
Mozilla has laid off their dev tools people and the entire MDN team - claviska
https://twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333952
======
jacquesm
Yesterday's thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)

------
sequoia
Pardon my french but fuuuuuck. I switched to chrome back in the early 2010s
after years of Firefox use because it was faster, and I stuck with it because
the the devtools were better than firebug and later built-in FF tools. But
always I told myself "next year, I'll switch back to Firefox" which I was much
more comfortable with ideologically.

Eventually after years of waiting FF got fast enough and the devtools were
good enough (and chrome got creepy enough: the automatic browser sign-in made
clear chrome was tightening the noose of browser/web/google lock-in). So I
switched back a year or two ago and have been quite happy with it! This news
indicates it won't be long before I have to switch again.

Mozilla's strategy seems so incoherent, at least from the outside. _Who is
their target demographic?_ Perhaps "power users" & developers like me are too
small a demographic to be worth competing for (see also: the toyification of
the macbook pro). But I seriously wonder if Mozilla as a nonprofit has a path
forward without keeping some of the "power users", (casual) privacy nerds, and
FOSS folks in the fold. Are they planning to compete with Google for casual
users as "just another browser"? I really don't see how they plan to beat
google in this arena.

EDIT: In Mozilla's defense, no I have not donated anything to the organization
to keep FF or MDN development running (though I have contributed to MDN & FF
in small ways) so perhaps I share some of the blame here. TBH I'd donate if I
knew it was going to FF & MDN and not one of the two thousand other little
projects Mozilla keeps starting and killing.

~~~
stu2b50
Actually, if you donate, literally none of it will go to Firefox.

You'd be donating to the Mozilla foundation, not the Mozilla corporation,
which develops Firefox.

P.s the Mozilla foundations CEO makes 2.5 million dollars a year, and said "it
would be too much a financial burden to cut C suite salaries to 500k"

[https://mobile.twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1293233620711...](https://mobile.twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1293233620711243776)

~~~
jacques_chester
After link chasing from that Tweet, this appears to be the underlying quote:

> _Here 's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount
> from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an
> 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo
> had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an
> 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying
> about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their
> families to commit to._

[https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-
aGY62z](https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z)

~~~
oliwarner
> That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.

I'm aghast. How could _anyone_ survive on $500k?! Everybody at the yacht club
would laugh at you. It would be simply beastly.

I know they play this game against the likes of Google and Microsoft but they
have favour with people _because they 're not Google or Microsoft_, because
their product is driven by engineering, not repeatedly tainted by management.

These job losses shouldn't be at product level, they should clean out
management, restructure to bring engineering up to board level, kick out the
suits that are only there for the cheque.

------
fmax30
Mozilla MDN docs are my go-to resource for js related stuff, does this mean
they won't be maintained and updated anymore?

To be honest, I would be more than willing to pay a reasonable monthly
subscription fee to access their docs.

~~~
Semaphor
It’s not only them anymore: "Mozilla brings Microsoft, Google, the W3C,
Samsung together to create cross-browser documentation on MDN"

\-- [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-
micr...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft-
google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/)

~~~
claviska
That's at least a tiny bit of good news then. Thanks for clarifying that!

~~~
pintxo
The blog is from 2017!

------
avolcano
Firefox Dev Tools were how I sold other devs on trying Firefox. I think the
number of devs who liked the tools and stuck by them is the only reason why as
much of the web renders well on Gecko as it does. Certainly, I've worked at
small startups where no one used Firefox that turned out to have significant
visual bugs on Firefox for months, because no one ever bothered to check it
out.

I understand why Mozilla wants to make more money new ways. I think everyone
does. I was going to get their VPN as soon as it became available on Mac. I
also completely understand that they can't monetize Firefox, at least not in
its current state. Users would obviously rebel against any kind of proprietary
features that live behind a commercial license, and I don't think they can
make any compelling hosted services that integrate with Firefox either. But I
don't understand why Mozilla seems to be trying to speed along its death.

~~~
debacle
Firefox Dev Tools are the best around.

~~~
thoughtpalette
Uhhhhhh, maybe back when firebug was the only way to debug.

But this is all subjective anyway, huge fan of Chrome dev tools here.

------
aphextron
It's been pretty obvious over the last 5 years or so that the Mozilla we once
knew is dead and gone forever. The MBA types have completed their takeover of
a once venerable engineering organization. I'm glad that Firefox still exists
as an alternative to Chrome, but the differences between them from a privacy
and freedom standpoint are increasingly negligible. And with this move it
seems very obvious what management's sole focus is at this point: "trimming
the fat" of what little community focused efforts they had left, and boosting
revenue.

~~~
CarelessExpert
> The MBA types have completed their takeover of a once venerable engineering
> organization.

And yet, in the last 5 years we've seen some of the greatest leaps in Firefox
in the form of adopting technologies in Servo. And that's ignoring the growth
of Rust adoption and so forth.

But you're right. Obviously the problem is the technologists aren't in
control.

It's definitely not monopoly abuse on dominant platforms, the fact that
browsers don't make money (even Microsoft couldn't do it), the lack of
diversification in their revenue models...

If they just got the tech right it'd solve everything!

~~~
mumblemumble
Agreed.

The deeper reason why bundled IE was such an existential threat to Netscape,
then to Mozilla, and, more generally, a Web that wasn't under the thumb of any
one corporation, was that the surest way to squash your competitors is to take
away their ability to make money.

With IE, the strategy was to make money on the OS and developer tools. You
needed to buy a Microsoft IDE, which would run on a Microsoft operating
system, in order to make those cool ActiveX controls that everyone was leaning
on back when JavaScript couldn't quite hack it. Also Frontpage.

With Chrome, it's ads and Google One.

Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox has no way to make money on the browser. There's
passing a hat, but that was never going to make for a sustainable business.
Not if the only people who really care enough to toss some money in,
developers, are going to continue to stick with Chrome. Which they clearly
are. So they _need_ to pivot to survive. Even if they lose some goodwill with
techies. Most employees won't accept simple gratitude as a form of payment.

~~~
portmanteaufu
> There's passing a hat

Frustratingly, Mozilla has made it all but impossible to contribute
financially to the development of Firefox itself. You can donate to the
Mozilla Organization but there's no guarantee any of that money will be spent
on Firefox development.

I would absolutely pay for Firefox if they'd let me.

~~~
gatlin
Seconding this for anyone reading!

------
vesinisa
With the caveat that the source is a Twitter thread, if this turns out to be
true it is increasingly looking like the end of Firefox and Mozilla. Earlier
today, a separate Twitter thread was posted that claimed the whole Servo team
had been let go.

This is a massive blow to Internet as we know it. It will mean that WebKit /
Blink will now be the _de facto_ Internet standard. In about 5 years Blink-
based browsers will be the only relevant target for web development and all
remaining users will be urged to switch to Chrome/Edge/Safari or have to
suffer broken sites.

With Google pushing Chromium to make life for ad blockers difficult, I would
really hope an open source project for a new Blink-based privacy-respecting
browser to emerge. (As far as I know the Brave Browser is financed by ads that
are hard-coded in the browser.)

~~~
CarelessExpert
> With the caveat that the source is a Twitter thread, if this turns out to be
> true it is increasingly looking like the end of Firefox and Mozilla. Earlier
> today, a separate Twitter thread was posted that claimed the whole Servo
> team had been let go.

It's pretty clear Mozilla was never planning to have Servo completely supplant
Gecko. Their approach has been to treat Servo as a research project and then
fold technologies (like Rust and Quantum) into Gecko as appropriate.

Through that lens, you should ask yourself if it makes sense for Mozilla to
fund an R&D effort like that given they're operating on a shoestring
(especially with at least 75% of their revenues about to evaporate thanks to
the Google deal not getting renewed).

I think you could argue either way, and I don't think I have a strong opinion.
But I think your framing is overly hyperbolic and doesn't reflect what Servo
actually was and how it fit with Mozilla's overall strategy.

~~~
vesinisa
Even still, firing the DevTools team is equally as worrying as shuttering
Servo.

------
claviska
I know the Mozilla layoffs aren't news, but 25% is a lot and I haven't seen
any sources saying exactly what happened in terms of the reorg. The fact that
both of these teams have vanished is a major gut punch to developers.

~~~
PaulHoule
Particularly MDN.

I remember the bad old days when you had to have a few huge O'Reilly books to
write advanced HTML or program Javascript because Firefox and IE and other
browsers were all so different -- you were lucky to have any official
documentation at all, never mind something that looked at Javascript from a
portable point of view.

MDN paved the way for having online developer info available for the web
platform. I use it every day. In fact, I go out of way to look things up on
MDN because if I just search "Google" I get spammy and sometimes wrong results
that are crammed with ads, often poorly written, etc.

It is sad that good documentation can't pay for itself. It's like "the truth
is paywalled but the lies are free".

~~~
theandrewbailey
> In fact, I go out of way to look things up on MDN because if I just search
> "Google" I get spammy and sometimes wrong results that are crammed with ads,
> often poorly written, etc.

Tip: use DuckDuckGo's searchbangs[0]. I reach for !mdn everyday.

[0] [https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=mdn](https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=mdn)

~~~
dhimes
with ddg I don't even have to use the bang. Just mdn <whatever I need> gets me
to it as the first result.

------
rdslw
Unfortunately 25% at mozilla, 25% at booking, 25% at uber, 20% at linkedin,
more at airbnb (obviously) shows how internal management teams are seeing
revenues HUGELY shrinking.

This tells a lot about fact that stock prices are bad measurement of situation
we're in. It's funny to observe that S&P and Nasdaq are at the February all
time high, pre-covid levels. Let that thought sink in.

~~~
almost_usual
>Unfortunately 25% at mozilla, 25% at booking, 25% at uber, 20% at linkedin,
more at airbnb (obviously) shows how internal management teams are seeing
revenues HUGELY shrinking.

Of course some companies will struggle during covid. There are others though
that have grown and are beating their forecasts. The covid proof tech
companies will absorb this talent and grow larger.

~~~
rdslw
For me, trying to say, that total net economic impact of covid is _zero_, is
like gross negligence in analytical thinking. Sorry for being strong here.

funny fact: I'm using (as we're hiring) 'What do you think of covid' as nice
and quick question to judge reasoning ability.

Conspiracy? bam.

Flu like? bam.

ends in a month? bam.

~~~
almost_usual
The fact you’re using that question in what I’m presuming is a technical
interview is odd and also potentially insensitive to the candidate.

I can’t imagine how I would respond if a family member or someone I’d known
had just passed because of the virus.

------
losvedir
This is sad. I remember back when Firebug came on the scene and all of a
sudden it wasn't just possible it was _easy_ to debug your website. That, more
than anything, I think is why Firefox took off the way it did. Then Chrome
came out with its developer tools which eventually, I thought, surpassed
Firefox. But Firefox's native dev tools are quite good, too.

I switched back to Firefox as my personal browser a year or two ago when they
had the big rendering overhaul (I think "Quantum" or something? when they
included the rust code to do layout in parallel, or something like that). It
seemed like Firefox was finally moving in the right direction!

But now with the news that they let go of the dev tools team and Servo, I
worry about the future of Firefox. I, personally, don't care about Mozilla
other than Firefox, so this seems bleak. I'll continue to use the browser
because I like it so much, but I imagine eventually it will fall behind
newfangled CSS/JS features that developers will use and I'll have to switch
eventually.

------
aeroheim
MDN has such a large impact and influence on the web development community so
it's baffling to me as to why this decision was made. I just hope there are
plans in the work to at least preserve if not continue its operation
eventually under a different organization perhaps.

Honestly, I just really don't want to think of the alternatives without MDN. I
don't think ANYONE wants to go back to w3schools.

------
untog
Related reading from QuirksMode about MDN: "the cult of the free must die"
[https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/the_cult_of...](https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/the_cult_of_the.html)

I think a version of MDN that solicits donations from the companies and
individual developers that make use of it could be great. Mozilla being
propped up by money Google gave them from the search bar always felt fragile.

~~~
Hoenoe
I will gladly donate money to them the whole year trough.

And I think a lot of people/businesses would as long as they market it well
enough and make it easy enough.

------
rvz
> The excellent devtools were a good., non-ideological reason for developers
> to use Firefox as part of their daily work, & thus test in it & care about
> it. Moz had long given up on any other developer relations activities.

Pale Moon, Waterfox, SeaMonkey and IceWeasel to Firefox: "Your First Time?"

Economically, Mozilla never had stood a chance against the major browser
competition given that it was also being 'kept alive' by its main competitor
for decades. The open-source alternatives also had no chance of competing and
are eternally relying on donations.

The moment Google entered with their own browser and Microsoft, Opera, Qt and
Electron crowd all jumped into the Chromium boat, Mozilla only had 'Firefox'
as the only reason why they are still relevant and that's it. Not even Mozilla
cares about the greatness Rust brings. It's just another open source tool
which everyone is saying: "tank u, gimme dat 4 free". Here's another way to
make money: Mozilla could also easily have been the Rust equivalent of "Erlang
Solutions Ltd.".

We all know that no-one would go for their non-competitive VPNs or premium
bookmark service. The reality is, Mozilla has to stand on its own and pivot to
something else other than Firefox to generate revenue if it wants to stay true
to its mission statement which is essentially privacy. Not sure how they have
the balls to support "privacy" (on their frontpage) [0][1] and then tell us
that they have a contract with Google to fund them [2] as the default search
engine choice at the same time.

[0] [https://www.mozilla.org](https://www.mozilla.org)

[1] [https://www.mozilla.org/firefox](https://www.mozilla.org/firefox)

[2] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/foundation/annualreport/2018/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/foundation/annualreport/2018/)

------
whack
Not to derail this conversation, but I wonder how much this can be attributed
to the ousting of Brendan Eich. Political views aside, Eich was a technologist
first and foremost. His replacement, Chris Beard, is a business/marketing guy
at heart. It's hardly surprising that Mozilla has since trended more towards
business/marketing priorities, as opposed to engineering excellence.

------
D13Fd
This sucks, but it's not all that surprising given that their Google deal--90%
of their revenue--is about to expire and won't be renewed.

~~~
Semaphor
> and won't be renewed.

Source?

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Mentioned by ZDNet: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-
off-250-employees...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-
off-250-employees-while-it-refocuses-on-commercial-products/)

(fwiw I found out by way of John Gruber:
[https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/11/mozilla-
layoffs](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/11/mozilla-layoffs))

~~~
Semaphor
That doesn’t say it won’t be renewed, just that it’s currently not renewed.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Doesn’t it seem a little late for them to be renewing a deal worth hundreds of
millions of dollars?

At minimum, I think it spells trouble. Would love to be wrong.

Edit: Since anything can happen, I personally wouldn’t have written the
sentence with as much certainty as the GP, but I don’t think they were far
off.

~~~
Semaphor
Funny thing ;)

> Mozilla and Google are expected to extend their current search deal for
> another three years, multiple sources have told ZDNet.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-expected-to-
ex...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-expected-to-extend-its-
google-search-deal/)

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Thanks—wonderful news, honestly. I was super concerned.

------
nicoburns
This seems short-sighted. As does firing the Servo team. Does anyone know
which teams they _have_ kept?

~~~
emteycz
What? So is the project over? What about webrender and wasm-related stuff?

~~~
nicoburns
> So is the project over?

As an independent research project, more or less I think. I suppose it might
continue as an open source project. We'll see.

> What about webrender and wasm-related stuff?

Webrender and related projects will continue as part of Firefox I think. But I
guess Mozilla won't be doing any further experimental work.

------
Fej
This is absolutely bonkers - if the Firefox dev tools stagnate, then devs
won't test their sites on Firefox, leading to even more users ditching the
product for Chrome!

------
protomyth
I'm a bit confused. It seems like not having great dev tool keeps developers
using Chrome which hurts the adoption of Firefox. Do they not get that?

------
bluejekyll
The MDN is such a great resource. It’s my primary source for looking up web
standards documentation.

Does this imply that won’t be maintained anymore?

~~~
random_dork1
No. Mozilla is only one of multiple companies that work on MDN
[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-
micr...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft-
google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/)

~~~
bluejekyll
Thanks. Still feels like a pretty big loss from that.

------
rasz
This makes perfect MBA sense, why bother developing anything when you can
transition to shipping Chrome skin with paid Google search bar?

------
m-p-3
Without MDN being actively maintained, the web just became a worse place.

~~~
rvz
How exactly?

~~~
m-p-3
It's a way better resource than w3school, would be a shame if it drifted out
because of a lack of maintainers.

------
butz
Recently migrated fully to Firefox at work and was really enjoying DevTools.
While they still lack features in some places, but Inspector tool with flexbox
and grid visualisation is very useful. Also little hints why some properties
were not applied really helps. MDN is also one of my frequently visited
websites with a lot of useful info.

Is there way open source community could save these projects? I would gladly
sponsor further development of Firefox DevTools.

------
random_dork1
I dislike these tweet links with no context. I am supposed to know who the
person tweeting this is and how reliable they are?

~~~
lhnz
Their profile description says they are W3C staff, and this can easily be
confirmed by googling their name.

------
bgorman
From an outside perspective it seems like Mozilla has been spending the last
few years trying to get traction with social justice and political issues
while neglecting their core product.

Safari and Chrome are much faster, Mozilla should have shipped servo in a
product by now instead of investing in legacy tech for a declining product.

~~~
spanhandler
As an on-again-off again user (currently on-again but today here I am googling
WebKit-based Linux browsers) who hasn't _loved_ FF since 2.0, it looks like
they're spending a shitload on UI fiddling and marketing/messaging of dubious
or negative value. Sometimes the UI fiddling and marketing are combined, for
when they _really_ want to make me like the product less.

------
wg0
Mozilla should have diversified into CDN static web app delivery/JAMStack or
similar on top of existing clouds or something. Plus additional
instrumentation tooling with backend services to monitor frontend performance
etc could be an area which could bring decent amount of revenue.

------
rammy1234
[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-
chan...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing-
mozilla/)

------
raxxorrax
MDN is extremely useful, something I cannot ascribe to Mozillas management.
There seems to be some kind of ridiculous transformation in process. Maybe
they know that Google will stop sending money?

------
btbuildem
Wait, so who did they keep on staff?

~~~
conradfr
The opposite roles of what HN wanted in yesterday's thread ;)

------
cft
That's a massive blow. Rust next?

~~~
steveklabnik
The team these days is pretty small. Two folks have posted publicly about it,
one was, one wasn’t. We’ll see, I guess.

------
EdwinLarkin
What boggles my mind is why Microsoft just did not acquire Mozilla. They could
be funding the project while owning the brand. Hell they could have made FF
into the default browser and people would actually not associate it with
Explorer or whatever.

~~~
sanxiyn
As I understand, Mozilla is not for sale and can't be acquired.

~~~
EdwinLarkin
Cant the for profit entity be acquired?

------
crumpled
This is the eventuality that WebPlatform.org was supposed to prepare us for.
But I think WebPlatform failed because most of the docs were upstream at MDN,
and people never stopped looking there.

------
agustif
This is pretty bleak and sad news for future browser competition I guess

------
MasterYoda
Really sad about this lay off, Mozilla does so much good stuff, not just
Firefox.

[https://donate.mozilla.org/](https://donate.mozilla.org/)

~~~
nicholosophy
That money goes to the Foundation. The Corporation can't receive money from
the Foundation. The Corporation makes Firefox.

------
edgarvaldes
Time to go back to Firebug? Well, except Firebug no longer exists.

~~~
quotemstr
This new world of safe, approved, and powerless browser extensions sure is
great, isn't it?

------
saos
Wow. Will others be looking at moving away from Firefox soon? I moved to
Firefox because of the devtools! It sounds like they have leadership that’s
out of touch with community.

------
eximius
Want to help? [https://donate.mozilla.org/en-
US/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/)

~~~
chrisseaton
Why throw money into this fire?

------
rahul_201
Huge fan of Firefox, this is unfortunate.

Noticed that this girl is helping them in some way.
[https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl/status/1293237589202178048](https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl/status/1293237589202178048)

