pulled out from me in six months? lol.

For me to take any non-Firefox project from Mozilla seriously, I'd need to hear some kind of commitment from Mozilla to supporting it for the long haul.

The reason I use Firefox is I still trust Mozilla more than Google, but the more Mozilla erodes that, the less they have to offer - the browser is not improving technically at the same rate Mozilla is diminishing reputationally.

Standards for Mozilla do not come alone from being an NGO, but from the promises Mozilla makes and the history. Breaking promises and forgetting it's origin seems to be the main source of hate against mozilla, besides of course the fails themself.

> Did we apologize?

Nope.

> Did we learn anything?

Nope.

> Did we work to prevent it happening again?

Nope. But some were even repeated.

> Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet.

Is this still a thing? I get the impression that mozilla today has just become a small unimportant voice, mostly just following the choral. Even Microsoft seems to be now stronger in that regard.

People openly post that they'll switch to Chrome or Chrome-derivatives, as if that fixes things, because Mozilla allegedly is throwing away money by not 100% focusing on the browser.

Mozilla is the last company other than Apple maintaining an independent browser engine. Microsoft has given up as well.

If Mozilla and by Proxy the Firefox Project dies, the internet will become a darker place. The only hope would be that Microsoft ruins the Chrome browser via EEE (and in thise case, one of the instances where I hope they do) before Mozilla has to shutter.

People give Google an excuse for the billionth time they are caught exporting your medical history from chrome but if Mozilla makes a mistake, they're chastized for it.

It's disgusting how people treat Mozilla.

When Brendan Eich was made CEO, Mozilla employees did everything possible to make sure that he wouldn’t stay; all due to a single political donation from six years beforehand.

While I don’t agree with his position, the whole fiasco tarnished Mozilla and the people in it, at least in my mind.

Far from being held to an impossible standard, I feel like it suffered from a form of monoculture.

Like, not lying to users about data collection, not opting users into third-party products, not censoring add-ons for political reasons?

Gimme a break. The foundation is given a big break as it is, being tax-free. Then there is this huge greedy corporation bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars while resting its brand on the perceptions most users (outside of HN) have about Mozilla and Firefox being a non-profit thing in general.

While I find the corporate speech slightly annoying this is not even close to being my main issue with Mozilla. I am more concerned with the complete disregard for privacy that Mozilla has (even if we ignore telemetry and the normandy backdoor that you need to fiddle in about:config to disable and you make sure to check for new about:config options in every update [some of them are even hidden by default!], there have been privacy issues reported on bugzilla for years that have gone ignored), along with limiting the options that the user has (no option to ignore hsts, userChrome.css being killed, webextensions being limited, etc), making rushed decisions (such as the move to webextensions before the api was mature enough for the extensions to move over), the lack of openness (despite being promised years earlier the pocket server code is still closed), the general disregard about their main project (some bugzilla issues in firefox are old enough to vote), wasting money on designers (the ui is fine and it has been fine for quite a while, it is as if they want to find ways to mess it up just so that they can justify their wages), and the lack of care given to less popular platforms (such as linux).

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

It does not seem that way after the mr robot and pocket scandals. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23947681

Yes, that is the name of the game. Isn't it? You are not a obscure project in GitHub. If you don't think so please move on. When you are a top Hollywood star you play the game of the stars. The same applies for sports or other high competitive activities. Chrome is here, show you deserve the place you are.

One thing I've learned in my time as an engineer is that ultimately, the course and attitude of a company comes from the top. Thus, what upper management chooses to say is a great indicator of the health and direction of a company, especially to a non-employee or someone without other knowledge of the company. I can understand why people would react strongly to this latest missive from Mozilla - apparently, everything we like about Mozilla and Firefox is going to be dismantled to aid in the fight against systematic racism (and starting immediately with the mass layoff of the Servo team). Yes, this is enough to make me consider switching.

2. Sounds logical: no one wants to get stuck with abandonware (or semi-abandonware). Browsers are the #1 by importance piece of software. Competitors in this field just HAVE TO keep up with the current state of things and global expectations/demand. If you don't - goodbye, then.

4. No, Mozilla never apologized for its mistakes properly. It doesn't even admit most of them. And it clearly didn't learn anything as it still is deaf to peoples opinions/expectations/feedback. Just as an example: take a look at your issue tracker and the managerial approach at what should gain the focus of developers. Issues live there unsolved for more than a _decade_. Mozillians don't care what people want, they work on things THEY are interested in. Or maybe in what their nutjob of a manager tells them to work on.

5. I was a firefox user since it's quite early days and it's Mozilla's actions that made me switch to Chromium. With Google Chrome (being the base for Chromium) I at least know what evilcorp Google is. And they do. They don't claim to be the defenders of the weak.

It's hard to escape news cycle, and when you apply what you see inside vs how it's presented publicly, you get angry. Understandably, as you twisted facts and cherry-picked details, just to support the narrative.

This is true about employees at many big companies. For - ask why people work at Google/Facebook, given all the horrible stuff you read about them? Reasons will be often similar - news cycle vs reality is very distorted and careful balances of tricky topics don't make catchy headlines.

Are those companies flawless? Hell no. Are they evil empires spending all their time figuring out how to steal candy from a baby? Also no.

I genuinely do not know if this is rhetorical. My guess would be "no" to all the questions but it doesn't suit the narrative.

Maybe you think it's "yes"? Do you mind clarifying why?

Just wanted to let you know I appreciate what you and Mozilla are doing, regardless of these certain purity-zeolots. May Mozilla live long!

Why can't a platform simply be a platform?

This is the primary reason why I choose Firefox over Chrome. Because Mozilla is the the world's Jon Snow against the world's white walkers (Google and co).

Mozilla needs to do whatever it needs to stay alive. We need more non-profit voices in the table not less

So long Firefox and thanks for all the fish!

People have only one standard: Build a good browser. Writing this from Firefox it is still a CPU and memory hog when you have 50+ tabs open.

I do so hope Mozilla survives for many more years.

History Lesson. Back in the early 00's we all used IE and Proxomitron to block undesirable web elements. Firefox, Safari, and Netscape all existed, but IE6 was constantly forcing companies to break them.

Then, Firefox came out with Tabbed browsing and plugins, something that took IE years to catch up on. You could use adblock with firefox as early as I believe version 2 or 3 and that was very effective at blocking web advertising and undesriable elements as well as making the web more convenient to work with.

Then late 00's Google decided it wanted to be an advertising company, and its interest in Firefox changed and firefox was was pulled down the path of becoming an company selling advertising.

Today, they do things like quietly implimenting DNS in HTTPS, which we all know is aimed at ads and ad targeting. All while putting up cutsie pages with animated animals in them about their product with undertones about sticking it to the man.

The reason people flog you and your organization on the internet is they have very, very long memories and know what bullshit looks like.

Try forking firefox into a ruthlessly ad-removing, DRM abusing, secure, privacy protecting, enterprise quality version of what it is today with vastly simplified configuration options and sell it for $25 a year. Then you'll get some attention, otherwise, you're being paid to not compete.

Chrome is the technically better product, despite privacy issues (sorry). Many techies want to switch to Chrome. But it's against their self-described ideology. So they find some fault with Mozilla - there always will be - and that's the excuse they need, regardless of what Chrome does. Mozilla should focus about making a better product and ignoring minor complaints.

That said, Mozilla is mismanaged. Always was. I remember back before Firefox when Mozilla was the example of a mismanaged open source effect. It didn't change that much. It's just that IE stagnated and Opera was barely known (despite being by far better), so a trimmed Firefox could surge. Once actual competition got going, it was obvious FF would be a small minority. Linux prospered by getting community contributions from interested companies. Mozilla never managed to get to that stage.

Uh... no?

First, the plague of Debian and the logjam breakers. Mozilla, like Debian, has many technical users with loud opinions and struggles to reach consensus. Debian suffers from this problem because it comes to consensus oh so very slowly - multiple competing packaging formats exist and hurt the community for decades. But, Mozilla has the worst result - "logjam breaker" executives come in, and, rather than pushing the technical leadership to make a reasonable technical decision based on the weighed factors, they break the logjam by encouraging the technical leaders to blindly imitate the competition. This problem is intractable - giving in to the Debianers means being mired in debate forever and making no or extremely slow progress; giving in to the suits means failing to innovate, becoming a clone of your competition, and eventually being forgotten. A true solution requires real technical leadership, something that's sorely lacking at Mozilla, or a different user base, which is not a possibility at Mozilla.

Second, the plague of Wikimedia. Non-technical leadership comes to dominate decisions about how to spending incoming donations from successful technical projects. Such leadership is often interested in hoping from the board of one non-profit to another. Much like Googlers are always interested in content for their next promotion form, such non profit executives are interested in bragging about the great projects they kicked off the ground. The results is a slew of failed and cancelled projects while the core project languishes.

Finally, the plague of social justice run amok. Most companies right now are on social justice kick and for the last few years. That's good; racism is bad, and tech could be a bit more welcoming. However, most companies understand where the lines are drawn. For example, Google executives don't release statements after employees die trashing the employee because of an underlying difference in personality and/or political views. Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common. Such actions have a chilling effect on recruitment and leads to technical talent that might otherwise have been interested in Mozilla (like myself) to permanently write it off.

I don't hold Mozilla to higher standards and I'm not mad about double speak. I'm mad that Mozilla is nasty, that is breaks well established liberal norms regarding political freedom, that it's executives waste my donations on resume lines for their next gig, and that it's technical leadership seems incapable of making balanced decisions other than imitation Google. But most of all, I'm mad that nobody at Mozilla can even see the problem (yourself included). Mozilla is deeply sick and needs to diagnose its own problems correctly, in order to begin remediating them. Until then, I'll regard it as a dying corporation and I'll look forward to the day when Mozilla finally dies and we can get started on the project of building a free web again by forking Chromium.

No.

> OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."

If you think that Mozilla not using "corporate doublespeak" is an impossible standard, I am left speechless.

People talk as if Mozilla and others could exist in their magic bubble outside of a world where all comes down to money.

Being a non-profit means they still have to pay rent, loans etc. so there has to be enough money to do that. While many use Mozilla products without donating it is strange for me that the same people wonder about Mozilla not having enough money to keep all their employees and infrastructure.

Focusing on other actions that promise an increase in revenue is necessary if people just take without giving back.

When companies struggle with a failing product, the answer usually is to evolve. Not to double down on what has (thankfully for us) worked for several decades but now is starting to fail systemically.

What you're saying here presumes to be the answer to the most important question Mozilla is struggling with: in 10 years, is a browser-focused Mozilla viable? Nobody knows the answer to this, there are strong reasons to think the answer is a strong "No." So stop pretending like you know the answer.

The people that brought balance got gradually left go or left out of disgust, allowing that leader to grow their compensation unchecked (2.5M a year now).

I had a lot of respect for them when I joined, and was just feeling empty and disappointed when I left.

One all hands speech that is stuck with me was the one about "how Mozilla needed to participate to something with the United Nations and that's really important" when their wanted to join the UN board. This quickly got covered up and they also did not get to join the UN board.

Basically, follow the money, as usual. I'll be on the lookout for a post from Eich on the subject, I guess.

Don’t get me wrong; their “distractions” have given the world a lot of nice things (Rust comes to mind). But first and foremost, Mozilla’s mission should be to ensure a great, competitive browser, and they’re losing the competition badly. And imho they are prioritizing their resources badly as well.

The one reason that I don’t donate to Mozilla is simply because I feel that my money will be used for vanity ambitions, rather than to the core product. I wish there was a way to donate to Mozilla and say “only use this money for Firefox, because that’s the mission I support, and I don’t really care about the other 90% of the things you’re doing”.

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 them being financed by other tech companies which are the epitomes of the ad tech industry. Their market share is shrinking, and the moment Google (and their other sponsors, but mostly Google) think they can get away with it they will cut Mozilla's funding.

I very much encourage their branching out if it leads to them being more independent and sustainable as a company. Moreover, I think [1] the idea of Firefox providing basic internet services is a really good idea.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566732

I would love to see a small dedicated team concentrated on the browser and led by manager who are not playing SV hotshots.

If I understand this right, Mozilla tried to focus on FF only, and that didn't pay back. User base is still declining (in relative numbers), revenue stream gets narrower. So Mozilla is trying to transform itself from a browser vendor to a true user agent, assisting the user and protecting them more comprehensively on the web. This transformation is still ongoing.

But they did that, and now Firefox market share is almost negligible because it wasn't the default browser on mobile OS's.

For example, I'm sceptical about the potential reach of XR, but if it grows big, it is vital that Firefox plays a bigger role there, instead of everybody being reliant on apps and Chrome once again.

> Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest.

There is also this:

> As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation. [1] (January 28th 2020)

I think that proper email and calendar is what people need too. It's a big market and something you would more obviously pay for than a browser. Protonmail doesn't have a good calendar; Google doesn't have good privacy.

[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

What's the point of survival in the kind of world this would result in? To paraphrase, this kind of life is not a life worth living. The internet activism part is core to Mozilla's mission, without that there's no point to having Firefox at all. Chrome is a perfectly functional browser.

I can hear your rebuttal now: oh Firefox offers better privacy. Sure, in the browser Firefox offers better privacy. But the Internet as a whole is sick, so having a good browser without activism to fix the Internet is just papering over the real problems.

Perhaps what they mean is "nobody is paying for the browser (except Google, our arch-nemesis) we need to build things people will pay for"

Why is everyone so freaking obsessed with saving the world and fixing all its ills? When did it become not good enough to just make something people enjoy using?

Could you imagine how stupid and obnoxious it would be if every time you bought a tool from a hardware store, the packaging went on some long winded self congratulatory rant about how it's saving the world and battling the woes of humanity?

To differentiate, one idea is that Firefox create optional browser extensions to support local mesh networking over wifi or bluetooth and a container or VM for hosting servers as a safer and more portable alternative to native appstores. This would represent a step back from the FirefoxOS notion, but a step forward from the browser, and could drive interesting proximity applications as well as gaming, which could lead to new users and properly challenge the status quo.

Rationale: Mobile device vendors are too heavily wed to the cellular carriers and related regulatory inertia to do anything here. In particular, carriers are also major distribution channels for a lot of mobile devices, creating a resistance to anything but carrier-enabled mobile-data as a frontline topology.

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.

Yet we are increasingly seeing developers who won't follow those standards. What are we as developers going to do about that?

Unless they become a volunteer based effort -- which is unlikely, given the hideous complexity of implementing web standards -- they don't have a way to fund things.

This is why I've repeatedly spoken against the unapproachable complexity of web standards. They effectively turn the web into a corporate walled garden for megacorporations, because they're too complicated to implement affordably.

Each represents a huge value to the community.

New and untried consumer products? Well, maybe. You never know which could be a big hit.

Still it's not obvious how to make money on any of these :(

I'm pretty sure this was their direct reason for buying Pocket. It gives something for Firefox users to interact with that isn't actively and passively trying to get them to switch off.

They have already started this with products like Mozilla Send and Lockwise.

No one is willing to pay for a browser but they are willing to pay for these extra services that plug in to the browser.

Every day I wake up to work on my own business and promise myself to do the opposite of this.

By lots, do you mean that we'd need to pull off our boots to count them?

Everything is done on the web now. Job applications, apartment leasing, government services, government obligations, commerce. Giving up the web alltogether is the modern-day equivalent of living as a mountain hermit. It either requires a truly colossal amount of privilege, or it will inflict a lot of pain on you.

They should find/build/maintain a good alternative for that.

Are you gonna give them the money to replace that income? Is anyone at all?

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.

By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.

But they did stand up to industry pressure, to a larger degree than most are willing to give them credit for.

On H.264, they refused to implement it, arguing that while the licensing requirements were acceptable at the moment, there was no guarantee that the patent pools would get greedy later on (boy did that turn out prescient with H.265). And they got Google to agree to rip out H.264 support from Chrome... except Google appears to have no intention of doing so, and it took Mozilla a year to realize that they had lost the battle.

On EME, Netflix faced the problem that it couldn't implement its contractual obligations to encrypt films without Silverlight, which was clearly on its last gasp. I believe it was Google and Microsoft who brought the original specification, based on their existing implementations. Mozilla objected vociferously and continuously, trying to get more parts of the system specified (such as communication between the browser and the CDM), and generally trying to make the CDMs as narrow as possible and as open as possible. They ultimately lost on most, if not all, of those issues, but it's not for a lack of trying!

I don't use Firefox anymore and I don't love Mozilla, but I appreciate the efforts they do make in favor of privacy and interoperability and especially the fact that still make the best fairly drop-in alternative to the engine with 80% domination of the browser market. I still would recommend Firefox to any nontechnical person who uses Chrome or Edge now (it's at least as fast, uses maybe 40% less RAM, and just happens to be less evil). (And I personally still use a browser that benefits from their work, Palemoon, which is also flawed (corrupted to a much smaller degree than FF by a much less evil search engine than Google — DuckDuckGo — but I'd use any browser —even the old Edge, if someone maintained a version for my OS— that's not based on Chromium, if it slowed down the growth of Google's evil empire/monopoly)).

Maybe you have not noticed that money actually matters? Mozilla maintains a global infrastructure for serving Firefox updates and new installs; they have to pay developers to keep up with bugs, vulnerabilities, and new web standards; they have to pay lawyers to deal with the various legal issues that come up when a project has millions of users across multiple jurisdictions; etc. Donations have never been sufficient for Mozilla to do the core development work on Firefox, which is why they signed those search deals.

Why don't corporations simply be straightforward and say "We are facing imminent death and we need your financial assistance if you don't want a Google-monopolized world"?

This "changing world" fluff is a huge turnoff for people actually wanting to help Mozilla's mission.

So what do you suggest one use as a browser then? Don't you dare say Chrome or Brave.

Firefox is the best of the worst. Yeah, it would be good if they were better, but I am not going to be moving to Chrome or Brave anytime soon.

Fly by nights like brave have come in and then realized its hard to do in a sustainable way.

Chrome is certainly not privacy focused. Ie and edge arent either.

There is a reason tor browser is basically firefox code under the hood.

The part you get wrong is that they were always going to die, hill or no hill. It has been a slow grind downward as Firefox has practically vanished as a product among mainstream Internet users. It's merely slowly going to the same grave as Opera and IE. Chrome won, on both the desktop and mobile. The only major holdout is the Apple ecosystem with Safari, because Apple can do what it likes.

What else is Mozilla other than Firefox? Not much in terms of revenue sources.

I've been using Firefox daily for 15 or so years, and I've watched as everyone I know stopped using it one after another. Chrome is a good browser for most purposes, the average user - which is what Firefox requires for Mozilla to stay alive financially - doesn't care about the things you apparently think they do.

You have to be able to pay the bills first IMO. I don't fault them for that at all.

FTR I do and never stopped.

Edit: Added clarification about Chromium in case someone doesn't know the difference between Chromium (open source) vs Google Chrome (proprietary).

the alternative is cutting the bills down somewhat. They made about 500 million in revenue in 2018, that's a healthy pile of cash.

They've got a pretty huge engineering team and still development on their products is painfully slow. Just take the password manager they've been offering, it can't even import or export passwords and it misses half of the features any of the free competitors have.

Adding even more stuff on top of it doesn't really give me a lot of confidence.

https://donate.mozilla.org/

And the best product is a product that is useful to users.

To me, Mozilla felt like an ideology and not so much like a browser. That repelled me from Mozilla. I was annoyed by their attitude and puns toward Chrome, especially the prefix war and the comparison between IE6 and Chrome. That was way too much for me, even though they had a point. Ironically one of their evangelists, that made a lot of noise against Chrome, later moved on to Microsoft.

Microsoft has settled the prefix war in the way that they adopted Chromium.

Coming from Netscape, which I loved, and going through almost every iteration of the Internet and browsers, Mozilla feels like Assembler or C to me. Yes, Assembler was cool when you had your C64, and yes, you can do everything with C, but that is not the point. People need to get a job done, and yes, automated Garbage Collection is ok most of the time - I mean you Java, C#, Python, etc.

Maybe the comparison is not the best, but Mozilla's priority seems right this time: new product(s).

Best of luck, Mozilla!

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/

I give FF a try every few months and will happily switch if they ever manage to get it to having comparable performance to Chrome or Safari on my architecture.

Seeing this "diversification" strategy I just installed Edge and am giving it a try, FF wasn't a great experience but I was willing to stick with it to support Chrome alternatives - but it's obvious it needs a lot of work - and removing focus is a signal people should be moving off not coming back to it.

Brave is more private and respecting of the user, without the politics. It's all whats good with Mozilla leaving out the bad part.

We could have had that in Mozilla today, but because virtue signaling they had to fire Brendan. This was probably the nail that lead to the coffin for Mozilla.

Mozilla getting rid of their main product's most relevant R&D makes me fear they'll eventually announce Firefox replacing its internals with chromium

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.

At the same time this is not a big surprise to me: Mozilla was already becoming a PM driven organization instead of an engineer driven one. At least they gave us Rust, that will live on and be extremely successful.

But Firefox makes my web development work harder. It opens Gmail slower. And with this news, I have no reason to support Firefox. I don't want to stand behind a company that's de-prioritizing the only product I use.

I hope they turn things around though. Firefox is a great product and we need it. And I hope the people who were let go land safely on their feet elsewhere.

I hope they could find another job soon.

I don't know that they would need to sell Thunderbird as a whole bundled product/service like Hey; they could launch a paid email service (in the "it's not Gmail" market occupied by Proton, FastMail, Posteo, etc.) and use that money for work on Thunderbird.

Not so different from having a VPN service and using it to bring in money for Firefox.

They still have a thousand mouths to feed.

Are these numbers accurate? The first seems very low and the last seems very high? Is it still like this?

KaiOS is in the ultra-low-end smartphone/feature-phone market that Microsoft/Google/Apple don't care about at all.

What's remarkable is that something ill-conceived like "web technology on ultra-low-end devices" actually gained enough traction to get devices on the market.

Like Firefox OS before it, actual KaiOS devices were not well-received, because of poor performance and lack of apps. It's just that nobody really notices because all the buzz is around "real" smartphones.

Mozilla's privacy branding is in direct conflict with Baker's vision of some kind of corporate entity that can pay her a lot of money. Apple can do this because they are filthy rich themselves, Mozilla's puny market share means that increasing their revenue will require them to use the most valuable coin in the Internet realm, which is user data.

I think a LibreOffice-style hard fork will be necessary at some point with a nonprofit carrying Firefox forward. Another thread mentioned Mozilla Firefox becoming a skin on Chromium ... Microsoft basically has validated this approach, and I can see Baker eliminating most of the rest of their engineering core to do the same.

I remember a headline in 2006 that Mitchel Baker's salary at Mozilla was $500k which I thought was a lot for non-profit but her salary has increased 5X since then? Based on what exactly? I understand the need to pay competitive wages but $2.5 million when the organization is in such a state that you are laying off a significant chunk of your workforce? Is she giving up any salary?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12link.html

> Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges.

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 my information.

The last few years, imo, they have been chasing market share by trying to play follow the leader with Google which have turned off a few major power users which was their core base

This is with out getting into some of the political based initiatives we have seen over the last few years as well

It's the sort of thing a lot of people here might pay for regardless of what's in it just because they believe Firefox is essential to the open web.

But what could it be?

What if all it was to start was bundling their existing VPN service, Scroll, and Pocket Premium for a single price, and even if technically you can use them in Chrome or as iOS apps, it's marketed as a better browser. And then the door is open to add new things, maybe pinboard-style bookmark archiving would make sense?

Is it a hit? Hard to say. But it feels like a better bet as a feature set that ALSO supports the open web than marketing each of those services individually.

The cost of building/maintaining Firefox is holding them back from putting more money and effort toward that mission (and I think that's why they're reducing their workforce [2]). Well said!

My company and most of my friends at other tech companies have had paycuts, layoffs, or furloughs.

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.

Maybe this could be one of the separate parts some of the devs could split out as a donation/patreon project or something. You pay for them giving you better dev environment in Firefox.

Edit: Another comment seems to have some details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123945

But Firefox just isn't that popular anymore. Which, mind you, sucks, because we need a Firefox (and Quantum is actually pretty good).

That said, Mozilla's focus is no longer Firefox apparently - so, there's that.

On the other hand, I disagree with your proposal. When I pay for software, content or a service I pay because I want the service/content, not because I want to join some kind of social club or receiving useless merch cluttering my wardrobe.