
Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products - rebelwebmaster
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing-mozilla/
======
dang
There have been multiple submissions. I guess this one wins because it's the
original source and was posted first. But since corporate press releases leave
much to be desired
([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corporate%20press%20release%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corporate%20press%20release%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment)),
I've pilfered the title from [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/) via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121166).

Please note that this thread has multiple pages of comments. You can get to
the later pages via the More link at the bottom, or like this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336&p=2](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336&p=2)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336&p=3](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336&p=3)

------
dblohm7
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I _do_ recognize how my position influences
my perspective.]

One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or
elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a
non-profit, we _should_ be held to _higher_ standards, but not _impossible_
standards.

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

Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?

Sure, Mozilla has made mistakes. Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did
we work to prevent it happening again?

People want to continue flogging us for these things while giving other
companies (who have made their own mistakes, often much more consequential
than ours, would never be as open about it, and often learn nothing) a
relatively free pass.

I'm certainly not the first person on the planet whose employer has been on
the receiving end of vitriol. And if Mozilla doesn't make it through this next
phase, I can always find another job. But what concerns me about this is that
Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet. To
see it wither away because of people angry with what are, in the grand scheme
of things, minor mistakes, is a shame.

EDIT: And lest you think I am embellishing about trivial complaints, there was
a rant last week on r/Firefox that Mozilla was allegedly conspiring to hide
Gecko's source code because we self-host our primary repo and bug tracking
instead of using GitHub, despite the fact that the Mozilla project predates
GitHub by a decade.

~~~
renewiltord
Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They
have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product.
Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.

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.

~~~
ploxiln
I use Firefox. I have used it since it was called Phoenix, and I still use it
today, extensively, on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

I'm just disappointed about what Mozilla has become over the years. It wasn't
supposed to be an "agile" tech company, with slick marketing and UI/UX, making
deals to try to get market share.

It was supposed to be a non-profit foundation, making an open-source cross-
platform browser engine, pushing for open protocols and standards. It enabled
a few niche open-source operating systems to have a viable browser, it put a
big dent in IE's market share, I would say it paved the way for Safari on iOS
to be viable way back in 2009, and that obviously changed the world.

It still could have done that. It was making 100s of millions of dollars per
year from the default search provider deal, for over a decade. It could have
saved most of that money, spending it only on 50 to 100 browser engineers.
Branching out to MDN and websocket or webrtc libraries would also make sense.
But the rest of the crap, the marketing, the rebranding, the Pocket purchase
and integration, Firefox OS, the voice recognition and AI stuff (and notice
the announcement, they're keeping the AI division, really need that part
apparently), stuff that nobody remembers, that's all a waste of money that
could be saved by the non-profit foundation to just support the low-level
engine keeping the open web viable.

~~~
zmix
Each time somebody mentions, that 'libxslt2' is on an XPath 1.0 level (20
years old, we are at v3.1, currently) and how nice an update would be, the
common agreement is the same: " _lots_ of work, which nobody pays for."

Just thinking about all the money they burned through, how great would it have
been, to bring XML up to current standards, and to support it well in Firefox.
I mention this, because it _is_ important, that we have at least one browser
in the market, that understands XML native.

Or what would be if "Ubiquity" would have become an integral part of Firefox?
Wow, just wow! I hate these people. They totally ignored the desire of many
folks for a WYSIWYG XUL IDE back in the day as well... Instead they made
Firefoxy parties, sold T-Shirts and coffee-mugs, implemented 'Persona',
'Hello' and what not! Did you just say, they bought 'Pocket'? Holy moly! I
thought it was just a strategic relationship.

~~~
tannhaeuser
What has XML to do with anything?

~~~
zmix
XML is the only serious, modern document format we have and well within the
realm of web browsers.

------
jacquesm
Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly
strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to
Chrome or Edge.

"But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products
and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests"

Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget
about the rest. There are bugs open for the browser that cost them marketshare
every day (WebMIDI for instance) driving people to Chrome.

Spreading their focus thinly, causing their main product to be somewhat
neglected and behind when it comes to comparing it with other browsers. And
that's before we get into the re-write and forced upgrade and breakage of lots
of important plug-ins.

It's not so much the changing world that is the problem here, but a ship that
has become rudderless and that does not treat the browser landscape like the
war it really is.

The world needs Mozilla, healthy and under good management. I'm not sure if
that is a luxury we will have for much longer if they are going down hill this
fast. On the plus side, it's open source and will - hopefully - continue to
work for many years as long as there are people willing to keep it alive.

So as far as I'm concerned this post highlights the problem in the post
itself, this is _not_ what's needed.

Laser focus on the browser at the expense of all the fluff. Forget about
'internet activism' and 'building new products'.

Get the most secure and most user friendly, privacy first, standards
compatible and feature rich browser out there and you'll survive for another
decade at least. Get distracted by new and shiny stuff and I'd be surprised if
it lasts another five years.

~~~
gfodor
A common refrain, but is anything but obvious. Focusing on the browser could
be a losing strategy. I'd argue it probably is. The trajectory is terrible:
the tech is being commoditized (WebKit, Chromium) and the market share picture
is bleak. The opportunity cost is huge: maintaining a web engine, one which
basically just tries to keep up with the others put out by Google et al, takes
armies of people that could perhaps otherwise be leveraged elsewhere towards
creating something disruptive which could carry Mozilla forward into the
future. The entire revenue model is held up by, of all companies, Google. And
that model is backed up by market share which is going down continuously, is
under attack on all sides, and is morally compromised by being powered by by
ads. The biggest counterincentive to Google pulling the plug isn't one of
ending a transaction of mutual value exchange, but potential legal impact by
regulators. Not exactly the most robust business model.

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.

~~~
barrkel
Counterpoint: Apple when Jobs came back.

Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is
to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly.

It's very hard to do psychologically, though.

IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the
customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under
development), but it could be profitable and it leverages their USP in a way
that Chrome doesn't seem able or willing to follow.

Finding different products to sell simply leads to Firefox going away, IMO. I
don't care about Mozilla; I care about what Firefox does that Chrome does not.
And at the end of the day, that's mostly Tree Style Tabs, uBlock and a menu
bar.

~~~
gfodor
I think one challenge is a lot of Mozilla's users see Mozilla as a browser
company, whereas Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company. The users may be
right. Your Apple analogy is a tough one - if Apple had just stayed focused on
PCs, and not the higher level mission of the company around comput-ing-, they
would have not invented new kinds of computers. Focus makes sense, once you've
locked in on something. The trick of _what_ to focus on is hard though, and
the scope of things to consider as possible to focus on is informed by the
mission of the company and its fundamental thesis for existing. When the iPod
came out it was often chastised as being off-mission for Apple, and many Mac
enthusiasts yelled that it would detract away from having them fix whatever
the problem of the day was bothering them about their Mac. This kind of
complaint is obviously very familiar in the Mozilla case - things other than
Firefox are often considered 'distractions' much like the iPod (which led to
the iPhone) was by similar people who were heavily invested in the company's
existing product line. Time will tell if Mozilla survives if it turns out they
should, unlike Apple, listen to them and accept they can't do more than one
thing.

Mozilla's thesis is about unlocking the potential of the Internet and ensuring
it remains a public resource. Its purpose for existing is not about tree style
tabs or ad blockers. But this makes for a tough process of determining how to
foster innovative products since the mission is so broad.

~~~
jacquesm
> I think one challenge is a lot of Mozilla's users see Mozilla as a browser
> company, whereas Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company.

Spot on. In fact, I think that without FireFox Mozilla might as well be dead,
even if it survives as a legal entity and employs people. That's it's whole
reason for existence as far as I'm concerned.

~~~
gred
Agree. I use Firefox for all the usual reasons. I've considered donating to
Mozilla in the past, but have always decided not to -- because my impression
is that most of that money would be spent on experiments and signaling, not
work on the core product that I care about.

------
segphault
Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical
issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to
industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than
leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior.

In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk
losing users, arguing that these issues weren't hills worth dying on. And now,
because Mozilla didn't choose a hill to die on, they are going to die on no
hill at all.

When they aren't the browser that is standing up for interoperability and the
freedom and privacy of their users, they have no way to differentiate
themselves. Firefox is just another browser, and it's one that is
architecturally dated and under-resourced compared to its rivals.

I had assumed that when Mozilla had nothing left to lose as Firefox
marketshare crashed, they would go back to being the scrappy underdog who
advocates for the right thing. The fact that they've chosen to focus on
revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has
fallen.

~~~
news12klm
They may have made mistakes over EME but would _you_ have sacrificed netflix
or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?

~~~
shock
Computers are powerful enough these days to have multiple browsers installed
and running simultaneously. One could have used Firefox for general browsing
and just used Chrome for Netflix.

~~~
est31
Power users might do it, but most people don't.

~~~
shock
There are enough power users in the world to keep Firefox relevant.

~~~
spanhandler
Judging from market share, does anyone who's not a power user even run Firefox
these days? I know I stopped religiously installing it on non-nerd relatives'
computers and stopped evangelizing it to my friends years ago, when it stopped
being a clear usability and safety win. They're certainly not installing it
themselves.

[EDIT] basically I have no reason to bother a friend or relative to install
Firefox if they're gonna open it and go "well, that's... fine". Non-nerds
could immediately tell Phoenix/Firebird/early-FF were better than IE. For
real. These days, to convince my uncle to install FF instead of Edge, what's
the sell? What about FF makes it seem to them like I didn't just make them do
this for no reason? Unless you _also_ install some extensions, the only
difference is that they advertise different add-on services at you. If FF
doesn't make bold choices that improve the default browsing experience, I have
_no reason whatsoever_ to recommend them to non-nerds, or to install FF when I
set up a computer for someone, or whatever.

------
billyhoffman
“We need to focus...” followed by 5 different areas to focus on.

That’s not focusing.

“[We] need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and
technologies that both excite them and represent their interests.”

What? Mozilla needs to build great products that solve people’s problems
better than Google or whomever else does. That’s what Firefox did when it came
out. It was objectively better than IE in ways that people could immediately
grasp.

“Representing interests?” WTF are you even taking about? If you mean privacy
and ownership of my personal data than say that.

“To start, that means products that mitigate harms or address the kinds of the
problems that people face today. Over the longer run, our goal is to build new
experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better
characteristics inside those products.”

Mitigate harms? Again, WTF are we even talking about? Better values? Maybe
this is the open source roots showing? But the majority of your business is
based on selling default search engine rights to one of the most invasive
harvesters of personal info, so let’s not pull that “values” thread too much
here Mozilla.

Make awesome products and solve people problems better than your competitors.
If you competition is doing scummy stuff, then tell people why your approach
is better. Apple is doing an awesome job messaging the importance of privacy.

Come on Mozilla. Get in the damn game

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

~~~
fsflover
Also, please make a monthly donation to Mozilla if you can. You will
contribute to saving the world.

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

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

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

~~~
shock
I wonder why the current structure is set up like that. I mean I don't think
it's by accident – if it were set up like that by accident, surely, it could
have been set up so people could direct donations directly at Firefox, if the
CEO wanted that.

~~~
staktrace
The structure is set up that because it reflects the goals of Mozilla. Firefox
the browser is not the end goal, it's a means to making the internet a better
place. And that's what the Foundation is about. The corporation also pays
dividends to the Foundation in order to help fund their efforts, because it's
the Foundation's work that matters more (in the long term) than Firefox.

------
alex_young
Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and
a few related applications [0].

Apache meanwhile, has revenue of less than $1M, and has over 350 projects with
huge adoption like Cassandra and Kafka and Lucene and Maven and that eponymous
HTTP server [1].

In 2017 Mozilla paid their CEO $2.3M and their treasurer (who only worked 6
months) $1.2M [2].

Mozilla is a foundation which owns a for-profit corporation. That corporation
had revenues of $450M in 2018 [3]. I double checked this shocking amount.

Most of that revenue comes from their search partner, which was switched back
to Google recently [4].

How is all of this possible given the relative contributions of these software
non-profits?

[0] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/products](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products) [1]
[https://projects.apache.org/projects.html](https://projects.apache.org/projects.html)
[2]
[https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017-fo...](https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017-form-990.pdf)
[3] [https://www.ghacks.net/2019/11/26/mozilla-revenue-dropped-
in...](https://www.ghacks.net/2019/11/26/mozilla-revenue-dropped-in-2018-but-
it-is-still-doing-well/) [4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google)

~~~
jefftk
Apache projects are generally developed by a combination of interested
volunteers and corporate-funded teams, not by employees of the Apache
foundation.

~~~
Hello71
and why is that?

~~~
jefftk
The Apache Foundation is organized as a legal entity to host projects, but is
intentionally decentralized. Because they have chosen to organize themselves
this way, many large companies have chosen to work with them to host
collaborative open source projects they care about. It fills a very different
niche than Mozilla.

Looking at the revenue of the Apache Foundation is about as misleading as
looking at the revenue for the Mozilla Foundation. In both cases, development
is generally funded through corporations, though in the Apache case the
corporations are independent while in the Mozilla case the Foundation owns the
Mozilla Corporation.

------
bsimpson
Sounds like Servo, the next-generation browser engine that brought the world
Rust, is one of the teams being destaffed:

[https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960](https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960)

~~~
__s
Servo showed there was plenty of room for browser perf beyond optimizing JS
engines

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

~~~
xfour
Can’t say I’m surprised there wasn’t much movement on that project in a
coordinated fashion it had all the makings of a project without adequate
staffing to complete its vision.

~~~
rl3
Can you elaborate on this? Because I remember the day Firefox became _fast_
with an incredible amount of fondness, and that moment owed in large part to
Servo.

~~~
Miraste
Firefox is faster than it was, but it's still the slowest browser. I've gotten
literally 2x benchmark scores from Safari on the same hardware, and the
subjective difference is large. Servo propelled FF from "unusable" to "worth
the tradeoff" but they didn't have the resources to make it _fast_.

~~~
rl3
My experience in daily use of Firefox post-Servo is that all page loads have
essentially been instantaneous. This is of course subjective based in part on
hardware, so I'm not disputing your assessment.

As far as I'm aware, Servo is at the bleeding edge of performance under the
hood. Its hybrid glyph rendering system for example is state-of-the-art.

~~~
Miraste
I'm no browser architect--I don't know how the rendering engines compare, and
of course it depends on the site and the extensions used. I did just time some
popular websites, and confirmed my impressions. For example, nytimes.com gives

0.5s on Safari with Adguard

1.6s on Chrome with uBlock Origin

2.5s on Firefox with uBlock Origin

which is pretty representative.

~~~
foota
Have you tried it without ublock out of curiosity?

~~~
Miraste
Without uBlock it's Chrome 2s, Firefox 3s.

~~~
ffpip
Make sure it is not some extension in the background.

Because Firefox is the fastest on my Windows PC

~~~
Miraste
That was in private windows with no extensions. I tried it on my Windows
machine with no extensions too, and it was 1.44 to 1.51, basically margin of
error. I know MacOS Firefox has really lagged on performance improvements in
the past. It could be a Mac-only issue.

------
ilmiont
Mozilla needs to stop prattling on about being a "world-class, modern, multi-
product internet organisation" and being "diverse" and "inclusive" and
"battling systemic racism" and get back to developing its core products which
people actually want to use.

Stop with the fluff and the airy blog posts and societal ambitions and get
back to doing actual engineering which gets people back using your products.
You may have a "new focus on community" but it means nothing if there's no
product to have that community built around.

You might claim to be a "technical powerhouse of the internet activist
movement" (whatever that is !? ) but soon you're going to be nothing at all
because Firefox is, as much as it pains me to say it, still merely following
and not leading while Mozilla leadership goes back and forth and seems more
interested in writing blog posts about global issues than the technology that
actually makes it a viable business.

Focus on Firefox. Build a product that's truly competitive once more. Build a
product. Not endless blog posts about trust and "authenticity" and
"leadership" and whatever else appears on the RSS feed today; get some actual
leadership together and start looking at what you're actually doing, which of
late has been not a lot at all.

~~~
warmind99
It'd be really interesting to see how much activist HR employees eat into
their revenue.

------
sciurus
250 people, roughly 25% of the company, were laid off today.

This is on top of the 70 laid off in January (discussion of that at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737))

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

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

~~~
saagarjha
Chromium is known to be a fairly well-staffed project; it’s really not a great
example to compare against.

~~~
ric2b
What would you compare it against? It's the most similar project I can think
of.

~~~
saagarjha
The Safari/WebKit team is much more reasonable, with probably an average of
one to two hundred people working on it at any given time (this is a bit
complicated to measure, since many people move around between the browser and
related teams like Mail or CFNetwork–and not to mention the various non-
developer roles that only work part-time on Safari–but it should be accurate
to an order of magnitude).

~~~
sciurus
I'm sure there are lots of other engineering teams at Apple focused on
security, build systems, developer tools, infrastructure, etc that the
Safari/Webkit team relies on.

Then there are all the non-engineering functions like HR, marketing, etc.

Mozilla has to do all of that.

~~~
saagarjha
I'm including all of that in that number, the actual organization's full-time
engineer count for it is probably half that. Also, I am excluding people
working on things used by Safari but general purpose and part of the OS, such
as system libraries and platform security features (many of which Chrome and
Firefox use themselves).

------
kstenerud
This has wayyy too much corporate doublespeak in it. I try not to be negative
on companies with a good mission, but this fluff-filled announcement tells my
spidey senses that they're about to do something that people won't like.

~~~
gilrain
You're not wrong, but why do you suspect the "something people won't like" is
anything more than this massive layoff?

~~~
abetusk
Section 5:

" New focus on economics. 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. "

A kind reading would be that they'll try to move to a consultancy or
subscription based model, like Red Hat. An unkind reading is that they will
make portions of their products and code proprietary and charge licensing
fees.

"... everything was free ..." is an ambiguous statement in this context. Do
they mean free/libre or do they mean free/gratis? This, to me reads like
corporate double speak. It leaves enough ambiguity so that people can have a
kind interpretation while letting them claim they were being honest about
their intentions should they choose to go a proprietary route.

~~~
renewiltord
I think it's pretty obvious they mean they (like Brave) want to participate in
building an Internet where you can monetize not using ads.

------
sbahr001
I find this sad, Mozilla is really an advocate for the open web and web
standards. Since web browsers are free, they can't make much. They might be
able to sell something like Thunderbird; if they improve it and make it more
into a service, like Hey! for example. They could also try the sponsorship
model that a lot of open source projects are doing. They already have
sponsors, but maybe sponsors for their open source frameworks might be better
than asking for donations at a company level.

~~~
wlesieutre
If downsizing the organization and bringing some revenue in from a VPN service
helps them be less financially beholden to Google, I think that's a net
positive.

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.

~~~
nix23
>beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive

For the Mozilla Management, not the Company itself.

~~~
wlesieutre
For anyone worried about what will happen to Mozilla if Google decides they
don't want to pay for being the default search engine in Firefox anymore.
Their current arrangement is a lot of eggs in one basket.

~~~
nix23
Was about the net positive, if you trow out all the developers and just hold
the highly paid management, firefox will loose even more % and not even google
will care if the default search engine google is.

------
Abishek_Muthian
That's sad, many of them would have joined Mozilla not just for money but
genuinely believing they are working for social good and they did.

I understood how bad Mozilla, for lack of a better term 'sucked' at making
money when I saw how the small team of KaiOS picked up the remains of Firefox
OS and not only turned it to be a viable business but did so in the ruthless,
hyper-competitive market of Smartphone OS ecosystem where even Microsoft had
failed.

IMO Mozilla should have gone full throttle on Thunderbird Enterprise with
support structure, Something for Microsoft Teams equivalent and finally
embracing DDG with open hands.

~~~
gridlockd
> I understood how bad Mozilla, for lack of a better term 'sucked' at making
> money when I saw how the small team of KaiOS picked up the remains of
> Firefox OS and not only turned it to be a viable business but did so in the
> ruthless, hyper-competitive market of Smartphone OS ecosystem where even
> Microsoft had failed.

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.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
>Like Firefox OS before it, actual KaiOS devices were not well-received,
because of poor performance and lack of apps.

As of Q1 2018, 23 million KaiOS devices were shipped. It stood second in terms
of market share in India due to JioPhone(even ahead of iOS). It seems future
Jio Phones would be Android, especially considering Google is now invested in
Jio(It's an investor in KaiOS as well). Mozilla had recently signed a deal to
develop the gecko engine for KaiOS further.

KaiOS team saw where Firefox OS would fit well and they brought it to
fruition; Something I feel Mozilla could have pulled off too.

~~~
gridlockd
> As of Q1 2018, 23 million KaiOS devices were shipped.

Like I said, remarkable.

> KaiOS team saw where Firefox OS would fit well and they brought it to
> fruition; Something I feel Mozilla could have pulled off too.

You mean they could've pulled off getting investor money to develop a bad
product into an even worse product and unload it on markets in the developing
world, where people are presumably used to bad products?

I don't think that's in their "mission statement".

------
zobzu
Mozilla 2010: "join us, don't work for the man, work for mankind!" (this was
their actual slogan)

Mozilla 2020: "well actually, work for the man" (or woman in this case)

Sadly, even with Mozilla Foundation getting 40M in donations they need the
Corporation to pay the bills (including Mitchell Baker's 2.5M/y salary)

The fact that this makes it less likely Firefox continues to be competition
for Chrome is bad news for the web ...

~~~
yborg
The "new focus" isn't that new, it's been the same since Baker became CEO, and
it's a focus on making Mitchell Baker really, really rich.

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.

~~~
erk__
The issue is that there are few nonprofits that can carry Firefox as much as
it need. The document foundation has around 0.2% of the revenue that Mozilla
has, so that was a lot more manageable than a hard fork of Firefox would be.

A potential new non-profit would need backing from some very large companies,
donations from privite people would likely get no where near enough.

~~~
xigency
Can you explain why? Why would a fork need anything more than hosting and a
mailing list?

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

So what is the impact on things like Servo/Rust, and the core browser?

I guess they are setting up for a post-Google-pays-to-keep-us-going world, but
not sure that Pocket or Hubs or VPN are going to set the world on fire.

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

~~~
vanderZwan
It's in the linked internal message, second page:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-
content/uploads/2020/08/Message-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-
content/uploads/2020/08/Message-to-Employees-Change-in-Difficult-Times.pdf)

~~~
emptyparadise
This is seriously unfortunate. A Chromium-only world creeps ever closer...

------
spinningslate
I feel for everyone who will lose their job here. That's never a pleasant
thing, particularly so in current circumstances.

Notwithstanding that though - and with no disrespect to anyone being laid off
- I'm actually really encouraged by this. The key quote from the announcement
is this one:

"Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default
search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the
contract has not been renewed."

Mozilla's reliance on Google is a major detraction from delivering privacy-
focused products.

I've said before, and I'll say again: I'd gladly pay a fee for Firefox if it
meant (a) it was funding the product so that (b) there was no need for them to
peddle in surveillance.

I really wish Mozilla all the best. Commit to provacy, show me where to pay
and I'll gladly sign up _.

\--

_I'm aware they accept donations and have already donated. But that's
different from paid-for products.

~~~
wtetzner
I would also happily pay for Firefox. I'm not sure if it would be better or
worse for the browser though, in terms of market share. If they don't charge
for it, hopefully they can cover costs with other paid services, like their
VPN service.

Honestly, it would be great if Mozilla could provide privacy focused cloud
services like storage, email, etc. I'd gladly pay for it, knowing they are not
interested in collecting my information.

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

------
praveenperera
4.5 months severance for the laid off employees.

Doesn't say anything about any cuts to executive compensation however.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-
content/uploads/2020/08/Message-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-
content/uploads/2020/08/Message-to-Employees-Change-in-Difficult-Times.pdf)

~~~
ecf
Every single C-suite executive should be required to take a (2 * % of
employees laid off) pay cut.

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.

~~~
warmind99
Coming from the finance world, there's a very good reason that doesn't happen.
In situations where a company is spiraling, everyone is incentivized to leave
for new work. The people who are most competent at work are also most capable
of getting new jobs, so what used to happen before it was standard was as a
company died, the best people left, and the company died faster.

If you axe the CEO's pay by 50% one year, what reason does he have to stay on
and fix things? Why shouldn't he just go to some successful series A startup,
get a bunch of equity, and retire in 10 years? He definitely could, if he
wanted to.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
While I fully understand the logic of what you're saying, this is what makes
us peons despise the upper execs, as they've turned it into a game of "Heads I
win, tails you lose".

I mean, if you're a great CEO, you're lavished with Midas-level wealth. If
you're an absolute shitty CEO, you're also lavished with let's say Midas-
junior-level wealth in the form of retention bonuses and/or golden parachutes
to fix the mess you created (as you, no doubt, axe a large number of your
underlings).

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

A paid browser at this point is realistically impossible to sell at any sort
of scale because chrome is free. IMO Firefox Mozilla needs to make a new
product that is paid. Someone on HN suggested email and/or other services that
compete with Google's user product suite? At that point you are selling server
space so its easier to get people to pay for it.

~~~
coffeefirst
That's a funny idea. Suppose there were a Firefox Pro option?

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.

------
jjordan
The reduced spending on dev tools makes me sad. Their efforts in the past, for
example their unparalleled support for CSS grid, have set the standard for web
developer tools. I hope they find a way to continue to innovate in this space.

~~~
olodus
Yeah, I very much agree. For a diverse Web development needs to be good on as
many browsers as possible.

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.

------
bhahn
The CEO mentions that COVID devastated their revenue but doesn’t elaborate.
Did COVID somehow impact their market share? Are fewer people buying and as
such they get less rev share? Something else?

~~~
throwaway987978
Yeah that's interesting. I thought nearly all of Mozilla's revenue came from
Google to default to their search engine. I wonder if COVID is just an excuse
to do this now.

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

------
CameronNemo
Mozilla should offer a way to make donations that are earmarked for direct use
on Firefox engineering.

Not marketing, not new services, none of that... just engineering the core
product.

Other expenses can come out of the general donation fund.

------
Santosh83
The browser space is extremely competitive because it has been driven for
decades by corporations _seeking_ to dominate the field, and that naturally
leads to Byzantine complexity and high barrier for any competition.

Mozilla really needs to find ways to generate profits and in turn, channel the
lion's share of those profits into their browser. But this is a hard
proposition when giant corporations give away their browsers for free and even
bundle it hard with their operating systems. The unfairness of Mozilla's
browser endeavour is stark when you stop to think about it.

Maybe we the collective really do deserve our corporate overlords because we
can't be bothered to pay for something when a free version _also_ exists. This
not only applies to Firefox but is a big reason why nearly all the top OSS are
struggling to reach parity with their commercial counterparts.

How many of us will pay Office/Adobe licenses but if LibreOffice or Gimp ask
for payment, we won't? The reason is vendor lock-in and feature-wise
inferiority of the open source counterparts, but if no one uses them, then
like the proverbial chicken-and-egg, they will never be able to compete, and
will only slowly fade away.

------
andruby
I was watching Troy Hunt's weekly update[0] where he reveals he's open-
sourcing Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). He also talks about the failed M&A process:

    
    
       We get all the way with an organisation who we thought was a very good fit.
       [...] which due to confidentiality reasons I have to describe as "a change in
       business operating model" happened that killed the whole [deal], in February.
    

Mozilla would have been a perfect fit for HIBP. Could it be that the failed
M&A partner was in fact Mozilla, who are now revealing their "change in
business operating model" (ie: focus on commercial products)?

This comment from 5 months ago has the same idea [1].

[0] [https://youtu.be/2-wgY3Fqfos?t=2160](https://youtu.be/2-wgY3Fqfos?t=2160)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22471374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22471374)

------
elmarschraml
Here is how that press release should have read:

First paragraph: Get to the point (layoffs are happening) immediately, and
state the concrete reasons why they are necessary.

Second paragraph: Thank the people being laid off, call out some of their good
work, and talk about the things you are doing to help them find a new job.

Third paragraph: Mention the steps you are taking to avoid having to have
layoffs again. Be as specific as possible. When mentioning "focus", that means
focusing on one, possibly two, very specific things.

Last paragraph: Motivation for the future. Renewed commitment to making
Firefox better.

------
KingOfCoders
The "make Firefox a secondary goal" faction has won again.

"Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range
of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this. But we
know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and
technologies that both excite them and represent their interests. Over the
last while, it has been clear that Mozilla is not structured properly to
create these new things — and to build the better internet we all deserve."

~~~
coffeefirst
This would bug me less if their big ideas weren't Pocket and a VR chatroom.

~~~
rl3
> _This would bug me less if their big ideas weren 't Pocket and a VR
> chatroom._

It's probably just Pocket; developers working on the latter were hit with
layoffs today, too.

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

~~~
esarbe
Making a browsers requires developers, developers cost money.

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

~~~
Cthulhu_
Yup; Google / Chrome, Apple / Safari + webkit, and Microsoft / Edge get away
with it because their browser is not their product, it's an extra. For Google
its original intent was to make the internet faster so that people would see
more ads.

Firefox needs a company behind it whose income is not tied to the browser. I
don't believe you can monetize a browser, not without doing some dodgy shit
like forcing search engines on people, injecting ads, premium features, etc.

I know Firefox tried to launch a number of products over the years to try and
make money, but at this point it doesn't seem to be working. I think their
only hope financially is to be bought up by a FAANG, but they either have
their own browsers or no interest in having one.

~~~
Yoric
You can't by Mozilla. It's a non-profit. There are no shares.

------
GnarfGnarf
I wish they would get their "Send" feature up & running again. It's so simple
for one-off's, better than DropBox.

[https://send.firefox.com/](https://send.firefox.com/)

~~~
0xcoffee
I agree, this is the only Mozilla service I ever used. However
[https://transfer.sh/](https://transfer.sh/) is a good alternative.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Just looked at transfer.sh, and it seems like a much WORSE alternative. The
best thing about Firefox Send was the simple end-to-end encryption where I
could upload the file, then just send someone the (secure) 1-time only
download URL. Looks like transfer.sh doesn't support any encryption on its
own, you have to do all your encryption/decryption on your own.

------
konaraddi
The cost of building and maintaining a competitive browser is huge and it's
hard for Mozilla/Firefox to compete with Google/Chrome. Firefox saw its
monthly active users go down by ~14% in the last 8 months [1]. I think Mozilla
should consider stopping Firefox development and fork Chromium to focus on
accessibility and privacy (both in and out of the browser). It's far from
ideal--there'll only be one popular browser engine--but it's a trade off that
could help Mozilla put more money and time towards its true mission: "to
ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all".
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]).

[1] 244M MAU in Dec. 2018 and 209M MAU as of Aug. 2, 2020
[https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-
activity](https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity)

[2] "Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation.
This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services
that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the
changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately
250 people."

~~~
LamaOfRuin
That's 20 months, not 8.

~~~
konaraddi
Ah you're right, I skipped a year. Thank you for pointing that out

------
bluenose69
Anyone remember when companies were straightforward about layoffs and firings?
You know, text like "Sales are slow, so we need to lay some people off", not
"We’ll meet people where they are" (whatever that phrase-du-jour even means).

If that letter is a guide to leadership at mozilla, there's not much hope for
the future of the organization. It might be a good idea to ask the remaining
technical people what they would like to build, and let them go from there.

It's time to excite people with products. They got the browser to be nearly as
good as the alternatives (I try every new release of FF, only to switch back
to Safari when I see the terrible effect FF has on power consumption).

How about a better alternative for remote meetings? Start with the basics:
respond to reduced bandwidth by focussing on audio, not video. I want to hear
what someone is saying, not to see the titles on their bookshelves. In my
experience, zoom is pretty bad at this, and so (to a lesser extent) is
microsoft/teams. Watching TV news, I've learned that webex and skype are also
poor. Given the poor alternatives, and the high demand, I am surprised Mozilla
has not already produced a kick-ass product, and I was disappointed not to
read of this (or any other technical idea) in this management-speak firing
letter.

------
rl3
Surreal. Even the _Servo_ team was disbanded. Mozilla Research effectively no
longer exists. That alone says everything.

This is a dark day for the open web.

------
wanderr
'The coronavirus pandemic “significantly impacted our revenue,”' -

Most of their revenue comes from search engines paying to be the default. Are
there any details on why the pandemic would have a significant impact on that?

~~~
ngokevin
It's odd also because those search engines have long-term contracts to the
tune of like $350-$500M a year, and Google seems to be doing okay.

~~~
zobzu
The contract ends start of 2021 IIRC and Firefox market share has been
dropping and will continue dropping (specially now after this news).

Which means I'm sure they are planning for a large reduction in revenue, like
50% or whatever. These contracts are usually on a 3-6 year basis..

~~~
traskjd
While I get the intent, as noted on the thread about their version 2 script
blocker: what better way to hobble what tiny share you have by not allowing
site owners to know FF users exist?

------
whywhywhywhy
> Economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic have significantly
> impacted our revenue

This is baffling. How? You make a web technology and everyone is stuck at
home.

~~~
staktrace
People aren't clicking on ads to buy things because they've all been laid off.
Economies are circular.

~~~
FartyMcFarter
And yet, Google and Facebook revenue don't seem to be doing too bad. Slightly
down, but not very much so.

------
throwaway5752
Does the Baidu revenue and shutting down the Taipei office rub anyone else the
wrong way?

I am not sure Mozilla works outside of a nonprofit model.

~~~
zobzu
I think it works, they simply have no market share. Baidu and others will pay
millions to be a default search engine of a popular browser.

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.

------
jjordan
For all it's flaws, and with the exception of a brief 18 month stint, I've
been a dedicated Firefox user since 2004. I sincerely hope that this project
finds its new groove and continues to provide a viable alternative to
Chromium. The world truly needs it.

------
oefrha
Thought it would be another political activism post, turns out to be a
dressed-up corporate layoff announcement:

> Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce —
> approximately 250 people of exceptional professional and personal caliber
> who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today.

------
dfabulich
Mozilla should have a Mozilla club. Today, you can go to
[https://donate.mozilla.org/](https://donate.mozilla.org/) and you can donate
monthly, but you get nothing for it except the warm glow of helping Mozilla.

Instead, Mozilla should have a private Discord for dues-paying club members,
where participants have direct access to Mozilla decision makers, who should
show up on a regular basis and do AMAs.

Furthermore, the Mozilla club should nominate a user ombuds who can sit in on
Mozilla's board meetings.

Throughout this thread, I see folks criticizing Mozilla for not writing code /
fixing bugs they care about, without providing a constructive way for Mozilla
to fund their favorite initiatives. I think a Mozilla club could cut some of
these tricky knots.

~~~
Nextgrid
Donating to Mozilla goes to the _foundation_ , not the company. This funds
various initiatives that you may find useful or not but does not go directly
to the browser. As far as I know there is no actual way to pay/donate and have
that money allocated to the browser only.

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.

------
Vinnl
I wonder what this means (and fear) for important projects like
[https://commonvoice.mozilla.org](https://commonvoice.mozilla.org), that do
not seem to have been concerned with a business case at all. Best case I can
currently see is that some other organisation will take it on, though I'm not
sure which.

And I'm also curious how the pandemic has impacted them. As I understood it,
still by far their major revenue sources were the search engine deals - has
their value changed due to the pandemic?

~~~
sdenton4
I am very interested to know what's up with common voice... Please chime in if
anyone knows anything!

------
jiripospisil
> I've been told that a large part of Mozilla's security team has also been
> laid off, which seems like a big issue especially after Mozilla launched a
> VPN offering last month.

[https://twitter.com/campuscodi/status/1293200453736570881](https://twitter.com/campuscodi/status/1293200453736570881)

~~~
0xffff2
Mozilla VPN is just a rebranding of Mullvad. I doubt the Mozilla security team
was involved in any significant way.

------
noisy_boy
This makes me feel worried. I have come to rely on Firefox as the antidote to
Google's data collection machine and it would be unfortunate if Firefox also
goes the same way with this new focus.

~~~
ldiracdelta
You may wish to consider Brave. [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

~~~
ZekeSulastin
The browser built around ad replacement and blockchain payments? Seriously?

~~~
anoncareer0212
occassionally I am reminded exactly how vapid the discourse are open source
has gotten - 20 years ago, there used to be discussions, now it's just 'google
is SELLING EVERYONES DATA' instead of 'telemetry makes me uncomfortable'

when someone suggests X, instead of 'honestly, I think what I'm looking for is
something free as in beer - no charge, no revenue' 'ugh X is no alternative,
they do also make money in a way I don't like!'

the thing is, 20 years ago I was 10 and just trolling around slashdot, there
shouldn't be _weaker_ arguments at 30

~~~
renewiltord
Today someone else is 10 and trolling around HN, friend.

------
m0ck
I just wish they shift their focus again to technical solutions, instead of
political/social issues. I don't know why software company has need to act
like NGO/activist group (doesn't matter if I agree with their stances or not).

------
echelon
They were doing fine until Chrome ate up all the market share.

Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for
them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins
that support adblocking.

Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse.

~~~
TylerE
Chrome didn’t destroy Firefox. Firefox destroyed Firefox. Chrome was SO MUCH
better it could't help but win.

Turns out people do actually care about performance and responsiveness.

~~~
echelon
Chrome isn't better than Firefox, and both browsers have varied in terms of
their performance.

Google had the advantage of plastering Chrome all over google.com when people
performed searches. That's how it got installed everywhere.

~~~
TylerE
That is patently false. Chrome was light years ahead of Firefox in both cpu
and memory use for years.

~~~
olyjohn
Do you really, honestly thing that is why it came to dominance? There's
billions of computer users out there, and the majority of them are not techie
nerds. They don't know or care what browser they are using. They just want to
click the internet icon. You think all those people were sitting around,
opening up task manager, and comparing the results with all of their tabs
open? They are all used to the internet being slow. They don't know what part
is being slow.

If what you are saying was true, then Firefox should have dominated over IE.
Did they take over a large share of the market? Yes, after fighting and
fighting for years on end. Chrome just came out, and after putting it on their
home page, suddenly their marketshare skyrocketed. I believe that if Google
had to put it on a different URL, it would not have gotten the adoption it has
now.

~~~
TylerE
Yes.

Techies installed it because of how much faster it was. Then they installed it
on all of their parents/grandparents/siblings computers.

------
marmshallow
If this makes you sad or pissed off, the best thing you can do is donate. I
just donated for $15 for the first time.

[https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/)

~~~
dblohm7
While donating to Mozilla Foundation is a great cause [1], none of those funds
go to funding Mozilla Corporation, and thus Firefox.

If you want your funds to go toward MoCo (and thus Firefox development), your
best bet is to subscribe to Mozilla VPN or Pocket Premium.

[1]
[https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/)

~~~
mrweasel
That’t kinda stupid to be honest. Just charge me $50 for Firefox... you know
what make it $100 per year and I will pay, just to avoid Chrome.

I don’t know how many of us are out there, but a large number of people don’t
mind paying for the tools they rely on. I have co-worker who pay $100+ to get
the email client they want.

How such a payment scheme would work with an open source project I don’t know,
but find a way for me to direct payments to Firefox.

------
dredmorbius
As someone who very much wants to like Pocket, but finds it immensely
frustrating,[1] how 'zactly does Mozilla plan to monetise it?

________________________________

Notes:

1\. "Pocket: It gets worse the more you use it"
[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_it_gets_worse_the_more_you_use_it/)
and "Pocket: The worsening continues"
[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/688oc9/pocket_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/688oc9/pocket_the_worsening_continues/)
There's been some progress and backsliding, most of the complaints still
apply.

------
shock
> Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce —
> approximately 250 people of exceptional professional and personal caliber
> who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today. To each of
> them, I extend my heartfelt thanks and deepest regrets that we have come to
> this point. This is a humbling recognition of the realities we face, and
> what is needed to overcome them.

What a load of bull! How many people did she save from firing by taking a pay
cut? I agree that it would have been an insignificant number of the 250 people
fired, but it would have made a difference in the life of the employees not
fired and it would have given meaning to her words.

Words are extremely cheap (including the ones I'm writing right now).
Statements only become principles when they imply a personal cost, otherwise
they are just ideas.

~~~
Spivak
You do get that the total compensation for 250 FTE's is probably in the
neighborhood of $25 million/yr. She gets paid about $1m/yr which includes
performance incentives. So if she just gave up her whole salary she would only
have to fire 96% of the people let go today.

C suite members raking in high salaries is the tiniest most insignificant
issue when it comes to a large orgs finances. In most large orgs if C sites
were paid $0 the average employee wouldn't even notice the difference.

~~~
shock
You do get that the CEO has the most power in directing where the company goes
and the CEO is directly reponsible, at least in part, for the current
situation Mozilla is in. As a result I think the CEO should have been the
first to suffer the consequences of the reality they were (partly) responsible
for creating, before the first employee would have been impacted.

The way I see it, the employees that had almost no control over Mozilla's
direction over the last years are suffering the consequences.

~~~
Spivak
Right but this makes no sense except as some weird punishment thing. Like it
seems it would be the same to you if they still fired all 250 employees but
_also_ cut the CEOs salary as a slap on the wrist.

Like this stance is crazy if you apply it to anyone but the CEO. Can you
imagine if you got punished for writing bad code or not making a project
deadline by having your salary cut?

Regardless of whether you think she's doing a good job as the CEO, _she 's
still doing her job_ and deserves to be paid. Your just asking for CEOs to be
company whipping boys.

~~~
shock
> Can you imagine if you got punished for writing bad code or not making a
> project deadline by having your salary cut?

But I do get punished as part of the regular Performance Review, if I don't do
my job right. Luckily, I am very good at my job.

------
xg15
> _We love the traits of it — the decentralization, its permissionless
> innovation, the open source underpinnings of it, and the standards part — we
> love it all. But to enable these changes, we must shift our collective
> mindset from a place of defending, protecting, sometimes even huddling up
> and trying to keep a piece of what we love to one that is proactive,
> curious, and engaged with people out in the world. [...] and seeing how the
> traits of the past can show up in new ways in the future._

If my US corporate-speak decoder works halfway decently this paragraph reads
really scary. When exactly have decentralization, permissionless innovation,
open source and web standards become things to remember fondly while you move
on? This honesty reads like an admission of defeat.

------
jccalhoun
These posts always make me wish that hackernews has a way to block posts from
certain users.

These kind of posts always bring out the hateful comments and if I look at
their posting history a lot of times they seem to post mostly hateful
comments. Call it a filter bubble if you want but I would rather not waste my
time trying to convince them they are wrong and would rather be able to block
them.

~~~
insin
I feel the same, so I'm currently adding this feature to my HN Comments Owl
user script/extension:

[https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-
owl/issues/2](https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/issues/2)

------
eitland
I say it again:

\- I can support Mozilla today if I know the money goes to fix and improve
Firefox

\- For almost everything else I'll prefer to send the money directly

I sent a reply back to the last fundraising email I got and they still cannot
promise that the money will go towards Firefox.

To me however Firefox seems to be their biggest chance of achieving their
mission:

"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and
accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals
can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."

For this reason I find it deeply ironic that donation money somehow cannot be
used to develop Firefox when that should be the core purposes.

------
spenrose
I worked at Mozilla from 2013-2017, then moved into clean tech. I currently
manage software engineers for a technically-not-cleantech company that is
extremely effective at selling life-changing products, especially solar
energy, in the global South. While I don't have open slots on my team, I'm
happy to chat about software job hunts in general, and the amazing
opportunities available right now to fight climate change in particular. There
are dozens of legit companies that can use your skills—you just have to find
them. If you need a #mozillalifeboat, feel free to get in touch. "sampenrose"
on Google's email service.

------
albertzeyer
John Carmack
([https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1293227109738061826](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1293227109738061826)):

> Just last night I was thinking about how it was possible that, given the
> relative trends, Mozilla’s greater legacy might turn out to be Rust, not
> Firefox.

------
mishftw
This means a 1/3 reduction from where they were last year. And now with remote
work being the norm, I could see a company like Mozilla preferring that to
save further costs.

Their Google deal has not be renewed yet and that has accounted for a lot of
their revenue in the past (the article mentions a 90% figure).

I just hope Mozilla Co & Mozilla Foundation survive.

------
mrgleeco
Always struck me that this nonprofit has some of the most beaucoup waterfront
real estate down at EMB/Harrison. And that it shared the building with one of
its partners, Google.

Is that scaled down / restructured too?

------
cmsj
This is obviously very sad for the folk being laid off from Mozilla, and they
have my sympathies and best wishes for finding alternate employment.

Separate to that, and I realise I'm shouting at the sky since this is just one
comment among over 1200 others... CAN WE PLEASE STOP GIVING THE WEB TO GOOGLE.

Apple's iOS browser engine policy is basically the only thing that stands
between Google and complete dominance of the web. That's right, an anti-
choice, walled-garden decision to force WebKit on all iOS users, is the only
defence against Chrome supplanting the ideal of The Web, with itself.

Firefox and Safari are basically the only browsers left that don't use
Chromium, and they are making the sensible decision to hold back Google's
frenetic sprint to expose our entire computers to JavaScript. I'm confident
that Apple can hold the line if it wants to, but I have to assume that Firefox
will be dead within 5 years, which means the entire dream of an open web,
rests solely on Apple's whims. This is not healthy in any way.

To all of you who say things like "Safari is the new IE", or bemoan the lack
of particular Chrome APIs in WebKit, or who solely target Chrome and don't
care if your sites break in Firefox/WebKit.... you, all of you, individually
and collectively, are killing the web. Stop sleepwalking all of us into a
future where Chrome is the only "OS" that matters on any platform.

------
deltron3030
>That means reducing investment in other areas, though, such as in building
out developer tools.

Damn, big mistake. So this is what triggered the creator of the awesome CSS
grid tools to join Apple and Safari?

------
liminal
I'm still sad Microsoft chose to build on Chrome instead of Firefox

------
specto
750 employees with $350 million or more in revenue. It seems like they're just
restructuring and using covid as cover. Maybe I'm wrong, but it kind of looks
like that on the surface.

------
mark_l_watson
I came here to ask a question, hopefully one other people would like answered
also:

If the funding for the FireFox web browser combined with all Mozilla
projects/products, or is there some separation?

I would like to donate just to support development of the FireFox browser. Is
that possible?

FireFox containers is a very important feature to me and supporting FireFox
and containers is something I would like to support at a higher level than the
few random Mozilla donations I have made in the past.

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
Donations to Mozilla (the non profit) do not go towards Firefox, and there's
no way currently to directly donate to Firefox.

------
imagetic
Just give me a $10 subscription to all the services in one package. If I got
pocket + VPN in my browser for that. Win.

Also, focus on how to share with a family, not under one login ID. $20/mo I
get 3 logins under one household to hand out.

------
Accacin
I personally think that Mozilla have been making poor decisions, but I can't
believe that people would say they they are quitting Firefox because of it.

Mozilla might be going through a rough patch, and they now need our support
more than ever. Hopefully Firefox will be around a lot longer than the people
currently running the show.

I will not stop using Firefox, and will continue to try and help people move
away from Chrome.

------
throwawaysea
Anyone else concerned by a browser manufacturer claiming to build products by
mixing tech with their "values"? This seems like the exact opposite of what I
want with utility software.

------
bhauer
The new vision sounds like the old, current vision for the most part. I might
be missing subtle changes in items 1 through 4. But item 5 is interesting:

> _New focus on economics. 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_

I think combining this with the momentum behind things like the Federal
Reserve's new inter-bank payments system (linked on HN yesterday) could
finally make micropayments or something analogous mainstream. I would really
enjoy shifting some of the advertising-funded model back to direct revenue
from customers. I would like to be considered a "customer" again in more walks
of life, generally. Not just a "subject." I think the customer-vendor dynamic
is much more healthy when I am indeed the customer.

If there's anything hopeful to take from this announcement, I think this is
it.

------
searchableguy
Maybe it's a cultural problem but many of their products are aimed at
consumers when they have the opportunity to tune them for enterprise
(lockwise?). They could make more money with better and paid consultation
projects. Many open source projects they own can be sassified (voice
project?).

------
EdwinLarkin
It blows my mind that no company is currently able to challenge Chrome. Not
even Microsoft or Apple is interested to challenge the status quo.

~~~
takluyver
I think they are able. Apple still arguably does. But there's no obvious
incentive for them. Developing your own browser engine is a big ongoing
investment, constantly adding new features and promptly plugging security
vulnerabilities. We've long expected browsers to be free, so it doesn't
generate any direct income. If they want to collect data with it, they can
wrap Blink in their own app.

Mozilla keeps it up because of the principle that there should be more than
one decent rendering engine. For-profit companies can't take that stance.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Apple can't really compete with Chrome. They have walled off one little walled
garden (iOS) that Chrome isn't allowed to enter, but everywhere that Chrome is
allowed, it is crushing Safari.

------
rndmze
A shame, the internet could use a product like Firefox.

`an open and accessible internet is essential to the fight.` can't agree more.
Unfortunately just having that is not enough to get people to use your
product. VLC maintainers seems to have understood this. To paraphrase JB Kempf
"if you want people to use your open source product, build a great product
that is also open source."

Not sure where Firefox went wrong. And for sure the inclusion of default
browsers in various OSes did not help (or even the automatic install of Edge
whether you want to use it or not) but it seems like there are deeper problems
with this product.

I really hope they can get act together and start gaining marketshare again.

------
edumucelli
I am curious how COVID impacted a company like Mozilla? Their main revenue
comes from search partnerships, there were more people at home searching
things during lockdown. In the internal message Mitchell Baker said:

“We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring,
reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands. But COVID-19 has
accelerated the need and magnified the depth for these changes. Our pre-COVID
plan is no longer workable. We have talked about the need for change —
including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring. Today these changes
become real.”

------
babesh
I was told about 10 years ago that management at Mozilla was a shitshow. They
have had layoffs, project cancellations, and internal strife for a long time.
Sounds like more of the same.

------
elric
The cynic in me can't help but wonder if this "new focus on making money" is
why they suddenly decided to cripple the android version of firefox.

~~~
cglong
Can you elaborate?

~~~
elric
The new FF version for android is a toy. All advanced features have been
removed. Virtually no addons are available. No more about:config. The home
screen is a joke ("collections" instead of my previously opened tab? What's
that about?). Opening a new tab does not place the focus in the address bar,
and the "new tab" button and the address bar are on opposite ends of the
screen, resulting in very awkward finger movements. I got so angry in the
first hour of using it that I uninstalled it. It's the worst browsing
experience I've had since before IE4.

It's so bad that maybe it's deliberate in an attempt to sell the missing
features as addons or a pro version or something? At least I hope that's what
it is, otherwise I don't understand the move at all.

------
ericyan
> We have mapped out five specific areas to focus on...

Hey Mozilla, that's not how focusing works.

------
spinningslate
I feel for everyone who will lose their job here. That's never a pleasant
thing, particularly so in current circumstances.

Notwithstanding that though - and with no disrespect to anyone being laid off
- I'm actually really encouraged by this. The key quote from the announcement
is this one:

"Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default
search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the
contract has not been renewed."

Mozilla's reliance on Google is a major detraction from delivering privacy-
focused products.

I've said before, and I'll say again: I'd gladly pay a fee for Firefox if it
meant (a) it was funding the product so that (b) there was no need for them to
peddle in surveillance.

I really wish Mozilla all the best. Commit to privacy, show me where to pay
and I'll gladly sign up.

\--

I'm aware they accept donations and have already donated. But that's different
from paid-for products.

EDIT: cross-posted comment above from duplicate thread [0]. Don't think that's
against guidelines - apologies if so.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121166)

~~~
calcifer
> The key quote from the announcement is this one:

> "Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the
> default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and
> the contract has not been renewed."

That sentence doesn't seem to be anywhere in the announcement, nor in the
linked PDF. Where are you getting this?

~~~
spinningslate
It's here [0], which was posted in a separate thread [1].

[0] [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/)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121166)

~~~
calcifer
Even on that article I don't see a source for the claim. It's all
unsubstantiated speculation.

------
drno123
I somehow hoped that Baker got replaced.

------
oxymoron
Which teams were impacted? In particular, is anyone working on rust being let
go?

~~~
staktrace
Rust is largely community-owned now. There are some Mozilla employees still
working on rust, but not many.

------
jverce
What does COVID-19 have to do with anything here? They are an Internet
company, one would expect they'd be thriving in this scenario.

------
lukeplato
It might be obvious, but it would have been nice if their statement explained
in detail why this decision was the result of Covid

------
qchris
On one hand, it's of course kind of a bummer that these folks are losing their
jobs--never an easy thing to see.

On the other, I'm excited about the products that may end up coming out of
this. I'm already paying for the Mozilla VPN + Browser Extension (I think that
totals something like $8/mo), plus another few dollars for additional storage
on my personal Google account at the moment. I would be immensely enthusiastic
about putting that (and more) money towards a privacy-respecting Mozilla-
hosted email/calendar/file storage system instead.

That obviously not an insignificant engineering challenge, but there's a bunch
of open-source work in that area already that could probably be used as a
template. I only hope that whatever products they put out, they spend some
time making sure they're not damaging the enormous amount of goodwill they've
built up in the community about privacy and Internet ethics.

------
jitendrac
I find this sad news. I highly recommend mozilla to others due to its focus on
user privacy and open nature of organization. I know it is not an option for a
complete browser with its own js engine, rendering tool kit and kind of whole
app eco-system is not possible to survive on donations and small income
channels.

But, I would have highly recommended mozilla do it in a way to release a
community and enterprises services. where Enterprise will lead the future path
of browser with its own industrial/enterprise offering to customer sets like
governments, Developers and big companies, parallel maintaining the community
version of browser as its now, may be two feature cycle behind with some less
but fully open features.

If I had an option to buy a paid version of mozilla service which gave me
better functionality for application support and development I would have
gladly paid for it. I wish, It is the path they chose.

------
josh_carterPDX
I like the new focus on how they will make money. While it's nice to be a
mission-driven org they always straddled that line of being aspirational and
being "for profit." It makes the value proposition tough to define. Putting an
emphasis on revenue will better define the business without needing to sell
their souls.

------
prophesi
It really stinks that 250 people lost their jobs, I don't want to downplay
that. But I think overall this is a good move for Mozilla. For them to be
product-oriented will allow them to uphold their own privacy advocacy ideals.
Most notably, they may eventually be able to remove Google as Firefox's
default search engine.

~~~
solarkraft
> they may eventually be able to remove Google as Firefox's default search
> engine

IIRC the financial woes are precisely because the contract with Google is
running out. Aren't they?

~~~
prophesi
That's news to me. Their contract has been consistently renewed for years, and
I'd imagine that would give Google some pretty bad PR if they didn't.

~~~
rvz
Well after all these years they were soley sitting on Google's contract money
and are yet to create a very competitive and revenue-generating product that
users will pay for. Firefox VPN is essentially Mullvad with Firefox branding
so there is no comparison with either of them.

Most of all of the products Mozilla has is either free (mostly) or not
competitive enough to the point of redundancy. For the typical end-user (who
really doesn't see open-source as an advantage) Pocket can be replaced with
Chrome Bookmarks and ultimately, Firefox can be replaced with Chrome.

~~~
solarkraft
Add to that that for the freedom-concerned user Pocket has to be replaced
(Wallabag is good), as do most of their other "privacy respecting" services.
There's no advantage with them over any of the propriatary alternatives other
than a fallen-out-of-favor-dwindling-financially foundation-corporation hybrid
healf heartedly developing an important browser saying they won't sell your
data.

------
goldenManatee
I’ve always thought of Mozilla as a “force for good and change”, never as a
money machine. This has maintained _some_ balance for allowing Google to go
largely unchecked. If Mozilla moves in a direction more focused on profit and
more products, there’s no balance and the overdue regulating has to kick in
fast.

------
pjfin123
I you think projects like Mozilla and Firefox are important donations can
really go a long way. If enough people even donated ~$5/mo to projects like
this, which is less than lots of people spend for Spotify or buying coffee, it
would make open source privacy respecting projects a lot more viable.

~~~
gspr
> I you think projects like Mozilla and Firefox are important donations can
> really go a long way.

I know this kind of goes against my other comment stating that I'm super
worried about losing the only viable free and open browser out there (my only
browser), but: what's keeping me from donating is the bad aftertaste of the
money being used for frivilous things. I don't want to fund their bookmarking
service. I don't want to fund their VPN rebranding effort. I don't want to
fund their authentication services. I don't want to fund their voice
recognition services. They're probably great, but it's the browser that's
absolutely essential and irreplaceable at this time!

~~~
TumorousJoker
You can't give them money and then put conditions on top of it. It's their
business decision as to what they want to do with their monetary donations.

Otherwise, this would be like your employer saying, "I will pay you salary,
buuut only if you promise not to spend it on alcohol". It clearly doesn't work
like that, you just have to make a high level judgement if you agree with
their values and if yes, go ahead with that donation.

~~~
orev
Which is exactly what gspr is saying is the reason they don’t donate. If an
org shows that they have no focus, then people won’t want to donate exactly
_because_ you can’t say what the money goes to.

~~~
gspr
Exactly.

------
lukaa
Perhaps it should outsource most of jobs in country where open source
community is very strong like Brasil.

------
addicted
All the hand wringing here is kind of pointless without pointing out that it
appears that Google has not renewed its contract, which accounts for almost
90% of Mozilla’s revenue.

It’s obvious and necessary for Mozilla to consequently focus on revenue
earners and put infra dev on the back burner.

------
ofrzeta
Also, why you (Mozilla) are at it (Firefox): Please make Firefox the premium
development tool for webdevs. Headless should work as with Chrome. I am forced
to use Chrome when running Puppeteer.

Why create a separate "Firefox Developer Edition"? It's just a distraction.

------
krick
What exactly does this mean? Will I be forced to find a new browser in the
near future? Not that I was completely content with what happens for many
years now, of course, it's just that I don't know anything better (or even not
worse).

------
citizenpaul
This is one of the most pathetic layoff releases I have ever seen. Its
extremely, soul crushing, heart wrenchingly depressing to see Mozilla succumb
to the the get woke go broke mentality.

They should be focused on making good tech period nothing else.

------
AnonHP
The internal message to employees says:

> Investing in New Products We are organizing a new product organization
> outside of Firefox that will both ship new products faster and develop new
> revenue streams. Our initial investments will be Pocket, Hubs, VPN, Web
> Assembly and security and privacy products.

This is very much welcome, and I look forward to more products with paid
tiers. Mozilla Corporation must have ways to get revenues from end users
through different means, and combining that with Mozilla’s vision is a good
thing. If there’s one thing missing for me in this list, it’s an email service
that combines the best of other paid email providers.

------
Datenstrom
> "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," Baker said.

> We must learn and expand different ways to support ourselves and build a
> business that isn't what we see today.

Perhaps I am wrong, but to me this reads as Mozilla plans to give up on not
being evil and to do whatever it takes to make money. Sounds like Mozilla
products will soon become toxic including Firefox if not forked. Also, looks
like their hand is being forced by google.

Edit: formatting - also I hope I am wrong.

~~~
wtetzner
Charging money doesn't necessarily mean they're going to start being evil.

In fact, they may be able to provide better and more secure products, if it
means they can stop relying on Google/advertising/etc. to stay afloat.

~~~
Datenstrom
True, they could possibly spin out other high quality secure products and I
hope that is what they do and that I am wrong. It all depends on the current
leadership and how desperate they get I suppose and I am not familiar enough
with that to say.

------
pitay
Here is a (selective) look at the management of Mozilla in the recent past.

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

“Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was
crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related
topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his
interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the
Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to
individuals and to Mozilla overall.”

From
[http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/29/gerv.html](http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/29/gerv.html)

“I bring up Gerv's open-mindedness because I know that many people didn't find
him so, but, frankly, I think those folks were mistaken. It is well documented
publicly that Gerv held what most would consider particularly “conservative
values”. And, I'll continue with more frankness: I found a few of Gerv's views
offensive and morally wrong. But Gerv was also someone who could respectfully
communicate his views. I never felt the need to avoid speaking with him or
otherwise distance myself. Even if a particular position offended me, it was
nevertheless clear to me that Gerv had come to his conclusions by starting
from his (a priori) care and concern for all of humanity. Also, I could simply
say to Gerv: I really disagree with that so much, and if it became clear our
views were just too far apart to productively discuss the matter further, he'd
happily and collaboratively find another subject for us to discuss. Gerv was a
reasonable man. He could set aside fundamental disagreements and find common
ground to talk with, collaborate with, and befriend those who disagreed with
him. That level of kindness and openness is rarely seen in our current times.”

Here is an article another person who knew Gervase Markham who refutes
Mitchell Bakers account
[https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/](https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/) . Worth a
read.

Brendan Eich on the jump in executive share since he was let go:
[https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584](https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629)

Here is Brokedamouth on the two class system now at Mozilla
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061500)
Comment replicated here (it is worth looking at the whole discussion): “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.”

The people saying this is full of corporate doublespeak look to be very true,
especially when you have a memory and can look up what has gone on before.

~~~
rleigh
I had the pleasure of meeting Gerv once at a UK Linux conference in the mid
2000s. He was a really nice person, and an asset as a public face of Mozilla.
I can't help but feel that his critics are genuine "illiberals" who can't
tolerate any point of view but their own. And unfortunately, it's those people
who are part of its current management problems.

I did disagree with him about the Mozilla position upon trademarks, which was
unusually aggressive for an open source project at the time, and for the most
part still is. As a Debian developer at the time, that may have influenced my
views somewhat.

------
oedmarap
It's definitely not a requirement for companies to go into minute detail when
making these sorts of announcements, but Mozilla is a non-profit and I think
it would be good IMHO if they were to shed some light at least on the skillet
of those being let go relative to the new direction being taken.

If Mozilla is charting a path forward as a "technical powerhouse" and focusing
on Pocket, Hubs, VPN, etc. (as per the linked memo), I would hate to imagine
even a single SWE being laid off for reasons not performance-related.

------
scottlocklin
2018: meritocracy is bad

2020: ... pretty much what you'd expect

------
yarrel
It worries me that nobody in power at Mozilla seems to have the first clue how
to make money from Free Software and so they have made "commercialism" a
corporate fetish.

Making money and looking commercial are not the same thing, team. For the some
organizations they can be diametrically opposed. Mozilla, for example.

Mozilla need a CEO who knows how to make money for the company rather than
just receive it in their paycheck. Ideally one who eats up less than the
revenue from the first 50,000 VPN subscriptions.

------
tanilama
I don't find this that surprising as well.

Good intentions or ethicality aside, I don't find Firefox as a browser
convincing. It is just not as good as Chrome in handling navigating web pages.

I'd say focus on making Firefox better experience wise should always been
their priority, but the neglection of it has been lasting too long. Now Chrome
becomes the even bigger monster than IE uses to be, Firefox will have a much
harder time to justify its own existence in a financially substainable way

------
Zenbit_UX
Mozilla's ace up the sleeve, which I'm sure has been a temptation to them many
times - and seems more and more inevitable the more they brand themselves as
the privacy browser - is to make ublock origin a default and baked-in feature
out of the box.

I see this as an if, not when situation. Google may pull funding immediately
if they do so but the surge in users would be extreme, possibly forcing big G
to reconsider or lose an ever increasing market share to Bing and DDG.

~~~
jdashg
Why would that cause a surge of users given how trivial it is to add it to an
existing install today?

~~~
grey_earthling
And how would those new users make Mozilla money?

Maybe DuckDuckGo could pay Mozilla to be Firefox's default search engine and
get many more eyeballs on DDG… but if uBlock Origin blocks adverts on DDG, why
would DDG pay Mozilla?

------
gadders
>> To start, that means products that mitigate harms or address the kinds of
the problems that people face today.

So no more Firefox browser then? What does that statement even mean?

------
thinkloop
I was surprised and saddened when Mozilla gave up their mobile Firefox OS.
They should have been "The Web Company". Google and Apple have competing
interests with their proprietary native apps. They would much prefer the
entire web shift to apps. Mozilla could have been the open mobile app
platform. Maybe one of the purposes of Chrome OS is to ensure someone like
Mozilla doesn't do it.

------
tempsy
What was the reasoning behind closing the Taipei office?

~~~
khuey
The core Gecko engineering group in Taipei was all laid off already back in
2018. I'm not sure what was left but apparently it wasn't considered very
essential.

------
0xDEEPFAC
Without Firefox though _everything_ is Chrome.

Skype, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Chrome itself, Safari, Edge, Opera, VS Code,
Atom...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SCfNhyIo_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SCfNhyIo_U)

We need to encourage competition even if companies continue to spew this kind
of cringe. Firefox is the last holdout.

Good luck Mozilla, you're our old hope.

~~~
andor
Safari is still Webkit. Zoom is a native application.

~~~
0xDEEPFAC
Zoom is electon based.

~~~
andor
How did you get that idea?

This is what an Electron app looks like:

    
    
      $ ls Atom.app/Contents/Frameworks
      Electron Framework.framework
      other stuff...
    

You might also find a bunch of js files lying around:

    
    
      $ find Atom.app -name *.js
      Atom.app/Contents/Resources/app/apm/node_modules/chainsaw/index.js
      Atom.app/Contents/Resources/app/apm/node_modules/fs-constants/index.js
      Atom.app/Contents/Resources/app/apm/node_modules/fs-constants/browser.js
      very long list...
    

Whereas these are the frameworks Zoom ships with:

    
    
      $ ls zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/
      CptHost.app              asproxy.framework        nydus.framework          zMacRes.bundle
      Scintilla.framework      caphost.app              protobuf.framework       zMacResRetina.bundle
      Transcode.app            cmmlib.framework         ssb_sdk.bundle           zSIPCallUI.bundle
      ZCommonUI.framework      curl64.framework         tp.framework             zSIPSDK.bundle
      ZMScreenshot.app         faac.bundle              util.framework           zSipCallApp.bundle
      ZoomPhone.app            libcrypto.1.0.0.dylib    viper.framework          zVideoApp.bundle
      ZoomUninstaller.app      libmpg123_mac.bundle     xmpp_framework.framework zVideoUI.bundle
      airhost.app              libssl.1.0.0.dylib       zAutoUpdate.bundle       zWebService.bundle
      annoter.bundle           libz.dylib               zChatApp.bundle          zlt.bundle
      aomagent.bundle          mcm.bundle               zChatUI.bundle           zmLoader.bundle
      aomhost.app              mphost.app               zData.bundle             zmb.bundle
    

Instead of Javascript files there are tons of Interface Builder files in the
bundle:

    
    
      $ find zoom.us.app -name *.nib
      zoom.us.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/MainMenu.nib
      zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/zChatUI.bundle/Contents/Resources/ZMSettingRecordingViewController.nib
      zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/zChatUI.bundle/Contents/Resources/ZMChatsSearchField.nib
      zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/zChatUI.bundle/Contents/Resources/loadingInfoView.nib
      zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/zChatUI.bundle/Contents/Resources/ZMDiagnosticViewController.nib
      ...
    

A Linux job opening: [https://zoom.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-
US/Zoom/job/Phoenix-AZ...](https://zoom.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-
US/Zoom/job/Phoenix-AZ/Software-Engineer--Desktop-Application--Linux_R658-1)

    
    
      - 5 years of C/C++ programming experience.
      - 3 years of experience in Linux native application development.
      - Having experience in QT development is preferred.
    

Mac OS job opening: [https://zoom.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-
US/Zoom/job/Phoenix-AZ...](https://zoom.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-
US/Zoom/job/Phoenix-AZ/Software-Engineer---Mac_R525-1)

    
    
      - 2 years of experience in MacOS native client development.
      - Proficient in C++, Xcode, Objective-C and Cocoa Framework.

------
wintermutestwin
I am already paying a very high price (mostly in time) to keep the data
thieves from stealing my precious data. I would pay a pretty high monthly fee
to someone who I could trust to take care of it for me. That's why I pay the
Apple tax. How about a free browser for those who want to DIY privacy and a
premium for those who don't want to spend their time?

------
kryptiskt
I wonder why they didn't ever try to make it as a cloud provider, it would fit
their mission well to provide cloud services, it would just be for the server
side instead of the client side. Guess it's about a decade too late to pivot
there, but firms like Cloudflare shows that it's possible to compete with the
big actors with enough focus.

------
throwaway189262
Can they just focus on the browser? Firefox has been falling behind for years
now, especially on mobile. And it's not all because of Google's questionable
advertising. Chrome is simply better in many ways.

Mozilla is failing it's core mission chasing so many vanity projects. It's a
non-profit, not a startup. Flush management and start over

~~~
acdha
If you actually use Firefox it's really hard to support the belief that
there's some quality or speed gap like there was in the mid-2010s. They're
neck and neck on quality and features but it also highlights the degree to
which Google uses their other businesses to promote Chrome: everywhere you go
you'll be hit with suggestions to switch to Chrome, not to mention various QA
“lapses” like lowering performance on YouTube or accidentally breaking logins
on GCP only in Firefox.

~~~
throwaway189262
This is true. I set firefox to spoof Chrome user agent because otherwise many
Google properties are near unusable.

I really hope Mozilla survives. Were growing close to a Chrome monoculture at
it would be worse than IE days

------
user1980
"New focus on economics": It was bad enough seeing terrible clickbait in the
"Recommended by Pocket" section displayed on every new tab. Now I have to go
into settings to opt-out of Sponsored Stories so I don't have to see ads for
Honey.

All to fund the so-called "internet activist movement"?

I just want a web browser, not an ideology.

~~~
calcifer
> I just want a web browser

Excellent! How much are you planning on contributing?

~~~
Karen101
Already contributing by allowing all the telemetry & data collection and by
having unchanged the default search engine (Google)

~~~
Yoric
Telemetry and data collection don't contribute to paying the bills, only to
let Mozilla work on improving the browser.

Default search engine does.

------
aborsy
The free open source software approach has its own limitations. Developers and
companies need to make money to be viable. Software is a class of product; it
takes work and resources and simply can’t be all free.

This is going to be a problem going forward. I feel bad seeing developers
sometimes begging for donations. Why should software be free?

------
The_rationalist
I wonder if rustc developpers have been fired

~~~
zobzu
When I worked there, there were basically 4 people working on Rust.

And these people were making sure Rust would not need Mozilla to survive. Very
smart people. Rust will be fine.

~~~
zamalek
Also, Rust now has open source autonomy/community. Mozilla could go away
tomorrow and it would survive. There are some pretty big names invested and
interested in it.

~~~
zobzu
Exactly

------
leshow
Has it been confirmed that the servo team got fired? I read rumblings about
this on twitter. If so, that is very sad.

------
gravypod
Are there any lists of people looking for work during this round of layoffs?
It sounds like a lot of good projects got cut and there's some companies
growing that are finding it hard to locate talent. The pandemic is making
people weary of switching jobs and at my company it's been very difficult.

------
Funes-
Reduce every Mozilla executive's salary to a reasonable amount and you are
set. No need for massive layoffs.

------
didip
What kind of commercial products Mozilla have? I am not aware of their
offerings beside Firefox and Thunderbird.

~~~
ffpip
A VPN, 'Pocket' and now Firefox Relay

vpn.firefox.com

getpocket.com

relay.firefox.com

------
protomyth
_New focus on technology. Mozilla is a technical powerhouse of the internet
activist movement._

What does this line mean?

------
abinaya_rl
Huge fan of Firefox. I’m working on an initiative to help people who laid off
today at Mozilla

If you lost your job today add your profile here ->
[https://airtable.com/shrkd3WXxreIdgruV](https://airtable.com/shrkd3WXxreIdgruV)

------
spicyramen
While we are focusing in technology, once need to look into their Finance team
and how they push leadership on terms of income/cash flow. Recently one ex-
Google guy joined as COO not after a very successful gig in Cloud, hope he
helps leadership this time.

------
wwwwwwwww
Vivaldi Browser.

Founded by former Opera devs, when Opera was sold to a Chinese company.

Vivaldi is a fully employee owned company, based on Norway.

The browser had tons of ready-to-use configuration options.

Very good privacy options, no external ad blocker needed.

A great option if you want to stop using Firefox (like I did a few weeks ago).

------
mrkramer
What's the relation between Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation?
Corporation is for profit and Foundation is non profit so they don't share
revenues? But why they don't merge and become one for profit company, they
would much stronger.

------
liability
It feels like my hopes for ever seeing the Library window get fixed are being
dashed against the rocks. How can they ever hope to change the world when they
can't even rewrite a history/bookmarks GUI? I'm genuinely concerned for
Firefox.

------
connorgutman
Dear Mozilla, I would gladly sign-up for monthly patronage payments that go
towards the development of Firefox features that the community chooses.
Firstly, "installable" PWA support on Linux and Android. No one cares about
your VPN or Pocket.

------
lildata
I've used & loved Mozilla forever but at some point I am starting to wonder:
when you fire 1/3 of your workforce & have obvious mismanagement problems, how
can you still guarantee the security of such a complex piece of software?

------
nojvek
I wonder why Mozilla can’t make their own meta search engine like duckduckgo
and start something like carbonads.

It’s obvious that browser + search engine + ad bids are a money minting
machine.

Why is Mozilla not doing that? Depending on Google for revenue is a losing
game no?

------
shock
I wish the EU would get behind Firefox development. It would certainly be in
their courtyard, given how much energy they've spent battling monopolies and
toward creating a market in which there is competition.

------
Abishek_Muthian
Can someone tell me how COVID situation explicitly affected Mozilla's revenue
to such an extant? If anything, Internet companies were the least affected or
in-fact has been benefited from COVID situation.

------
a_imho
A door closes a window opens. Does not look good, but neither does the current
status quo. Might just be the blessing in disguise that kicks off some actual
competition in the browser space.

Feel bad for the laid off though.

------
markdog12
Looks like Servo may be done, :(

[https://twitter.com/lindsey/status/1293243218331439107](https://twitter.com/lindsey/status/1293243218331439107)

------
onyva
Would defiantly move from proton to Mozilla’s VPN the minute they make it
available in Europe. Would love to cancel my iCloud storage too, if Mozilla
offered an hosted NextCloud or something similar.

~~~
gspr
Mozilla's VPN is powered by Mullvad. Mullvad is available globally right now,
costs €5/month (vs Mozilla VPN's $5), and allows a range of payment methods
all the way down to "cash in an envelope".

Mozilla are great, I have nothing against them, but I really struggle to see
the point of their VPN service.

~~~
onyva
I’d like to support Mozilla going forward. I’m not sure if this is a major
revenue stream for them possibly or not, but if I can help, why not. I’m aware
of mullvad btw and I need to run out my proton subscription in any case.

------
im3w1l
I'm curious how Mozilla's finances are being impacted by covid.

------
Ericson2314
I want to read something at
[https://www.jwz.org/blog/](https://www.jwz.org/blog/) in response to all
this.

------
dataminded
Please sell me an alternative to gmail and gcalendar and docs.

------
3131s
I love Firefox but I'm going to start exploring other options for open source
browsers.

It's obvious from this layoff that their priorities are off. The CEO should be
fired.

------
input_sh
Add features to your smaller products (Lockwise, Notes, Monitor, Pocket, etc.)
and put them behind a paywall, while keeping the core features free to use.

I'd pay triple the price of Pocket's premium / Mozilla's VPN ($15/month) for a
Mozilla/Firefox app pack.

------
Ericson2314
Well, I guess the one thing that could save Firefox now is anti-trust, so it
can get on iOS devices and not be bludgeoned by Google promoting chrome.

------
lenkite
So this affects rust-lang too I guess ? I found it strange that people started
trusting a language with no open standard and one implementation.

~~~
pcwalton
Rust has multiple implementations, see mrustc.

~~~
progval
mrustc doesn't support all of Rust, its only purpose is to bootstrap the
normal Rust compiler; and it only works on x86 and x86_64 Linux and isn't very
much optimized (eg. needs about 10GB of RAM for the final linking).

And it's lagging behind by a year or two (which is about 15 intermediate
releases of the Rust compiler you need to compile to get the current one);
because it only has a single developer and keeping up is a huge amount of
work.

------
butz
Web browsers should be considered public utility, funded by tax payers money
and developed by independent organization. Core web browser should have
minimal set of features, just enough to safely browse internet and do every
day tasks, like online banking. Open source "core" web browser could be
extended by companies and provided as commercial software with various
additional features (VPNs, news aggregators, etc.) that might be useful to
some users who have means to pay for them.

~~~
pc86
This makes about as much sense as saying that toilets or electrical outlets
should be public utilities.

I've heard good arguments that _the internet_ should be a utility like
electricity or water. But this is nonsensical.

------
ekianjo
> Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences,

It took them that long to realize it? Talk about a blind spot.

------
abalone
Not a great sign: There are five new focuses each of which is sweepingly
vague.

Sorry to those who just lost their jobs.

------
deltron3030
Why not make a commercial pro version of the developer edition with Webflow
like design features?

~~~
pjmlp
Because most devs are allergic to pay for stuff, unless they happen to work
for big corp.

This is how the bazaar generation has pushed all good tools for those of us
that happen to work for the man.

~~~
deltron3030
FF developer attracts a different audience I think, more designers and
frontend people. Designers usually spend a lot more and don't insist on foss.

------
gvjddbnvdrbv
I guess Mozilla is going bust soon. Is there anyway to save Firefox and
Thunderbird?

------
ulfw
So will Mozilla lose it‘s non-profit status when „refocusing on COMMERCIAL
products“?

------
geogra4
I wonder if Alibaba or tencent would benefit from funding servo

------
praveenperera
This post makes me happy that Mozilla doesn't "own" rust

------
leptoniscool
Why couldn't they have shifted those employees to new projects?

------
bzb4
The mentions of “racism”, “advocacy”, etc on this post make me want to puke.
All while firing people from servo, rav1e, etc. Make a bloody good browser and
stop meddling with politics, dunces!

------
growlist
Are we now stuck with this vacuous corporate virtue signalling forever, or
just until the globalist/leftist/whatever-ists finally achieve the absolute
tyranny they seem to be seeking?

~~~
pkilgore
It's wild to live in a world where a guiding philosophy of _maybe we as a
society should make best efforts to treat people with maximum kindness_ is
mistaken for "absolute tyranny".

~~~
growlist
Including cancel culture? You don't think this is all part of the same push?

~~~
pkilgore
Fwiw a United States where people are forced to give other people attention
and money against their will is neither kind, nor has it ever existed.

You would not want to live there.

------
ThA0x2
Glad they spent time replacing the facist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic,
white supremacist verbiage "master" instead of ensuring their white and Asian
employees had jobs.

------
dependenttypes
This is a previous thread about something similar that happened a few months
ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737)

tldr (if I remember correctly): the higher ups is still paid a shit-ton of
money despite firing their employees and begging for donations. Along with
abandonware being created all the time (some of them were good ideas even).

More specifically
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058534)

> 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018

------
devrustr
This is sad if it affects rust

------
agumonkey
imagine chromium devs working with firefox devs on a new fork

------
late2part
release reads like word salad...

------
vsskanth
They should license their UI framework.

~~~
rapsey
Isn’t it all js/html? Who would pay for it when electron is free.

~~~
Crespyl
It used to be centered around XUL, and there was even a sort of proto-electron
in the form of xulrunner and the related Prism project, but they were all
dropped years ago and XUL itself has been deprecated and is being steadily
replaced.

There might've been a window somewhere in there where turning XUL/Gecko into a
Qt style application toolkit could've been an option, but I think we're well
past that point now.

------
gregmorton
tldr. But layoff = I won't donate anymore (I did).

Neither will I switch to Evil Corp browser.

------
drosan
They're already knee-deep in some ideology bullshit (instead of working on
actual browser that people want to use) and now they cover laying off 250
people with corporate garbage talks.

I really hope that Firefox has a future, but that kind of events make me thing
otherwise.

------
claydavisss
Mozilla's support model was left too weird, too long. Baker is to blame, this
should have been rectified years ago.

What does Mozilla really bring to the table with this new focus? The world is
full of VPN vendors.

------
throwaway234101
Corporate cancer[0] strikes again. Mozilla took on a lot of social justice
projects over the years. They hung around their ankles like a boat anchor.
Good on them for jettisoning that excess baggage and refocusing on their
primary business.

[0]: [https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Cancer-Miracles-Millions-
Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Cancer-Miracles-Millions-Company-
ebook/dp/B081D58P1X/)

------
caiob
Why does Mozilla insist on Pocket?

------
war1025
> I'm just disappointed about what Mozilla has become over the years.

I think that train started rolling when they forced Eich out as CEO.

Ever since then, Mozilla seems to be less about best-in-class technology, and
more about virtue signalling.

~~~
DonHopkins
Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board
actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own.
Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well
and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for
you spreading that misinformation.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-
resignat...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignation/)

Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?

A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:

“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our
mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I
cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to
do next.”

Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.

Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?

A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his
resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another
C-level role.

~~~
rsj_hn
Then the financial settlement was just for kicks?

~~~
DonHopkins
What financial settlement?

~~~
rsj_hn
The (substantial) one they were forced to pay Brendan for firing him. You see,
CA law protects employees from being fired for political activities done
outside work -- this was a law put on the books a long time ago, originally to
defend unionization campaigns and communists from being fired, but it means I
can donate to the Pro-Life-Anti-Gay-Anti-Black party all day long, attend
their conventions, give speeches, etc, and it's illegal for you to fire me for
that.

Funny how so few people know about this law.

That's why they had to come to a settlement to pay him so that he would agree
to leave and not pursue his rights under the law.

~~~
DonHopkins
They didn't fire Eich, as I said in my posting that you replied to. Did you
not read that? So what proof do you have that they paid him a financial
settlement for firing him, when clearly they didn't fire him? Or are you just
making up false accusations now that contradict the known facts?

Exactly how much did they pay him, and why, since they certainly didn't fire
him, and just how do you know that? Where is your evidence, or your retraction
and apology for lying and spreading misinformation?

~~~
BrendanEich
Hi Don — google “constructive separation” for the general idea, with which you
seem to be unfamiliar.

I can’t comment on anything about my exit. This will be my only comment,
confined to general facts and CA law.

P.S.: CA 1101 labor law is real.

~~~
war1025
Completely irrelevant to anything, but seeing this comment downstream from a
conversation I started pretty much made my day.

------
magnusmagnusson
Glad they focused on virtue signal violent protestors.

------
marta_morena_25
Why does Mozilla even develop their own browser? There is inherently nothing
wrong with everyone using Chromium as a foundation. Mozilla could use Chromium
as renderer while still doing all the privacy preserving stuff they do. There
is absolutely no correlation between the rendering engine and privacy. And
they few interlinks (fingerprinting, etc.) can very likely be addressed
through patches that are rebased over Chromium.

Firefox with its own renderer is dead anyway on iOS already, where everyone is
forced into Webkit. It seems like a loosing battle to spend so much money on
something that doesn't give the average user ANY benefit whatsoever. Yes,
Chrome will be a monopoly, but Microsoft already bought into that monopoly.
What's the point of fighting a loosing battle? Focus on integrating Chromium
and make it into a rock solid privacy-first browser.

~~~
The_rationalist
They'll be all fired before they realized that you're spelling the truth.
Until them you're condemned to be downvoted in order to lessen the harm on
their childish sensitivities. Cognitive biases are indeed powerful.

------
tus88
firefox.exe /uninstall

------
paulie_a
That press release had words. That's important

------
cultureulterior
Removing the old plugin format killed Mozilla.

------
sunseb
"combatting a lethal virus and battling systemic racism"

WTF?! I mean, maybe you should actually build the best web browser instead of
doing politics.

------
The_rationalist
Mozilla, it's still time. You need to face reality and embrace chromium, and
improve it through worldwide collaboration.

------
mikece
While I really hate to suggest this, the best way to make money might be to
sell space on newly opened tabs (with an option to turn off ads for something
reasonable like USD$24.95 per year).

~~~
gkoberger
Mozilla tries this every few years and gets (rightfully) huge blowback.
Mozilla makes enough money (through partnerships), the problem is they just
spend too much.

------
kgraves
Did anyone find anything in this post about Mozilla refusing to take money
from Google?

I can’t find it.

Mozilla, stop taking money from Google and letting them be the default search
engine!

Please don’t enable and legitimise surveillance capitalism.

~~~
soundnote
To do that now would be financial suicide. They have several new services, if
they manage to get revenue from them they could survive cutting Google. But
not before.

~~~
kgraves
> They have several new services,

Please name these revenue generating services from Mozilla.

~~~
Yoric
From the top of my head, Firefox VPN and Pocket.

~~~
kgraves
What is more disappointing is this is what they have to show for after years
of funding from Google.

I get that they have to build a browser but come on. Is that it?

------
cannedslime
Mozilla was dead to me the moment they decided to financially support the
encrypted communication services of antifa (riseup.net). Even though that
donation was a drip compared to what the CEO pulls out of the organisation.

I straight up deleted it! And I make sure that any organisation I get into
won't bother optimizing or even testing for FF since it has such a small user
base these days that its not worth bothering with it, testing on the default
android browsers and safari has higher priorities these days.

If the end users complain, we tell them to use ANY other browser now and they
are happy with it.

This is what you get when you pose as an NGO that stands for values such as
free-speech and openness while you do nothing but stiffle it behind the
curtains. (Helping professional political agitators, that are renown for
attacking peaceful protests etc is the opposite of supporting free-speech, so
is getting your own CEO booted for having an opinion, controversial or not!)

