
Mozilla lays off 70 - ameshkov
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for-subscription-products-to-generate-revenue
======
sstangl
I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although
Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it
would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too
shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the
lead-up, but that was not the case.

I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible
future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey
JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10
years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.

~~~
kev009
Sounds like a pretty clueless layoff, I guess I expected better from Mozilla
than usual corporate derp. If there was truly no dead weight, surely the
management could have scaled back their own comp for misdirecting the company?
Very few people understand what it means to be a leader in corporate world.

~~~
ksec
> for misdirecting the company?

As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists,
and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years.
I am not surprised.

At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then
it happened again, again, and again.

>Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said
it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.

Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser,
But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few
senior engineers with a decade of experience.

I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every
time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend
it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was
much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you
grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.

~~~
pergadad
What's the alternative? Google? Not really better even if this disappoints
about Mozilla.

~~~
qbaqbaqba
Edge or Brave. Different business models than Google's and to some extent
Mozilla's.

~~~
m3adow
Still 100% depending on Google, still supporting a near monopolistic position
for the browser. Every Chromium fork is part of the problem, not the solution.

~~~
BrendanEich
Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if
Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

~~~
aloisdg
You know better than anybody the size of the task of rolling a homemade
engine. Is this some vaporware promise or does Brave already started something
around this idea?

~~~
vbezhenar
May be in the future web will be simpler?

My theory: browser of the future will need to support wasm and webgl (well,
not webgl, but something similar, providing fast and safe interface for GPU).
Of course along with smaller standards like fetch api, but that's manageable.

Most of the useful websites will utilize those tech to build their UI from
scratch without using of HTML, CSS or JS.

And HTML, CSS and JS engines could be just another wasm blob. For example
parts of chromium engine adapted and compiled for wasm. So it's like jQuery.

~~~
PyroLagus
That just sounds terrible for both SEO and accessibility.

------
lizzard
Well, it's been a truly amazing place to work, and I've enjoyed it so much,
right up until being laid off today. Really the smartest and coolest engineers
I've ever known and the best community! I have had my hand in shipping every
version of Firefox since around version 30 and it's been great. Especially
working in such an open environment. Onward to the next adventure.

~~~
Aperocky
As someone who jumped from chrome since quantum came out, I can't appreciate
Mozilla enough, sadly things are not made to last...

I'm guilty too having used such great tool but haven't directly contributed
anything.

But from what I hear, it seem the layoffs are directed not by technical
reasons, and amazing people were let go. In this case, I fear for the future
of firefox, which are not well protected or funded like the open sourced titan
Linux.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Mozilla gets $$$$ from Google, they seem pretty well funded?

~~~
tehbeard
Getting funding from your biggest rival isn't exactly the most stable strat
long term...

Mismanagement of funds/personnel not withstanding.

~~~
zobzu
to be fair it worked for like 2 decades, it feels long termish. but i don't
really disagree.

the current model really is: Google needs Mozilla to survive so that they have
less chances to get split due to monopoly in the browser market

------
Brokedamouth
I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew
first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and
retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in
comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB
to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night
rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was
during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you
had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families -
many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they
were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping
tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers
last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic
culture, all around.

~~~
kamaal
Two days back I wrote this comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034293)

I doubt if this is just with Mozilla. Things like these are come as job perks
when you enter management. And this one of the reasons why you must aspire to
be a manager and not a programmer on the longer run.

>>The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive
dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures.

They will always come up with reasons why they need to do this. The most
common one is they need to be fresh with brains in clouds so that they can to
talk to clients etc well. And they are doing this for the employees good.

 _“Comrades! ' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing
this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike
milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things
is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science,
comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig.
We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm
depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your
sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”_

\- George Orwell.

>>This is not even included in comp.

Things like this generally go in some top level budget and the are approvals
are not even audited at item level spending. Like no asks if you had a $100
dinner. It just goes into a group by statement in some dashboard. This is also
why so many managers spend lavishly. It's almost anonymous spending. And money
once given is never asked back.

If you think this is saying something. Wait till you discover how comp works
in those roles. Pretty much anything given is never audited and its given
fairly unchecked. Big bonuses and stock grants are just every day activities.

As in Indian who worked in the US for a while, I've even seen Green cards
handed to manager's pets like candies. Again no asks questions, no audits
done. Its just how awesome managerial jobs are.

>>The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last.

I doubt if military or any people structure works this way.

Don't fall for these pep talk like speeches.

~~~
anon463637
I used to work at Stanford, once upon a time. Our boss got us training for a
week around Hollywood with a Jag as a rental. Our boss'es boss seriously put
in to have helicopter rides to work, and they definitely had $100+ per diem
and expense accounts. What's interesting is when your boss has self-approval
over their own budget and expenses. They're not really big on accountability
so much as expanding prestige and pyramids on their sides of the org charts.

Similarly, Big 4 and MBB tend to have healthy expense accounts and fringe
benefits.

PS: One of my coworkers kept a counter for all-hands meetings because previous
said entitled boss'es boss tended to go full mission statement by overusing a
particular "motivational" word during their carefully-choreographed, dog-and-
pony PowerPoint. Dilbert and Dogbert would've both doubled hand/pawpalmed.

~~~
kamaal
>>What's interesting is when your boss has self-approval over their own budget
and expenses.

As you go up, its hard to say no to your friends. Because you might need a
bailout from them someday, so you don't go cheap on them. Some one asks for
money they don't say no.

>>They're not really big on accountability so much as expanding prestige and
pyramids on their sides of the org charts.

There is also this thing that if you look rich and affluent you tend to
command respect. That is from where the "Dress for the job" kind of saying
comes from.

------
strict9
Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be
part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops
large and small over the past 10 or so years.

In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop,
and manage.

But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center
for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and
PMs, though usually with mixed results.

For Mozilla, axing quality and security first is a bad look when those are
crucial aspects of a privacy-first company value.

~~~
zelly
If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it
with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable,
so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and
$$$.

I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux
with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month
whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Never had that happen with Chromium,
which runs through megs of JS like butter.

Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-
oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that
trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-
privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.

~~~
fencepost
Could you clarify "recently" a bit more? Clearly it's after the release of
uBlock Origin, but I'm pretty sure that there was a big effort to clean up
memory use a few years ago.

Maybe it's poor Linux support, I have a distressingly high 4 digit number of
tabs open on a Windows box and I don't think I've seen it go past 8gb with
multiple weeks of runtime.

Edit: Win10 Pro on a Xeon with 48gb ram available

~~~
usr1106
What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs? How can you even find what you are
looking for? (Honest question, no attack)

I hardly ever have more than 10 tabs open, and aggressively close everything I
am not working with. I also shut down my browser twice a day (2 working
locations) and never restore the previous session. I do bookmark some pages,
but as a matter of fact I notice that I hardly ever refer to my bookmarks. I
don't have the feeling that I am missing out on anything.

~~~
fencepost
_What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs?_

Fail to go back and clear them out, mostly. Most were left open because of
something relevant at the time, so I mostly need to spend a little time going
through and nuking or nothing. There's been little friction due to leaving
them open so it hasn't been a priority.

Pretty much the same thing that leaves some people with tens of thousands of
messages in their inboxes (I deal with someone who does that and it makes my
teeth itch, so my inbox isn't so bad).

~~~
usr1106
Right, my private Gmail inbox has more than 70,000 conversations (no clue how
many messages). Using search I typically find quickly what I want.

As a programmer who has spent significant time with performance work, having
useless tabs in a browser would hurt me. But that Google has to search through
a bit longer list of messages I can accept as the typical wastefulness of
computing these days. (I am old enough to have done time-sharing on 4 MB with
11 other students on their VT100)

------
ameshkov
Brendan Eich tweeted that they laid off about 70 people:
[https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217517703914643456](https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217517703914643456)

This is about 7% of all their employees.

People report that a lot of QA, security, and release management folks were
sacked.

A lot more details in the TechCrunch article:
[https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-
it-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for-
subscription-products-to-generate-revenue/)

> In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker
> specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-
> generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this decision

edit: fixed the numbers, added some more details.

~~~
tracker1
I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and
concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they
grew in the first place.

I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and
communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out
there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product
on the server component. As much as I hated Lotus Notes, something between
Lotus Notes, Outlook and MS Teams could be something great and that the
Mozilla org would be in a good position to create.

I know they may have good reach with the VPN service as well... I'm unsure how
they can reduce security, qa and release management people when orchestration,
automation and verification are such huge needs.

They get enough income from search (for now) that they could concentrate on
best of breed tech, build mindshare from that, then re-introduce marketing for
critical mass.

~~~
Sammi
The world today is different. Can't skimp on marketing any more, as the
competition is extremely heavy on marketing.

~~~
asdff
Mozilla's competition is default apps and chrome which I've only seen
advertise on google and youtube, on the random day I use a computer without an
ad blocker. Not like Safari is putting out any ads, or that Edge has any fans
outside of geriatrics who don't know any better.

The competition (chrome) is just enjoying the runaway success of being the
household name for over 10 years, simply by being a better product than
firefox was 10 years ago when the market shares were much closer.

If firefox wants to enjoy this runaway success that chrome has, mozilla should
steal the playbook of being the contrarian option for tech minded people just
like how chrome was the foil to IE and Safari a decade ago before it became
the dominant web browser. The focus should therefore be on dev tooling, not
marketing, and the rest of the user base will follow the devs.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Firefox got where it was by being faster and less bloated than the current
alternatives at the time. Then it lost its way completely and Chrome was that
and took all the market share. There’s a theme here. People like fast browsers
that just work and don’t do a lot of extra crap. If Firefox ever wants to take
market share this is a great time to do that with how bloated Chrome is
becoming and how much privacy it constantly encroaches on. If Mozilla is smart
it will figure this out and go for the kill. Is Mozilla smart? I keep trying
to use Firefox and every time I go back to Chrome (or Brave or Safari on my
phone) because Firefox is too slow, it changes radically every version, and
things just don’t work right in it that do work on other browsers. I don’t
need marketing, I just need them to make the browser better. I’m the target
audience; I want to switch!

------
ex_mozillian
Look at the changes to the executive team at Mozilla in 2017 and 2018 if you
want to see the root of the problem.

Look at the changes Chief People Office Michael D'Angelo introduced (after
leaving Pinterest), especially the multi-tier bonus system that crystallized
the executive hierarchy and made ironclad the gap between Mozilla leaders and
the Mozilla proletariat. How much does he make?

Ask yourself- what value or improvement did Chris Lin, VP of Mozilla's horrid
IT, hired from Facebook, bring to the company? And look at his overpaid group
of Directors, who do not have a single win between them that improved
Mozilla's bottom line. Why did they hire a leader from Facebook? Were they
trying to sink the ship?

Ask yourself- with all of Mozilla's failed marketing initiatives, why has the
CMO never been held to account?

There was great hope that Mitchell Baker would return and clean house where it
was needed, starting with many of the execs. This layoff, with so far no
indication of leaders being held to account, is a sign that things are not
going to improve.

It's a shame, because the people of Mozilla are the finest people you could
ever work with. They don't deserve this leadership. The rank and file at
Mozilla are amazing, though some of the best were let go today.

~~~
jdance
As an outsider there are constantly small details that are off in product and
marketing that hint to this. Its really sad to see, I keep using firefox and
get a little sad every time I see these signs that this company does not know
what it wants to do. In many ways it behaves like a public company without
long term direction

------
csdreamer7
This feels really bad. I feel she seems to be hinting that they are cutting
people in case they lose revenue.

As others have posted their financials:
[https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-
fdn-201...](https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-
fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf)

They seem to be very dependent on search engine revenue: 91% and 93% for their
revenue. Once again, I feel she is worried Mozilla will be cut off very soon.

Still feels like really bad news for Firefox. Microsoft cut their QA people
for Windows. Windows 10 to this day still has update issues.

I do agree that Mozilla needs more products to stay competitive. Especially
when the Google docs team doesn't fix issues that make Google sheets very
frustrating to enter data into with Firefox. Just listen to Linus(TechTips)
complain about Google Calendar issues when he pays for the commercial version
of GSuite.

I wonder if Mozilla gets cut off from search engine revenue means they will
start to develop products/fund OSS competitors to GSuite?

Still, when you introduce new products, that is when you need Q/A the most.

However, Pocket is not one these products. I disable the pocket button on
every new Firefox install I do. They have an entire page on it in their
financial statement.

And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce
suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m). Nintendo's management took a pay cut during
their Wii U years before the Switch. And that is what management in general
should be doing well before a layout.

The Mozilla steering committee certainly didn't consider this when "we plan to
eliminate about 70 roles from across MoCo... ...(were) considered as part of
our 2020 planning and budgeting exercise only after all other avenues were
explored."

~~~
Yoric
> I wonder if Mozilla gets cut off from search engine revenue means they will
> start to develop products/fund OSS competitors to GSuite?

How would Mozilla fund this?

> And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce
> suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m).

Where do you find this? At the moment, Mozilla doesn't have a CEO, only an
interim CEO, are you sure that's her?

~~~
flurdy
> Where do you find this?

[https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584](https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584)

~~~
dblohm7
Mitchell Baker is the executive chair and interim CEO.

------
jahlove
I don't understand Mozilla. How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser
alternative to a company that spends $450m annually and dedicates $43m just
for future endeavors? Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser
possible with a small dedicated team?

~~~
ameshkov
Nowadays, a small team is simply not enough to develop a browser and keep up
with the competition. Unless you fork Chrome, of course.

~~~
jahlove
They made $450m in revenue in 2018. What fraction of that is actually needed
to keep a productive browser team afloat?

~~~
bzbarsky
How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be?

How big do you think the Chromium team is?

~~~
coldtea
> _How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be?_

I'd say 50 or so people would be fine.

> _How big do you think the Chromium team is?_

Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink
teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).

~~~
Yoric
> I'd say 50 or so people would be fine.

With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX
researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a
small UX.

Not nearly a browser :(

> Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink
> teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).

That sounds like a really, really vast underestimation. To the best of my
recollection Chromium _embedding_ teams inside Google that are 30+ developers
(again, let's forget managers, UX researchers, etc.). I know that there are at
least 4 such teams at Google.

I would be very surprised if Google didn't have at least 1000 developers
working on Chromium.

~~~
saagarjha
> With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX
> researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a
> small UX.

Safari does those two specific things with a quarter of the number you
mentioned. The entire team is nowhere near a thousand people.

~~~
marcinzm
Safari runs on 1.5 operating systems and a limited set of hardware.

~~~
alwillis
Apple is known for how small their teams are.

WebKit runs on macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS across Intel and ARM
architectures.

WebKit provides the web views for countless 3rd party apps, including Mail,
Calendar, iTunes, etc.

Apple certainly has fewer people who get paid to write code for Safari/WebKit
than Google has on Chrome/Blink. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla has more
people too, especially since they’re rewriting pieces of the browser engine at
the same time.

~~~
saagarjha
A number of other companies also contribute support for a variety of other
platforms too. Scrolling through a platform header gives a good idea of who's
adapted WebKit for their needs:
[https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/blob/master/Source/WTF/wtf/...](https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/blob/master/Source/WTF/wtf/Platform.h)

------
iamleppert
Mitchell Baker should be ashamed of her performance at Mozilla. Serious
missteps in the development of Firefox led to the rise of Google Chrome, and
only recently (and arguably too little, too late) have they seen the light and
prioritized the re-development of Firefox.

Nearly all of the other projects at Mozilla that aren't related to the browser
itself have been abject failures. They have not only failed in their core
product against Google, but have shown that they are completely incapable of
innovation in other areas of tech.

Her letter reads like someone who is completely clueless. Getting rid of
people while earmarking $40 million for a so-called "innovation fund" with no
real strategy?

They are hoping some half-baked VPN product generates enough revenue to make
them independent of Google's search deal? Please remember this post when that
product fails to deliver. It's not a matter of time, it just makes no sense in
any kind of timeline and at this point Mitchell Baker is grasping at straws.

~~~
the_duke
Firefox did become horribly slow compared to Chrome and lost a lot of market
share in the tech savvy community because of it. I also don't understand how
they could fall so far behind with their primary product.

(they finally caught up again now, I switched back to Firefox about 2 years
ago)

But:

Google pushed Chrome on desktop _very aggressively_ via Google Search and
bundling Chrome with every software download imaginable.

Then came the rise of mobile and tablets, with forced Safari on iOS and Chrome
by default on Android/Chrome OS, with little incentive to switch...

The bulk of market share loss was inevitable.

~~~
thu2111
I think you're assuming Chrome's very existence was inevitable, but it wasn't.

Chrome was created partly because Page just wanted to do a browser, but that
wasn't enough by itself. Schmidt blocked a browser project for years on the
grounds that it was a low priority and there wasn't much reason because
Firefox was doing fine.

What changed things was Google trying to work with Mozilla to contribute
resources, push the web forward faster and running into huge problems again
and again. Political, corporate, technical. The Firefox architecture was over-
engineered but also the Firefox guys thought they were top dog and kept
dropping or ignoring Google's contributions for what looked like spurious
reasons. Frustration grew amongst engineers who cared about improving HTML and
with Page having always wanted to do a browser, now there was pressure from
the top and the grassroots. When they got a few key hires who showed they
could do a new browser with a much better architecture, and move way faster
than cooperating with Mozilla, events were set in motion.

But there's a parallel universe in which Mozilla welcomed the Google
contributions with open arms, in which Gecko had been written in normal C++,
was easier to work on/better documented, where the app architecture was more
conventional and thus more amenable to sandboxing etc. And in that world maybe
Firefox would be even more dominant than Chrome. I don't think Mozilla
realised back then they either could learn how to work with the Google
engineering teams, even to the extent of giving up some architectural control,
or Google would wipe them out.

~~~
ralfinat
> When they got a few key hires who showed they could do a new browser with a
> much better architecture, and move way faster than cooperating with Mozilla,
> events were set in motion.

They also bought up a significant fraction of the Firefox core devs -- there's
a lot of "crushing the competition" you can do when your money pit is
basically bottomless.

~~~
thu2111
Mozilla was a firehose of money back then. Financially they were and still are
Google: literally they get a fraction of Google's own revenue stream. That was
more than sufficient to reward their developers in whatever way they liked.

Those devs weren't leaving Mozilla because of money. They left because they
were being given a nearly blank slate on which to create a browser they felt
would be much better.

------
falcolas
70 employees, at a grossly over-estimated cost of $200,000 a year each (QA
"leads" would probably cost a fraction of that), would cost Mozilla about $14M
to retain. They are retaining their $43M budget for blue sky research intact
(per TFA).

It feels like a better compromise could have been made.

~~~
ameshkov
This might be a sign for other employees that they need to focus on the things
that can help Mozilla actually earn more and not just be a good guy. It may
sound horrible, but considering their market share dynamics it makes sense.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Remember the PR disaster they had when they bundled Pocket?

~~~
ameshkov
Well, yeah, but focusing on earning does not mean they should start doing
stupid things like that or adding a banner place to the start page.

For instance, I would have considered paying for some premium features like
additional privacy-related functionality or a VPN.

~~~
Yoric
Well, Mozilla is selling VPN services (in some countries). Are you a user?

------
musicale
> “You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from
> new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of
> search. This did not happen

I don't want subscription garbage, and I don't want Firefox advertising stuff
to me.

However, I have no idea how I'd try to fund Mozilla when most of their work is
on a product that they give away for free.

I can't imagine that grants from foundations or the government could cover
their budget, and I can't really see them being amazingly successful with apps
(although I would pay for a bulletproof, high quality ad blocker for iPhone)
or hardware (although Purism's phones and laptops seem kind of in Mozilla's
ballpark, I doubt they are making much money.) Nobody wants to pay for web
services, and it's hard to compete with the many cloud incumbents, so those
don't really seem like a good options either. Running a consulting business to
fund the browser doesn't seem like a winning idea. Development tools seem to
be free from the likes of {Microsoft, Apple, Google} as well, so that doesn't
seem like a great business. I can't imagine many people paying for Rust or
webasm tools either. Perhaps web game development tools or platforms? Anyway,
it's a hard problem.

So HN, does anyone have any actual, serious, good ideas on how Mozilla can
make money and keep delivering a good Firefox browser (and Rust, webasm, etc.)
for free?

~~~
pnako
Why not something like the Linux Foundation?

Stop all the marketing and the nonsense advocacy, focus on developing a
browser, get other companies to fund development. It's in the interest of
quite a few vendors to have a good, neutral browser.

~~~
modo_mario
The linux foundation gets money because quite a lot of products, companies
depend on it. Their servers, their iot devices, etc, etc A lot of the code
contributions come from the industries that depend on it not just volunteers
or people payed with donations by small time linux lovers.

Nobody directly depends on Mozilla and or features in their product and so
nobody will give them money because of that. (you can argue rust trough
kubernetes and such is an example of the opposite but despite their big
influence and contribution it's not really a mozilla product) Electron has
chromium at it's core, CEF apps have chromium at their core, all the other
popular alternatives have chromium at their core and google has nice control.
Despite that this dominance is ultimately bad for everyone. Google gets too
much control over internet standards and their implementation. It is trash.
and Mozzila depends on them too for their funding.

I'd say we even risk that they wouldn't get hit with monopoly rulings if
Mozilla and firefox dies despite their competition being utterly dependant on
and at the mercy of the direction of their product.

------
WhatIsDukkha
I'm looking forward to some paid products from Mozilla (including the vpn).

Privacy focused personal zeroknowledge cloud things are needed.

I'd love to have a more elaborate version of Firefox Sync that worked across
chromium (and I'd pay for it).

The obvious calendar, mail, etc.

I'd pay for a zeroknowledge hosted Berners Lee Solid service.

Do this stuff and I'll pay well for it.

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
Why do you want sync with chromium?

Firefox syncs just fine with Firefox on any platform, including mobile. Just
use it everywhere, no?

~~~
WhatIsDukkha
Because, to me, even lockin to Firefox isn't a good thing.

I still use Chromium for garbage web time _cough_ hackernews*cough for
example.

All my actual work and projects are Firefox (tons of vertical tabs) and I
don't want them polluted with my trash reading but would still like to see
history/tabs etc at least browseable across browsers.

Containers are getting a bit more viable to combine work and consumption but
not quite there.

edit - and yes I'm actually just about 100% Firefox mobile already

------
aazaa
> All of this is part of the organization’s plans to become less reliant on
> income from search partnerships and to create more revenue channels. In
> 2018, the latest year for which Mozilla has published its financial records,
> about 91 percent of its royalty revenues came from search contracts.

This raises the question of what products Mozilla plans to make that will
generate revenue. The article doesn't address this.

I found these after a quick search, all of which appear to depend on Firefox
to some extent:

\- VPN/password manager called Lockvise

\- Pocket recommendations and sponsored content

\- Firefox Monitor, "a free service which allows people to check whether their
email address has been a part of a recent security breach"

\- "DNS over HTTPS" and "Encrypted Server Name Indication", "... both of which
we’ve partnered with Cloudflare to test in the U.S. market."

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/foundation/annualreport/2017/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/foundation/annualreport/2017/)

------
sciurus
Statement from Mozilla: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/01/15/readying-
for-the-fu...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/01/15/readying-for-the-
future-at-mozilla/)

------
dredmorbius
TechCrunch has more info:

"Mozilla lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue"

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-
it-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for-
subscription-products-to-generate-revenue/)

~~~
dang
Ok, we changed to that from
[https://twitter.com/KingstonTime/status/1217498737397903363](https://twitter.com/KingstonTime/status/1217498737397903363).
Thanks!

------
_nickwhite
To the 70: Thank you for contributing to such incredible software for all
these years. Your contribution to my life is not insignificant. Good luck on
your next chapter.

To Mozilla: Let's figure out this monetization thing. Heck, I'd pay for
Firefox to keep it as great as it is and independent.

------
stuff4ben
Besides donating and the as-yet-to-be-released VPN service, how else can we
support Mozilla? I don't see anything they're actually selling and I hate for
stuff like this to happen.

~~~
Nextgrid
From what I heard from other HN comments, donations don't actually go to the
browser's development, instead they go to auxiliary projects of (IMO) dubious
value like community outreach, etc.

------
jeremyperson
If you are a Mozilla product user, this is the link to donate to a great
nonprofit. [https://donate.mozilla.org/en-
US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount...](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-
US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount=30&utm_source=support.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=footer&currency=usd)

------
nicolas_t
I would have expected in that email from the CEO something like, "I will
myself take a massive salary reduction and divide my salary by 2". But
strangely, it's never something we see during mass layoffs... I mean her
salary is pretty much the salary 15 to 20 software engineers.

------
solarengineer
I diligently donate to Mozilla, Wikimedia, and openbsd. After reading about
executives and their largesse on various threads today, I do want to know: do
donations to the Mozilla Foundation go towards paying the salaries and various
expenses of the executives at Mozilla the corporate?

------
ww520
Mozilla should provide products and services that are one level above the
cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GC) since it doesn't have the scale and datacenter
resources to compete. Mozilla should provide at the product level that's
consumer facing.

Mozilla can focus on online related communication and collaboration products.
Some examples: email, messenger & audio/video conference, online identity, and
security.

Email - make a web-based and an offline version.

Messenger & audio/video conference - can be easily tied in with the browser.

Online identity - people and company pay to have verified online identities
and brands.

Security - encrypted communication/email/message, anonymous services, vpn,
etc. SSL, domain name, DNS.

------
mindfulhack
This article and thread has put a baad taste in my mouth regarding Firefox.

But like Tesla, I still want Firefox to succeed. I'm not sure I'll donate
again however. They seem to be just fine on their own.

------
jug
If Google moved to more in-house development of Chromium, there wouldn't be
many scraps soon left for proponents of the open web to browse with... It's
sad to see Microsoft as well as Opera and Brave picking Chromium for their
engine when at least I think Gecko is still very much on par with web
standards support. It feels like a more sensible choice, including for their
own business safety in case Google does some sneaky move to "streamline their
development" and "focus on the next generation of smartphones and Fuchsia OS"
or something like that. That would be a power move we used to attribute to
Microsoft in the past.

I wish Mozilla good luck although I'm shaken by these news and how far
reaching the restructuring seems to be. I hope it's not the beginning of a
negative spiral where they end up lacking manpower in development and QA to
deliver a stable browser supporting the latest web standards and lagging
behind, because then they're truly out. We should see already in a couple of
years.

------
swills
Something I noticed about Firefox today, when I was trying to troubleshoot
something:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601925](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601925)

There are quite a few places where the browser makes requests and they are not
logged in the Network section of the Inspector.

------
Vinnl
Interesting announcement not two weeks after announcing that the MoFo board
would be expanded: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/01/08/expanding-
mozillas-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/01/08/expanding-mozillas-
boards-in-2020/)

------
thecrumb
This is sad. I don't really have any interest in whatever 'services' Firefox
has in mind but I'd actually pay for a good browser - maybe a monthly fee. I
really use no local apps these days - everything is IN my browser so whatever
I was paying for apps I'd be happy to chuck towards a secure, updated
browser...

------
elkos
Mozilla blog update: "Readying for the Future at Mozilla"
[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/01/15/readying-for-the-
fu...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/01/15/readying-for-the-future-at-
mozilla/)

------
ndesaulniers
Some of my friends are affected; does anyone have advice from experience that
could help?

~~~
Yoric
1\. Don't panic.

2\. Your worst enemy at this stage is depression/exhaustion. Sport and social
life are important to keep this at bay.

3\. Brush up your CV, your interview skills.

4\. Organize cross-reading of CVs, simulate interviews for each other.

5\. You may need to go through numerous interviews. It sucks.

------
anon463637
Too many chiefs, and they can the good braves. Top heavy org chart is going to
commence years of random re-orgs to dance around the real problem: management.
Firefox is of course even more likely to founder going forward.

------
Cyclone_
I don't think they've had any vision ever since Eich left.

------
remote_phone
My friend used to work for Mozilla. She said she has never had a more boring
job. She said there was no work to be done, her boss was remote and never
asked her for deliverables. She was well paid with a 40% cash bonus and she
would go on yearly boondoggles. I told her she should stay but she couldn’t
bear it so she left after 2 years.

She said part of it was that they couldn’t save money because they were a non
profit so all the money they got they had to spend, which caused over hiring.

~~~
zozbot234
This would be the Mozilla Foundation (not Corp), right? And I don't think it's
_literally_ true that a charitable foundation has to spend everything it gets
- they can still save for a rainy day or even build up an endowment over time.
They can't disburse profits obviously, but AIUI that's not the same thing as
saving money internally.

------
whatthefoxer
I had Mozilla hr straight up tell me they wanted me to hire someone based on
color regardless of performance difference even if somewhat large and obvious.
For you ladies, they indicated clearly that "we have enough women in
engineering".

This wasn't exactly a fun moment. I left Mozilla after this. Most of the
reason i post all this here now.

------
mjw1007
I wonder if they got less (if anything) from the settlement from the Yahoo
(Oath) lawsuit than they'd been planning on.

------
MichaelMoser123
Mr. Corbet is predicting 'perturbations in the job market' for this year. I
wonder if he will turn out to be right (also interesting that this news item
did get this huge amount of comments)

[https://lwn.net/Articles/807748/](https://lwn.net/Articles/807748/)

------
monadamon
What was Mozilla thinking?!?

I'm hiring a WebAssembly compiler expert. We're an all Rust shop, too.
damon@nearprotocol.com

------
dgudkov
Mozilla lays off people, yet it still doesn't accept donations. I don't
understand it - there are tons of people (including me) would gladly donate to
Mozilla to keep it afloat. Yet, you can only donate to the Mozilla foundation,
but not to Mozilla Corporation (that develops the browser).

~~~
gr__or
Afaik companies can't ask for donations in the US.

------
ausjke
I guess, in addition to Chrome, Microsoft just _Edged_ Mozilla out a little
more.

I use Linux as desktop and for me Chrome has been the choice for the last few
years. The only thing I use most often from Mozilla is its MDN site, which is
absolutely great.

------
siwatanejo
If any of the ones laid off is interested in working for a startup developing
a browser extension with WASM (from C#), poke me via email: andrew.forsure at
gmail (remote working is welcome; part-time ok too)

------
alwillis
Apparently Brenden Eich, who helped develop Firefox when he was at Mozilla,
seems to be innovating with monetizing a browser, first with cryptocurrency
and now with sponsored images:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061348)

------
unlit_spark
What's this mean? Do their jobs get automatized or is this the beginning of
the end for Mozilla?

------
im3w1l
Sad they for these people, for Mozilla and for the whole web. Hope Mozilla's
fortune turns.

------
butterNaN
As someone who looks up to Mozilla as a "dream job company", this is
disheartening.

------
itsangaris
"officeoftheceo@mozilla.com", aka Mitchell, has a number grammar issues with
their email. It's surprising that someone in such a high leadership position,
who communicates for a living doesn't have an intuitive sense of basic
grammar—especially for such an important announcement…

------
rexreed
Why does Mozilla Corporation have 1,000 employees? Just an honest question.

~~~
bzbarsky
Because browsers are hard. See my comment at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059393)
for some comparative numbers.

------
flybyair2038
What did Mitchell mean by "Most will not join us in Berlin"?

~~~
yoasif_
They are meeting for an all-hands meeting in Berlin soon.

------
dependenttypes
They should have fired some of the designers and managers instead.

------
IGotThroughIt
Wouldn't have happened if they hadn't forced Brendan Eich out. Just saying. I
know as a patron I trust him and followed him over to brave especially for its
privacy offering. Removing founders is hardly ever a good idea.

------
ChrisArchitect
man, the chromium-based MS Edge browser launched today....hm

------
sida
I am starting to see a lot of tech layoffs. Bubble popping?

------
chrshawkes
I find it interesting they are laying off 7% of their staff while hiring new
developers. I say this as they had a job post in DC recently saying we could
join their growing company. Are they growing or retracting?

~~~
blackearl
Maybe it's like a controlled burn. Get rid of a bunch of low performers or
those who they don't really need currently, hire quickly into what they do
need.

~~~
grilled_cheese
remember you're talking about people who just lost their job...

------
mherrmann
A reminder that you can donate to Mozilla [1]. I think it's very important for
a free web.

[1]: [https://give.mozilla.org/](https://give.mozilla.org/)

------
ntnsndr
Any word about whether this affects Thunberbird?

~~~
sciurus
AFAIK no Mozilla Corporation employees have been paid to work on Thunderbird
for years now, so there's nothing to cut.

------
fapjacks
Mismanagement.

Let me have Rome for but a single eight-hour workday.

------
pos52
Sad

------
petagonoral
in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets:

2018 financials: [https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-
fdn-201...](https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-
fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf)

wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person
really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in
addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated
out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. nice job if you can
get it.

edit: 1 million USD in 2016 and before.jumped to 2.3 million in 2017! pg8 of
form 990 available at [https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-
records/](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-records/)

~~~
shawndrost
The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years
contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on
Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many
foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the
founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its
~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profitable source of the $368
million in Foundation assets that parent cited.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker)

I understand why people are generally peeved about executive compensation, but
this conversation is very rote and this is a particularly flamebait-y framing
of it.

~~~
phonon
She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham
after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome
to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did.

[https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-
gerva...](https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-
markham/)

~~~
catalogia
That's appalling. How did that make people still working at Mozilla feel? I
can't imagine working under somebody like that.

~~~
tenpies
This will sound outrageous to US technology workers in 2020, but some people
are able to separate their professional lives from the religious and political
beliefs of their co-workers.

About 15 years ago it was perfectly normal for this exchange to take place:
_Your view of marriage is a faith-based promise to your deity based on
millennia of tradition and completely different from my view of it as a
legalistic civil affair that is even less serious than renewing a recreational
boating licence? Not a problem, let 's go back to work now._

~~~
monoideism
There are still tech companies like this. I have no detailed idea about my
boss and coworkers' political beliefs, but I suspect they're different from
mine. No problem, we keep things professional and respectful.

------
dman
Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at
Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time.

[https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...](https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/photo/1)

~~~
throwaway123x2
It's crazy how much FF's marketshare has dropped. It's such a great browser.

~~~
pier25
Hmm I don't know. I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev
tools are great, it's simply not as polished as the competition.

For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual
menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The
tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.

It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For
people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this
functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much
IMO.

[0] [https://imgur.com/lODjWSm](https://imgur.com/lODjWSm)

~~~
takeda
> It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For
> people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this
> functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much
> IMO.

Really? Do you learn a new language every day? I installed languages that I am
interested years ago and forgot about it until you mentioned it.

~~~
flexd
A lot of us are bi-lingual. English is not my first language, so being able to
use spell checking for my native language and English without things breaking
is important to me.

~~~
takeda
well, I'm bi-lingual as well, I only needed to install languages once. I don't
want to have installed dictionary for every language under the sun. They do
take space.

------
overcast
Only in fairy tale land does CEO/Executive compensation reflect performance.

~~~
manfredo
Many CEOs derive a significant portion - often even the majority - of their
compensation from performance-based bonuses. Compensation not only reflects
performance, it is directly tied to it.

~~~
overcast
Millions/Billions were paid out in bailout money, to the very same people
responsible for collapsing the housing market in 2009. Compensation for that
level is complete bullshit.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/business/31pay.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/business/31pay.html)

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/16b-of-bank-bailout-went-to-
exe...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/16b-of-bank-bailout-went-to-execs/)

[https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/banks-
paid...](https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/banks-
paid-326-billion-in-bonuses-amid-us-bailout-bloomberg)

~~~
golergka
Didn't that bailout earn American taxpayers money in the end?

~~~
overcast
Sure, the ones that actually paid back with interest. But that doesn't help
the 'performance bonus' discussion. These people destroyed the housing market,
then got bailed out by the people they destroyed, THEN got paid
millions/billions in bonuses for doing it.

~~~
golergka
Housing market got destroyed by people not paying back their loans. Assigning
this to be a moral responsibility of banks and regulators is simplistic and
naive.

I had to search for this excellent clip from Margin Call, which explains this
better than I could:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2kGHcdJYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2kGHcdJYU)

~~~
overcast
It was much deeper than that. While you're partially correct, that people not
paying back their loans is what ultimate set off the collapse, the reason for
it was the straight greed, and manipulation of the repackaged junk sub-prime
mortgages by the banks. Collateralized Debt Obligations, and even worse CDO-
Squared, bundled up complete crap, and sold them off with triple-A ratings.
When the mortgagor failed to pay, those CDOs were finally downgraded and
became worthless, losing banks hundreds of billions. Predatory practices on
homeowners, and bank greed.

------
Slashbot2
Well I dunno.,. maybe it was good.. ever since Windows 8 came out (which was a
pile of fucking shit) I would say things have gotten worse.. Windows is
complete garbage as far as actual desktop improvements.

From Win98>Win2000>WinXP>Win7 it has been a slow but steady improvement in
stability and features.. sure could have been better, but compared to Linux
desktop distro's which none of them can barely even fucking match WinXp in
terms desktop features and stability.. nvm the power shell extensions and eco
system which don't exist. Because that only comes from good API's
documentation and community that isn't completely stupid ... I would say that
MS had a fairly good team of people up until the release of Win7, after that
they seemed to have got a retarded shit for brains CEO Satyan noob tard, and
replaced all the skilled people with fellow idiots.

And now Win10 is a stinking pile of broken and bug infested noob trash... it's
built on the work that proceeded it, but they sure have done as much as
possible to ruin that while doing fuck useful as an improvement in the
underlying system let alone the UX/UI which hasn't improved at all its at best
worse, they've just tacked on crap everywhere.

~~~
lostmsu
Sadly, I have to agree. There have been just a few of really good features in
Windows after 7: app sandboxing, first party VR support (if not for that, we'd
only have locked down VR platforms like PS VR and Oculus), the new Mail
client, and using voice to set reminders and alarms (when it works). Maybe
better support for tablet mode in Mail, browser and the Start Menu, and the
dark mode lately.

Outside of that list, I'd struggle to name a single thing in Windows, that
became better. Number of bugs certainly increased. Specifically, search and
language switching are the worst offenders.

------
modzu
i submit a bug report to the ff bugzilla and their reply to me was, "can you
fix it"? i thought, uh oh..

------
tus88
I thought Mozilla was a foundation not a company.

~~~
mattl
Mozilla Foundation owns Mozilla Corp.

~~~
teraflop
It's not quite clear to me -- were the laid-off employees working for the
foundation, or for the corporation?

~~~
Yoric
Corp

------
0xdead
Mozilla doesn't need employees when it has so many people white-knighting it
on the internet.

------
tanilama
If MSFT bought Mozilla to counter Google, that will be hilariously glorious to
fulfill a cycle, but makes logical sense.

~~~
jml7c5
Come to think of it, did Microsoft ever consider replacing their rendering
engine with Gecko, rather than Blink? I'm surprised they ceded such control
over the future direction of the web to Google.

------
johanekblad
Hacker news, please block topics from techcrunch- and verison media-articles.
They use a lot of third party cookies, ad banners, fingerprinting and other
evil stuff.

~~~
floatingatoll
You should email this to the mods using the Contact link in the footer, as
they'll be able to see your comment and respond to it.

------
tapoxi
Mozilla should just ship Chromium with privacy oriented features. There's no
reason to reinvent the wheel and keep iterating on Gecko when its obvious
there's less and less demand for it, especially when it costs them so much
money.

If Firefox was actually gaining share I'd feel differently, but I'd rather see
Mozilla switch tech stacks than fizzle out and die.

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
Firefox is our last bastion of hope against the browser monoculture.

If you think that the new browser monoculture would be any better than the
previous one (IE5-6), you are horribly, horribly wrong.

~~~
tapoxi
I don't understand that argument, IE was a closed source browser, Chromium is
BSD-licensed. If anything the closest comparison is probably the widespread
use of Linux.

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand
waive.

Imagine this: Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works
only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos), and cites this
as an excuse to close sources. Then, it starts updating it's own websites with
specific code that can run properly only in new (proprietary) versions of
Chrome.

Of course, outcry in tech press, but average Joe User does not care, he just
needs stuff to work. Then, developers say, screw it, we just need stuff to
work for users. Just like they did in 2004. This is a very crude model,
reality will likely be more subtle, but I hope you get the idea

~~~
tapoxi
> BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand
> waive.

So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar.

> Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome
> (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos)

This already exists, it's called Widevine and browsers download it as a binary
blob.

This is also a different argument, Chrome vs Chromium. If there was a healthy
ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers then one vendor not playing by the rules
would have limited impact.

~~~
jasonlotito
> So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar.

So, you were talking about not understanding why a mono-culture is bad. So
your license argument here means you don't understand the parent.

"BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand
waive."

This means that once FF is no more, what's stopping Google from slowing
closing off even more parts of the browser to just Chrome? They can start
forcing their will with their control over Chromium. They make the rules. And
the BSD license can't do anything to stop it. That's the point.

And because these other browsers invested into Chromium, simply forking and
continuing work on their Chromium version becomes more and more challenging
without massive financial support. Only a few companies can do that.

Look at Apple and Safari. Safari lags behind Chrome in many areas. And this is
Apple, not some small startup.

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
> once FF is no more, what's stopping Google from slowing closing off even
> more parts of the browser to just Chrome?

Nothing is stopping. In fact, they already do that with Android. Starting with
version 5, AOSP barely improves, but they add more and more and more
proprietary APIs like Firebase, severely limit background apps, pushing
developers to use proprietary push notifications, with each release more and
more functions are tied to Google Play Services. [0]

[0]: [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-
on...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-
controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/)

