
Mozilla CEO says layoffs needed amid shift from browser - troughway
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Mozilla-CEO-says-layoffs-needed-amid-shift-from-14978506.php
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Nextgrid
Shift from browser? Are they insane?

The browser is the only reason Mozilla is still relevant. In the grand scheme
of things, their other projects have near-zero impact on the world.

Mozilla’s current strategy is very stupid in my opinion. They should be
putting all their resources into the browser, the only space where they have
an advantage (because making a browser from scratch is hard and they already
did it) and where there’s potential money to be made.

~~~
pedrocx486
I remember seeing somewhere recently that they had 8% market share while MS
Edge after the update managed to reach almost 7%.

I'm sure it's a good idea to shift from Firefox and let Microsoft and Google
duke it out /s

The reason they fell apart as a Browser IMO was letting Firefox get "old" UX
wise, while Chrome felt VERY user-friendly (I mean to the common enduser, not
people like us here on HN).

~~~
Sir_Substance
It was partly that, but they also dropped the ball on their core demographic.

Things like pushing mandatory updates via "experiments", shoving pocket in
everyone's faces, killing XUL.

I can't remember what it was they did that was the final straw for me, it was
at least 4 years ago and not even that big a thing. What I remember is going
"well, there goes my last shred of hope. Mozilla officially doesn't understand
why their core advocates prefer them over alternatives. Might as well move to
vivaldi and at least get all them sweet chrome addons".

Mozilla forgot about their "whole-of-product quality". Their brand was
"secure, private, power-user oriented". They've been slowly cutting bits off
for years that impact those aspects, and somewhere along the line they passed
a threshold were they weren't sufficiently more secure, sufficiently more
private or sufficiently more power-user oriented than competitors. No one
change was at fault, but they've diluted themselves too much now. They're no
longer the staunch defender of non-corporate internet ideals they used to be,
and without that, they sorta...don't matter.

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leothekim
From January 2020.

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m0llusk
Mozilla doesn't have a great business model, browser or not. But their
codebase is full of treasures and Fluent is the best internationalization
framework.

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LinuxBender
If they stop maintaining Firefox, is there an org that could fork it and
continue supporting it?

