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.
I wonder if it would work for companies/services to offer perks to their users in exchange for donation to Mozilla? It's a weak example but if, for a $50 donation, you could get an icon on your HN profile -- and that shows up with your comments -- that you're a financial supporter of Mozilla that might drive donations. Granted, HN is a pretty small community but if, say, Facebook offered a perk level for supporting Mozilla it might get the network effect going perhaps.
I would happily pay for a “premium” Firefox experience, even if that premium was only cosmetic. I have received so much value from Firefox over the years that it would be an honour to support them directly.
Yes I know I can donate. But I want to pay, and that’s different somehow.
Do this! I procrastinated on switching from Chrome to Firefox for several months because I wasn't sure how much time and effort it would take. I set up a monthly donation to Mozilla during this time because it was easy and supported browser diversity.
When I did finally switch, it turned out to be pretty easy and fast to transfer my bookmarks and passwords to Firefox, and there are some features like the built-in containers and add-ons like Tree Style Tab [0] that I find pretty valuable.
Money is fungible and dollars are dollars. Donating money to the Foundation means less of the Corporation's dollars have to go to supporting the Foundation (which they do via dividend payments), and so more of the Corporation's dollars go to Firefox.
I don't disagree with your concept in theory, but I also don't think there is any evidence to suggest that MoCo's trademark royalty payments (as IIRC that's how they are structured according the financial docs) to MoFo are adjusted based on MoFo's donations.
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).
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.
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.
It was established precisely so that the Corporation could pursue commercial operations that the Foundation legally couldn't before that, like business partnerships.
Also Mozilla Foundation didn't qualify as a public charity since it received less than 1/3rd of its revenue via donations, though I don't know if it can be considered as one now (15 years after the split).
I hate to say it, but this is one of the reasons I stopped donating. Mozilla was getting a bit like EFF-lite and I've had enough of the EFF's non-mission nonsense as well.
What kills me is when people say they use Chrome cause they don't trust Mozilla cause they embedded Pocket, but like Chrome is literally shoved with a million Google bits, even Chromium (the open source variant of Google Chrome which is the proprietary variant almost everyone installs) has Google crapware at a much larger scale. Mozilla's Firefox still feels like the lesser of the two evils.
Edit: Added clarification about Chromium in case someone doesn't know the difference between Chromium (open source) vs Google Chrome (proprietary).
Well i think Mozilla made very clear in the past that they did all they can to avoid Pocket to be evasive, and they made it to respect your privacy, in case you choose to use it. Of course you can always turn it off on your Firefox and never come across it again.
Somehow I feel like they could have avoided a lot of the backlash by renaming Pocket to Firefox Pocket (and thus being part of the Firefox Lockwise, Firefox Send, Firefox Sync etc suite). Instead of being / feeling like it’s own separate entity, it would have felt like an integral part of Firefox and thus enjoying the same privacy commitments.
Even though I have Pocket disabled I don’t see much of a problem with it being in the browser. Isn’t it the same concept as Safari’s Reading List?
yeah that would be a good a idea i think the logical reason i can find for them to not do it was that Pocket was an independent business where probably Mozilla does not even own completely. Also by keeping them independent makes it easier to sell in the future.
It's just a plugin. They could have put it in the store, put a message in the update info "try pocket, we'd like to ram it down your throat but someone here with sense suggested we could give you control over your browser". Ta-da.
No need to put it into people's toolbars, pretend it's integral then put it back in people's toolbars when they remove it.
It's just disdain for users and the exact sort of heavy handed tactics I use FOSS to avoid.
Same thing with changing start pages, just leave it alone - suggest new defaults on update and allow people to subscribe to adverts if they want them.
Why do you think it has to offer suggestions? Reading List didn't. The equivalents in other browsers don't. Suggestions could be a separate opt in feature.
Pocket's Article View is optional. Firefox has Reader View built in. Special handling for top sites could be built in. Special handling for any site could use a protocol designed for privacy like malware protection does.
>you can always turn it off on your Firefox and never come across it again //
Are you aware that they reenabled it for users who had removed it (and of course made it a non-removable plugin in the first place), not sure if you were being sarcastic?
I still don't understand what Mozilla got out of forcing Pocket on people.
Sadly I had hopes for ChromeOS but I'm more saddened nothing like ChromeOS has popped up.
If Mozilla teamed up with someone like Ubuntu to produce a viable alternative I'd buy into it fairly quickly honestly.
In the meantime I'm considering an iPad Pro as a "Laptop" alternative and as a way to offload apps from my phone so my phone is just that, a phone with nothing but maybe the work apps on it and texting stuff. I don't want social media in my pocket anymore.
Edit: On another note, maybe if we see more ARM laptops it may be worthwhile for a new Netbook / ARM focused distro to crop up. One thing that kills me about Chromebooks is paying a thousand dollars for decent specs but I could pay the same amount and real a laptop with a real OS on it. The main selling factor with ChromeOS for me though has always been their security model.
> If Mozilla teamed up with someone like Ubuntu to produce a viable alternative I'd buy into it fairly quickly honestly.
The thing about that it is that it has really very little to do with Mozilla. ChromeOS is only that because a) ChromeOS and Chrome are both made by Google (there is no "teaming up"), and b) Google's incentive is for everything to be using their services in their browser.
But putting everything in the browser is not generally desirable in its own right. An interesting competitor would have a browser, but it would just be another application. And there have been several attempts at making security-first operating systems, from various Linux distros to OpenBSD, but none of them have Google's resources. And that isn't really a problem Mozilla can solve at this point either.
I would be fine if not everything is in the browser honestly. However the number of packages should be a slim amount to mimic how minimalist Chromebooks can be closely.
Putting everything in the browser doesn't buy you anything unless your goal is to put everything into your web services. Meanwhile it incurs a lot of costs because browsers are designed for client-server, which in Google's case was the point, but in a user-focused device it's a liability. You saddle yourself with javascript instead of better languages, you end up having to reimplement things like local storage and data transfer between applications, a lot of interesting applications will need access to lower level networking than browsers normally provide (e.g. ICMP, UDP, multicast) or some other access to hardware (e.g. access to USB devices).
Why build a second operating system inside the browser instead of just using the original operating system?
I'd be surprised if "people who know what telemetry is" and "people who choose to use ChromeOS" have much overlap.
I don't mean that as a dig on ChromeOS - personally I think its evolved into a pretty decent product for certain use cases. You can even use Firefox if you're so inclined.
So Firefox should aim to only be marginally better than Chrome, degrading itself along the way?
Firefox: 'I know we used to do cool stuff but Google rips it's users a new one on the regular so we need to be more shitty too, what're they going to do leave and use Chrome, lolz' /probably
It's a great browser, even faster than Chromium. I especially appreciate that they offer 32 bit versions for download which run on my old Linux machines just by unpacking the ZIP to some directory.
Thing is, Google doesn't try to sell itself otherwise. Mozilla talks a good game about privacy and users-first, but then it goes and does things like Pocket, Mr. Robot, etc. that make it clear it is all just marketing.
Edit: Uh, my memory was faulty on this one. See below.
Mozilla replaced a feature that was end to end encrypted with one that sent private data to a third party for data mining.
They denied getting paid for the integration. That was technically true. They eventually admitted they got paid for referrals.
They bought the company in 2017 and promised to release the source code. They still haven't.
The Pocket website says "as a member of the Firefox family, privacy is paramount."[1] The first part is misleading and the second part is simply false.
The whole Pocket affair reeked of “Valley connections” and corruption, and resulted in a net loss of privacy for Firefox users compared to what was there before. I use Firefox and will likely never stop using it, but that and FFOS, I felt, were signs that MoCo was being run like “just another company” rather than something that should have a strong moral and ethical compass.
Here is the worst possible case scenario that is really happening with Chrome:
If I want to use a Google Property with Chrome (just tested with Google Search Console) I MUST be "signed into" Chrome with the same Google Account as I want use to access the service.
I am not "signed into" Chrome with a google account and I log into that service using the login process IN the web page I become automatically "signed into" Chrome.
Chrome just peeks throught the veil and I am now logged into my browser. Talk about overstepping boundaries.
So, I don't want to have my browser sessions associated to my google account so I "Sign Out" of the browser. BOOM! Logged out of the service as well.
This is a very sad day for the state of a free and open internet.
This is actually sad - because i have limited use for either of those products. I likely want the VPN, but the value of having it on my phone is minimal to me.
So while i think i will get the VPN, Pocket on the otherhand... is just meh to me. Products where i give some cloud company a ton of data, even if a good company, is just not an interesting problem for an honest company to solve.
VPN is meaningful. Privacy in general is meaningful. Basic necessities like identity and communication are meaningful.
Pocket is a really nice feature and a good UX, but just not interesting to me for the company goals. If it makes them money i'm happy, but it's just mildly more interesting to me than Mozilla Tiktok might be.
I really hope they embrace the essentials to the web, and make a profit doing so. VPN seems like the right direction (though i'm dying for it on desktop). Pocket, less so... to me.
Well, I want to use products from companies that I support. Mozilla is simply pushing too much politics that I strongly disagree with so I cannot support them.
Brave is more private and respecting of the user, without the politics. It's all whats good with Mozilla leaving out the bad part.
We could have had that in Mozilla today, but because virtue signaling they had to fire Brendan. This was probably the nail that lead to the coffin for Mozilla.
Yes, do you have something to say or do you just like to quote me?
I dislike companies that push a political agenda when the product or service itself has little to do with it. Privacy politics is fine, since that is a core part of Mozilla and Firefox and is very neutral since everyone can enjoy privacy. It is also part of the browsing experience.
But pushing stuff like "white privilege" is just pushing away users like me. I use Brave, which is a company founded by Brendan and they don't push anti gay marriage politics on me even if that is what they may support.
I just don't want that in my browser, it makes it a shitty experience. I don't understand what's hard to understand about that. I am also a web developer, so pissing me off will just result in me not testing the website in Firefox unless my users specifically requests it.
> I just don't want that in my browser, it makes it a shitty experience.
How? If you don't care about politics, why would the politics of the organization running the browser affect your experience? Aren't you therefore virtue signalling (in this case for maximal free speech) by not using Firefox for political reasons? You haven't mentioned any product features/decisions made as a result of Mozilla's "virtue signalling" that affected the day-to-day experience of using Firefox.
Thanks for actually writing an answer instead of just circle-jerking and spamming the downvote button.
It's more about the features they don't implement, presumably because their focus is elsewhere. The biggest and most obvious feature is PWA support that is (still) lacking to this day which is very bad.
They don't follow the standards in picture-in-picture, messing up the user experience somewhat.
Minor things like using the wrong default algos for svg filters. I've had many issues with SVG support in Firefox.
The fact that Firefox is still laggier in a lot of different scenarios, but mostly games for me. In online fast pace games it makes the experience completely unplayable. Try https://agor.io in firefox and then swtich to Brave for example. It lags in firefox, at least on linux.
These are some of the things I could think of right now, but over time I've found many things that I find frustrating with Firefox. Then reading that they purchased pocket, a service which basically no one is using afaik seems like simply bad business.
They also claim to value privacy but there wasn't long ago since someone discovered that they send data to google even in private browsing. Brave was the only browser that didn't send any privacy-invading requests.
I think most of these things is due to a lack of commitment to the tech and a focus that has been on something else, namely politics.
(Couldn't answer earlier since HN disallows posting more than 4 comments per hour..)
My reason for using Firefox and never trying Brave is the same: I strongly disagree with Brendan Eich's politics. If using Brave means Brendan Eich profits from it then I'll never use it.
> 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.
Absolutely. It has to stand on its own feet. Yet the only reason Mozilla is being kept alive is due to Google paying them to be the default search engine as part of a deal which is where the majority of their revenue is from. [0]
Funny how their mission in "supporting internet privacy" also somehow means we must have deals with companies with the likes of Google who don't believe in Mozilla's own mission in order to survive.
Well, you have to pick your battles, right? Maybe in some future when Mozilla has their own privacy-oriented open-source search engine, as well as an independent solid source of income, it would cease to sign contracts with Google. We aren't there yet, and may never be.
> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.)
the alternative is cutting the bills down somewhat. They made about 500 million in revenue in 2018, that's a healthy pile of cash.
They've got a pretty huge engineering team and still development on their products is painfully slow. Just take the password manager they've been offering, it can't even import or export passwords and it misses half of the features any of the free competitors have.
Adding even more stuff on top of it doesn't really give me a lot of confidence.
And the best product is a product that is useful to users.
To me, Mozilla felt like an ideology and not so much like a browser. That repelled me from Mozilla. I was annoyed by their attitude and puns toward Chrome, especially the prefix war and the comparison between IE6 and Chrome. That was way too much for me, even though they had a point. Ironically one of their evangelists, that made a lot of noise against Chrome, later moved on to Microsoft.
Microsoft has settled the prefix war in the way that they adopted Chromium.
Coming from Netscape, which I loved, and going through almost every iteration of the Internet and browsers, Mozilla feels like Assembler or C to me. Yes, Assembler was cool when you had your C64, and yes, you can do everything with C, but that is not the point. People need to get a job done, and yes, automated Garbage Collection is ok most of the time - I mean you Java, C#, Python, etc.
Maybe the comparison is not the best, but Mozilla's priority seems right this time: new product(s).
Is it actually true that Mozilla’s core business (develop Firefox, funded by search bar traffic) loses money? Or is the crises that this core business doesn’t generate enough surplus to fund the overhead of other activities that Mozilla engages in?
I subscribe to Pocket Premium to support Firefox development because I think it's critical for it to continue existing, but I use Chrome as my daily driver because it's almost 2x faster on my Mac.
I give FF a try every few months and will happily switch if they ever manage to get it to having comparable performance to Chrome or Safari on my architecture.
I spent the last month switching to FF because Chrome is getting dog slow and I wanted to support it, despite multiple issues since switching I stuck along.
Seeing this "diversification" strategy I just installed Edge and am giving it a try, FF wasn't a great experience but I was willing to stick with it to support Chrome alternatives - but it's obvious it needs a lot of work - and removing focus is a signal people should be moving off not coming back to it.
Seeing Mozilla burn fills my heart with joy. Maybe they will be forced to be an actual software dev company instead of a political activist group. But even in this post they had to shove in 'racism' in the headline.
I can't say if it's in a good or bad way, I guess it would depend on the individual case. I just know it's extremely hard to be true to your stated purpose when incentives push you in other directions.
Please don't reframe my words. Nowhere did I state that "mozilla's politics are just corporate speak". I don't know enough about Mozilla's politics, to make that statement.
What I did was to point out what reading that page felt to me, and to point out that Principle 5 has been recently broken by Mozilla. If you have something to say to that, please do, but don't put words in my mouth.
> I don't know enough about Mozilla's politics, to make that statement.
And yet you feel qualified to tell us whether we should or shouldn't be political. When pointed out to that we are a fundamentally political organization you shift the goalposts to webextension support (another tick on the HN mozilla bingo card).
250 people lost their job today. Most of whom worked for Mozilla for political reasons, because they believe in the manifesto. But by all means please tell us why our motivations for working here are wrong.
Yes you have. You have made the implication that I'm asking you to act according to my wishes/opinions. I can hold an opinion without asking you to act according to my wishes/opinions. I hope you can see the difference. I don't know how to express it so it comes across more clearly.
Quite clearly we are discussing your opinion and I've never claimed you're demanding we act according to your wishes. You are the one putting words in people's mouths.
> But by all means please tell us why our motivations for working here are wrong.
I guess among the work offers you had when you made your employment choice, Mozilla's was the best. Would you still work at Mozilla if you were getting paid half of your current salary? How about 10%?
And who is this "us" you keep referring to? Have you been elected representative for a group of Mozillians?
That's not a dichotomy though. There's money, there's "making the best browser possible", there's "changing the world through activism" and there are plenty more goals. I understand those that criticize the activism would prefer them focusing on building the best browser.
> Honestly I wish we had more activists pursuing something else than money.
This is very hard to do without money. Money gives you freedom. If you lack money, other parties can use money, and whatever money can buy, as leverage against you – to stop whatever you are pursuing.
People have incentives. Google employees likely are there to have the experience on their resume and monetize later. Mozilla people work for a non profit, hence they are probably motivated by social activism rather than money or fame.
I think you should look back at Mozilla's mission before making a statement like that.
As Kvark wrote above [1]:
> Mozilla is not a software company today that tries to be an internet activist. Mozilla is an activist company that also happens to develop software to prove their point. So no, it's not just about the web browser.
Sadly considering their behaviour regarding ads, the default search engine, telemetry, sending the sites that you visit to google, pocket, etc it seems that they no longer care about making the internet a better place and that their focus it profit.
That seems a little extreme. You'd prefer Google/Chromium to be a complete monopoly because you don't like the political views of the company that develops Firefox?
I don't agree with all of Mozilla's politics either, and yes it's Free/Libre software and anyone could fork it, but there is no group more well-positioned to make Firefox a success than the people who built it. It's the Internet, you've got to take the good with the bad; in Mozilla's case the good far outweighs the nuisance of their often-partisan fundraising.
I think we completely agree. It's just that I have no faith in that the people in charge are in any shape or form involved in the actual development process of FF. And therefore I want the former to cease existing so that the latter can thrive.
Their activism has been way worse than fundraising. [0] Is treading a line where I even doubt FF is in the medium/long term even legal to use for people that don't align with their extreme views.
I used to work next door to Mozilla's SF HQ during the same time they ousted Brandon Eich for wrongthink. That whole fiasco was borne of the political biases of the rank-and-file employees, many of whom I've encountered throughout my career. I don't think it's a safe assumption that "the leadership team is compromised" and all would be well by cutting the head off the snake or whatever analogy.
Really Firefox is developed primarily by paid employees and the organization has fostered extreme political viewpoints from top to bottom. I could do without their partisan political drum-beating but much of their activism is honestly rooted in principles that keep the Internet open and fair, even if as an organization they act hypocritically (ie. by censoring browser add-ons developed by conservatives). My problem with the partisan stuff isn't even that I disagree with it, more that it alienates people (like you) who would likely otherwise agree with the stated mission of the organization but can't support the types of irrelevant virtue signaling they engage in.
"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.
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).
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.
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).
It fell victim to the same problem as Wikimedia, a kind of Dutch Disease: The web browser was too good, they earned so much money in donations from it that it attracted freeloading middle managers and do-gooders who don't give a flying f about the browser, but started empire-building with vague new "missions".
Interviewed there last year, wasn't a fit. It turns out I dodged multiple bullets.
I hope they turn things around though. Firefox is a great product and we need it. And I hope the people who were let go land safely on their feet elsewhere.
I feel like this should go down as one of the worst layoff announcements in history. The whole post seems to be an attempt to smooth over the layoffs with glorious language about the battle against systemic racism, internet freedom, etc. If I worked there, or was laid off, this would just make me more cynical.
Mozilla PR is famous for their absolutely meaningless and elusive corporate communication. I'm not sure how they ended up that way but it's a reoccurring theme.
Mozilla (or the CEO) wants to be a large profit driven corporations. Right now Mozilla makes its money by saying it's a privacy focused non-profit. These announcements are about saying they are the former without making it too obvious to those who like them for being the latter.
I could see this coming a mile away and have written about it several times on HN, last 6 months ago [1].
Due to Mozillas woke-ness, focus has shifted from the product which actually is great to worthless endeavors like pushing woke politics.
This made their product offerings hurt and now they have to cut jobs. I use Brave as my main browser today and Firefox is just not that relevant anymore due to bad user numbers. It's barely even worth it to test your sites in Firefox anymore.
I hope they will stop with the woke bullshit and start getting actual value to users out there instead. I believe it's that or they will cease to exist in time. No one will use your product just because you are woke.
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?
Yes they could have gone with a much clearer message: "People still aren't using Firefox much, so we've had to lay off part of our workforce. However we have lots of great technology almost ready so expect that to change soon" sort of thing.
Instead: In these COVID times, COVID COVID unprecedented COVID systemic racism. COVID. Btw we fired 250 people. Uncertain times, COVID.
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".
It is so refreshing to see an ethical company like mozilla when faced with financial struggle say "We at the top level have slashed our salaries to ensure we can keep paying as many contributors as possible as it is they who make our products great"
Sorry I thought it would be obvious to anyone reading the article. My hope was that by setting expectations to where they should be, the terribleness of this corporate statement would be more apparent.
The only sacrifice Mitchell Baker admits to is firing people. Somehow the ones that stay are supposed to do more.
There is no statement that firefox should be the best browser out there to encourage more users to switch.
No rallying call against the ad industry which is internet users biggest enemy
All I got out of it is that they want to develop new services as a software substitutes and charge people for it, probably as a subscription.
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.
I wonder what percentage of their bottom line comes from goodwill donations from individuals, versus the millions they get each year from Google and various other search companies they have contracts with - in some recent past years Google has been funding like 90%+ of their budget haven't they?
Having been disillusioned with what means to try to make money with desktop FOSS software, I would bet that goodwill donations aren't that representative.
There's Mozilla Foundation and there's Mozilla Corporation (the corporation is a subsidiary of the foundation). For Mozilla Corporation:
> In CY 2018, Mozilla Corporation generated $435.702 million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $542 million in CY 2017.
> Since not enough people are donating, they have to figure out how to make money otherwise.
I'd love to donate but only for the browser, not for that other stuff. And that seems to be the main problem here: They make tons of money, but there not investing it where they make the money with.
They could still work out a way to renew the Mozilla-Google contract, if they are extremely desperate.
I would be against it and prefer them to focus on their own products and strike alternative funding deals with multiple companies like what letsencrypt does and NOT solely rely on one source like Google.
Foundations often have trusts. Many of the donations go into the trust and most of your operating expenses (perhaps not including fund raising) come out of the interest payments, not the principle.
I was so disappointed when I discovered Mozilla was spending it as fast as it comes in. There will never be a windfall like the Google donation again.
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.
> 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.
There's a lot of talk of values that doesn't have an obvious associated action. This is typically a two stage way of announcing something. Next comes the actual action, which is in keeping with the "new values".
"
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.
"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'm totally with you on "Recommended by Pocket" thing, it's very sad. But I think you are confusing Mozilla with something it's not.
Mozilla is not a software company today that tries to be an internet activist. Mozilla is an activist company that also happens to develop software to prove their point. So no, it's not just about the web browser.
I wish Mozilla would distribute their free software the way some museums charge entry. A “suggested donation” of $X. And when I go to download the browser prompt me to either pay the suggested donation or manually change it to $0. I’d gladly pay $10 for Firefox every major update and I’m sure I’m not alone. It’s just not something I really think about very often. The passive asks just aren’t that effective.
In theory it's a nice idea, but it's hard enough to persuade my friends and acquaintances to try Firefox (again, since many of them left between versions 4 through 56). If they visited the website and were asked to make a donation, they'd think Firefox has become commercial software and will leave immediately. This will hurt their market share even more, if anything.
Ubuntu tried that one, and it wasn't very effective.
> And when I go to download the browser prompt me to either pay the suggested donation or manually change it to $0.
FYI elementary OS does that and they have public analytics where you can see how many people skip it: https://plausible.io/elementary.io
Their "payment skipped" goal has 57.9k conversions, while "payment complete" has 1k conversions. This is <2 months of data, since they've started using Plausible pretty recently.
Unfortunately web browsers cost money to make and maintain and people at large have shown they won't buy one the old fashioned way. Finding something that works is a hard problem.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, I specifically addressed that point in my post:
> 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.
Like it definitely wouldn't have been worth it. Playing some weird self-sacrifice game to save a few highly skilled employees that will absolutely be able to find work elsewhere is silly.
Yes the whole situation sucks, layoffs are never fun. I'm sure this decision was genuinely hard for her to make and she doesn't need to self-flagellate to prove to anyone that she cared.
The layoffs themselves show that Mitchell Baker is a leader. Layoffs are by far the hardest thing for a CEO to do. Assessing the reality of their market position, examining their future opportunities and revenue streams, and positioning the company to still be around in 10 years sometimes means deciding that the people you have currently aren’t the people you need to ultimately be successful and stay in business.
You should never give a CEO a pay cut for doing their job and making the hard decisions to help keep the company in the black.
> Layoffs are by far the hardest thing for a CEO to do.
Seeing up close and personal several CEOs that laid off people, I saw very little evidence of that. Some even happily talked about vacations and buying yachts, when not in employee company.
It's a popular claim that 1 in 5 CEOs is a psychopath. I don't know if that's true, but I'm inclined to think it wouldn't be such a popular claim if it weren't somewhere close to the truth. CEOs who don't seem to give a damn about the wellbeing of their employees aren't particularly rare.
Something to consider here too is that Chris Beard was CEO of Mozilla for over 5 years ending late 2019. Mitchell Baker only took over within the last year.
While I was getting ready to reply and say that most of my comments in this thread talking about the CEO were meant as general comments not referring to a specific Mozilla CEO, I went and read the Wikipedia Page for Mitchell Baker, so while you are correct that she took over from Chris Beard as CEO, there is also this bit of history to consider:
> When the Mozilla Corporation was launched as a taxable subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation on August 3, 2005, Baker was named the CEO of the new entity. In addition, she joined the Mozilla Corporation's Board of Directors, though she also kept her seat on the Mozilla Foundation's board, as well as her role as Chairperson.
In 2014, she wrote this piece[0] (while she was not CEO, but Chair), justifying putting ads in Firefox.
Layoffs can be as much about spending less money as refocusing the company. The company might layoff people who are very good at X but have no experience with Y because the company is not doing X anymore and is focusing on Y. From the announcement, "our pre-COVID plan for 2020 included [...] investing in innovation and creating new products", which suggests they hired people who were very experienced at X (a new product) but have decided to kill development on X. It would be nice if the post actually said what X was, since this whole post is totally generic. Retraining people to work on Y rather than laying them off would be nice, but maybe that would take too long and those people don't want to be retrained to work on Y, and will be much happier working on X somewhere else.
I read in this thread that they removed servo people, given that this was one of the best investments of mozilla in the past few years I would argue that refocusing is an issue itself.
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.
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.
> 250 FTE's is probably in the neighborhood of $25 million/yr
Mozilla is very engineering-heavy. While I don't know other people's salaries, I do know that the fully loaded cost of a developer almost anywhere is much higher than $100k/yr.
> You do get that the total compensation for 250 FTE's is probably in the neighborhood of $25 million/yr.
In 2018 she received almost $2.5 million comp from Mozilla. Assuming that her comp has not decreased since then, that would be 25 FTEs (according to your numbers) that she could have chosen not to fire at no other cost than her compensation. Do with that what you will.
Their priorities are out of wack. Firefox is their golden goose. It's the thing that gives them clout and revenue. Their job is to increase adoption because increased adoption means more clout and more revenue. You do that by constantly reinvesting in the platform and making it your core singular focus, especially performance and tooling (because developers are a big driver for browser adoption). Where is the Firefox version CEF? Where is a competitive option to v8/node.js? Why is MS Edge (and every other independent browser) based on CEF and not Firefox? Why has Firefox performance lagged behind Chrome for years now?
Since they ousted Eich (and maybe even before that), they've been focusing on everything except Firefox, and as a result they've steadily lost market-share. They screwed up.
Case in point:
>New focus on product. Mozilla must be a world-class, modern, multi-product internet organization.
What do you mean 'multi-product internet organization'? You have Firefox, and ... what else? Nothing. Firefox is the only thing that keeps them relevant and provides employment for their people. But let's instead focus on everything else?
Counterpoint: Firefox is the thing they're best known for, but it's been inexorably losing market share for years to a direct competitor with vastly more financial muscle and access to very prominent advertising space. At the same time, they're dependent on that competitor for most of their revenue.
It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it. Even if Google plays entirely fair - not optimising things like GMail & Google Maps for Chrome at all - it has the resources to keep up with anything Mozilla can do.
Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy. It makes sense for them to diversify. Inevitably there will be some failures (Firefox Phone seems like a bad idea with hindsight, but hindsight is always 20/20), but some things are having a bit of quiet success, like Firefox Send or their 'Privacy not Included' guides. How they create revenue, I have no idea, though their new VPN is one idea.
>but it's been inexorably losing market share for years to a direct competitor with vastly more financial muscle
If you remember, they gained market-share by competing and beating another direct competitor with vastly more finical muscle.
>It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it.
Have they tried? Why isn't Firefox front-and-center in this blog post. Why wasn't Firefox listed in their five areas of focus?
But if their attitude is that they will never be able to compete with Chrome, maybe they should just adopt CEF and move on to building all those new products they alluded to.
>Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy.
They have one egg, one basket. Firefox is the only thing that makes them relevant. Without Firefox they have nothing. That they have delusions of grandeur is their problem. To me, not having Firefox be the core focus of Mozilla is considerably more risky than trying to figure out new products.
> they gained market-share by competing and beating another direct competitor
Microsoft wasn't really interested in the web, and let IE stagnate for years. Google makes an enormous amount of money through the web, and consequently puts a lot of resources into developing Chrome.
>Microsoft wasn't really interested in the web, and let IE stagnate for years.
Sounds like Mozilla and Firefox.
But let's step back. If your contention is that Firefox cannot raise its adoption and/or cannot compete with Chrome - then Mozilla is in big trouble. In that case, they should free up their dev resources by dumping Firefox and either getting out of the browser game, or adopting CEF like everybody else and build their services (like 'Pocket' and 'VPN') on top of that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same reason Google forked webkit to make blink. Over time the involved parties' priorities diverge and when that gap is wide enough, it makes sense to fork.
Also note it's not just Edge we're talking about. Microsoft is one of the main Electron stewards, and products like VSCode are built on that platform.
As I said, I'd like that to happen, but I don't see MS being bothered by diverging priorities enough to fork after _throwing away_ a whole engine to avoid duplicating work. At least not in the medium term.
I don't have any insider knowledge. It makes sense to me that a trillion-dollar platform company will at some point want to control their browser destiny, and not rely on their competitor's roadmap.
You may very well be right. I have no special knowledge of internal workings at MS. Having said that, I can guarantee that there are factions within MS that were against getting rid of Edge and factions that are all about MS building their own browser. It's very possible these factions may win out at some point in the future. They certainly have the talent and resources to work on Chromium/Edge independently.
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.
Thanks for the downvotes, I know you don't like the facts, but here they are:
> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.) [0] [1] [2]
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.
The Debian Foundation also doesn't have to compete against Google on a product that costs millions of dollars to build and maintain, and that Google throws billions at in marketing.
Being beholden to your main competitor is a losing strategy. It's made them a lot of money in the short term to lose it all in the longer term. It's easy to comment on this in retrospect, but I personally think they should have considered this more seriously before making a deal with the devil.
Maybe settling for less cash, and working with partners you don't directly compete with, like DuckDuckGo and the like, would be a better long-term strategy even if it means less cashflow and a smaller company in the short term.
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.
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.
Sorry, but Mozilla started their downhill slide after the situation that forced Eich out. Mitchell Baker is complicit in this backstabbing.
I haven't used a Mozilla product since- until their leadership and mission change meaningfully to remove themselves from identity politics, I will continue to not use them.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 419 ms ] threadhttps://donate.mozilla.org/
Yes I know I can donate. But I want to pay, and that’s different somehow.
When I did finally switch, it turned out to be pretty easy and fast to transfer my bookmarks and passwords to Firefox, and there are some features like the built-in containers and add-ons like Tree Style Tab [0] that I find pretty valuable.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
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/
1 - https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704
Found on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/
Has that been mentioned in a meeting somewhere?
Also Mozilla Foundation didn't qualify as a public charity since it received less than 1/3rd of its revenue via donations, though I don't know if it can be considered as one now (15 years after the split).
I wonder how much of their money is from donations though, does Mozilla release these numbers?
> You will contribute to saving the world.
Cringed a bit there but to each to their own.
Would rather they fall and a Phoenix rises out of the ashes for a second time.
Edit: Added clarification about Chromium in case someone doesn't know the difference between Chromium (open source) vs Google Chrome (proprietary).
No need to put it into people's toolbars, pretend it's integral then put it back in people's toolbars when they remove it.
It's just disdain for users and the exact sort of heavy handed tactics I use FOSS to avoid.
Same thing with changing start pages, just leave it alone - suggest new defaults on update and allow people to subscribe to adverts if they want them.
Pocket isn't end to end encrypted. The Reading List it replaced was.
Protesting Pocket by using Chrome makes no sense but integrating Pocket objectively sacrificed user privacy for a revenue stream.
It also has to offer suggestions/recommendations, so they need to track you
Why do you think it has to offer suggestions? Reading List didn't. The equivalents in other browsers don't. Suggestions could be a separate opt in feature.
It removes the ads, signups, etc. They call it 'Article View'. It is rendered per domain.
People actually like the suggestions thing. They get good articles to read.
People who want suggestions could opt in.
Are you aware that they reenabled it for users who had removed it (and of course made it a non-removable plugin in the first place), not sure if you were being sarcastic?
I still don't understand what Mozilla got out of forcing Pocket on people.
If Mozilla teamed up with someone like Ubuntu to produce a viable alternative I'd buy into it fairly quickly honestly.
In the meantime I'm considering an iPad Pro as a "Laptop" alternative and as a way to offload apps from my phone so my phone is just that, a phone with nothing but maybe the work apps on it and texting stuff. I don't want social media in my pocket anymore.
Edit: On another note, maybe if we see more ARM laptops it may be worthwhile for a new Netbook / ARM focused distro to crop up. One thing that kills me about Chromebooks is paying a thousand dollars for decent specs but I could pay the same amount and real a laptop with a real OS on it. The main selling factor with ChromeOS for me though has always been their security model.
The thing about that it is that it has really very little to do with Mozilla. ChromeOS is only that because a) ChromeOS and Chrome are both made by Google (there is no "teaming up"), and b) Google's incentive is for everything to be using their services in their browser.
But putting everything in the browser is not generally desirable in its own right. An interesting competitor would have a browser, but it would just be another application. And there have been several attempts at making security-first operating systems, from various Linux distros to OpenBSD, but none of them have Google's resources. And that isn't really a problem Mozilla can solve at this point either.
Why build a second operating system inside the browser instead of just using the original operating system?
I don't mean that as a dig on ChromeOS - personally I think its evolved into a pretty decent product for certain use cases. You can even use Firefox if you're so inclined.
Firefox: 'I know we used to do cool stuff but Google rips it's users a new one on the regular so we need to be more shitty too, what're they going to do leave and use Chrome, lolz' /probably
If it wasn't for iOS, I bet job offers for Web would have changed already for Chrome developers.
Edit: Uh, my memory was faulty on this one. See below.
Citation?
They denied getting paid for the integration. That was technically true. They eventually admitted they got paid for referrals.
They bought the company in 2017 and promised to release the source code. They still haven't.
The Pocket website says "as a member of the Firefox family, privacy is paramount."[1] The first part is misleading and the second part is simply false.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/
If I want to use a Google Property with Chrome (just tested with Google Search Console) I MUST be "signed into" Chrome with the same Google Account as I want use to access the service.
I am not "signed into" Chrome with a google account and I log into that service using the login process IN the web page I become automatically "signed into" Chrome.
Chrome just peeks throught the veil and I am now logged into my browser. Talk about overstepping boundaries.
So, I don't want to have my browser sessions associated to my google account so I "Sign Out" of the browser. BOOM! Logged out of the service as well.
This is a very sad day for the state of a free and open internet.
> By turning this off, you can sign in to Google sites such as Gmail, without signing in to Chrome
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/
I am willing to pay for a license if they continue to support the browser.
So while i think i will get the VPN, Pocket on the otherhand... is just meh to me. Products where i give some cloud company a ton of data, even if a good company, is just not an interesting problem for an honest company to solve.
VPN is meaningful. Privacy in general is meaningful. Basic necessities like identity and communication are meaningful.
Pocket is a really nice feature and a good UX, but just not interesting to me for the company goals. If it makes them money i'm happy, but it's just mildly more interesting to me than Mozilla Tiktok might be.
I really hope they embrace the essentials to the web, and make a profit doing so. VPN seems like the right direction (though i'm dying for it on desktop). Pocket, less so... to me.
Brave is more private and respecting of the user, without the politics. It's all whats good with Mozilla leaving out the bad part.
We could have had that in Mozilla today, but because virtue signaling they had to fire Brendan. This was probably the nail that lead to the coffin for Mozilla.
I dislike companies that push a political agenda when the product or service itself has little to do with it. Privacy politics is fine, since that is a core part of Mozilla and Firefox and is very neutral since everyone can enjoy privacy. It is also part of the browsing experience.
But pushing stuff like "white privilege" is just pushing away users like me. I use Brave, which is a company founded by Brendan and they don't push anti gay marriage politics on me even if that is what they may support.
I just don't want that in my browser, it makes it a shitty experience. I don't understand what's hard to understand about that. I am also a web developer, so pissing me off will just result in me not testing the website in Firefox unless my users specifically requests it.
How? If you don't care about politics, why would the politics of the organization running the browser affect your experience? Aren't you therefore virtue signalling (in this case for maximal free speech) by not using Firefox for political reasons? You haven't mentioned any product features/decisions made as a result of Mozilla's "virtue signalling" that affected the day-to-day experience of using Firefox.
It's more about the features they don't implement, presumably because their focus is elsewhere. The biggest and most obvious feature is PWA support that is (still) lacking to this day which is very bad.
They don't follow the standards in picture-in-picture, messing up the user experience somewhat.
Minor things like using the wrong default algos for svg filters. I've had many issues with SVG support in Firefox.
The fact that Firefox is still laggier in a lot of different scenarios, but mostly games for me. In online fast pace games it makes the experience completely unplayable. Try https://agor.io in firefox and then swtich to Brave for example. It lags in firefox, at least on linux.
These are some of the things I could think of right now, but over time I've found many things that I find frustrating with Firefox. Then reading that they purchased pocket, a service which basically no one is using afaik seems like simply bad business.
They also claim to value privacy but there wasn't long ago since someone discovered that they send data to google even in private browsing. Brave was the only browser that didn't send any privacy-invading requests.
I think most of these things is due to a lack of commitment to the tech and a focus that has been on something else, namely politics.
(Couldn't answer earlier since HN disallows posting more than 4 comments per hour..)
Absolutely. It has to stand on its own feet. Yet the only reason Mozilla is being kept alive is due to Google paying them to be the default search engine as part of a deal which is where the majority of their revenue is from. [0]
Funny how their mission in "supporting internet privacy" also somehow means we must have deals with companies with the likes of Google who don't believe in Mozilla's own mission in order to survive.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/
> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.)
the alternative is cutting the bills down somewhat. They made about 500 million in revenue in 2018, that's a healthy pile of cash.
They've got a pretty huge engineering team and still development on their products is painfully slow. Just take the password manager they've been offering, it can't even import or export passwords and it misses half of the features any of the free competitors have.
Adding even more stuff on top of it doesn't really give me a lot of confidence.
And the best product is a product that is useful to users.
To me, Mozilla felt like an ideology and not so much like a browser. That repelled me from Mozilla. I was annoyed by their attitude and puns toward Chrome, especially the prefix war and the comparison between IE6 and Chrome. That was way too much for me, even though they had a point. Ironically one of their evangelists, that made a lot of noise against Chrome, later moved on to Microsoft.
Microsoft has settled the prefix war in the way that they adopted Chromium.
Coming from Netscape, which I loved, and going through almost every iteration of the Internet and browsers, Mozilla feels like Assembler or C to me. Yes, Assembler was cool when you had your C64, and yes, you can do everything with C, but that is not the point. People need to get a job done, and yes, automated Garbage Collection is ok most of the time - I mean you Java, C#, Python, etc.
Maybe the comparison is not the best, but Mozilla's priority seems right this time: new product(s).
Best of luck, Mozilla!
I give FF a try every few months and will happily switch if they ever manage to get it to having comparable performance to Chrome or Safari on my architecture.
Seeing this "diversification" strategy I just installed Edge and am giving it a try, FF wasn't a great experience but I was willing to stick with it to support Chrome alternatives - but it's obvious it needs a lot of work - and removing focus is a signal people should be moving off not coming back to it.
Nevertheless you have broken your
> Principle 5: Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it.
That principle is in direct contradiction to Mozilla pushing the recent Firefox update on users, that disabled their addons.
This tells me that the whole Manifesto is worthless. How can I trust an entity that has broken one of its core principles?
What I did was to point out what reading that page felt to me, and to point out that Principle 5 has been recently broken by Mozilla. If you have something to say to that, please do, but don't put words in my mouth.
And yet you feel qualified to tell us whether we should or shouldn't be political. When pointed out to that we are a fundamentally political organization you shift the goalposts to webextension support (another tick on the HN mozilla bingo card).
250 people lost their job today. Most of whom worked for Mozilla for political reasons, because they believe in the manifesto. But by all means please tell us why our motivations for working here are wrong.
Yes you have. You have made the implication that I'm asking you to act according to my wishes/opinions. I can hold an opinion without asking you to act according to my wishes/opinions. I hope you can see the difference. I don't know how to express it so it comes across more clearly.
I guess among the work offers you had when you made your employment choice, Mozilla's was the best. Would you still work at Mozilla if you were getting paid half of your current salary? How about 10%?
And who is this "us" you keep referring to? Have you been elected representative for a group of Mozillians?
This is very hard to do without money. Money gives you freedom. If you lack money, other parties can use money, and whatever money can buy, as leverage against you – to stop whatever you are pursuing.
As Kvark wrote above [1]:
> Mozilla is not a software company today that tries to be an internet activist. Mozilla is an activist company that also happens to develop software to prove their point. So no, it's not just about the web browser.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120561
(without counting interns)
forced/uninstallable addons
they sold us to google
they sold us to pocket
they sold us to promote their political views
mozilla should stick to open and free software and stick to their non-profit promise
why "flagged", is there some sort of AI that automatically detect when someone says something negative about mozilla?
Their activism has been way worse than fundraising. [0] Is treading a line where I even doubt FF is in the medium/long term even legal to use for people that don't align with their extreme views.
[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/
Really Firefox is developed primarily by paid employees and the organization has fostered extreme political viewpoints from top to bottom. I could do without their partisan political drum-beating but much of their activism is honestly rooted in principles that keep the Internet open and fair, even if as an organization they act hypocritically (ie. by censoring browser add-ons developed by conservatives). My problem with the partisan stuff isn't even that I disagree with it, more that it alienates people (like you) who would likely otherwise agree with the stated mission of the organization but can't support the types of irrelevant virtue signaling they engage in.
This is quite ironic when they themselves won't StopPrivacyViolationsForProfit (or anti-user behaviour in general).
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.
https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Message-...
This is on top of the 70 laid off in January (discussion of that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737)
Contributors can be external people including random guy fixing a typo.
Then there are all the non-engineering functions like HR, marketing, etc.
Mozilla has to do all of that.
I hope they could find another job soon.
I hope they turn things around though. Firefox is a great product and we need it. And I hope the people who were let go land safely on their feet elsewhere.
Due to Mozillas woke-ness, focus has shifted from the product which actually is great to worthless endeavors like pushing woke politics.
This made their product offerings hurt and now they have to cut jobs. I use Brave as my main browser today and Firefox is just not that relevant anymore due to bad user numbers. It's barely even worth it to test your sites in Firefox anymore.
I hope they will stop with the woke bullshit and start getting actual value to users out there instead. I believe it's that or they will cease to exist in time. No one will use your product just because you are woke.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22298296
Instead: In these COVID times, COVID COVID unprecedented COVID systemic racism. COVID. Btw we fired 250 people. Uncertain times, COVID.
You would not want to live there.
Was the quote in the article and got taken out, or were you just being sarcastic?
The only sacrifice Mitchell Baker admits to is firing people. Somehow the ones that stay are supposed to do more.
There is no statement that firefox should be the best browser out there to encourage more users to switch.
No rallying call against the ad industry which is internet users biggest enemy
All I got out of it is that they want to develop new services as a software substitutes and charge people for it, probably as a subscription.
Since not enough people are donating, they have to figure out how to make money otherwise.
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.
> In CY 2018, Mozilla Corporation generated $435.702 million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $542 million in CY 2017.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ (I couldn't find a more up-to-date annual report)
For Mozilla Foundation:
> The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations and 2% of annual net revenues from the Mozilla Corporation, amounting to over US$8.3 million in 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing
I'd love to donate but only for the browser, not for that other stuff. And that seems to be the main problem here: They make tons of money, but there not investing it where they make the money with.
I would be against it and prefer them to focus on their own products and strike alternative funding deals with multiple companies like what letsencrypt does and NOT solely rely on one source like Google.
Foundations often have trusts. Many of the donations go into the trust and most of your operating expenses (perhaps not including fund raising) come out of the interest payments, not the principle.
I was so disappointed when I discovered Mozilla was spending it as fast as it comes in. There will never be a windfall like the Google donation again.
> 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.
" 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.
All to fund the so-called "internet activist movement"?
I just want a web browser, not an ideology.
Mozilla is not a software company today that tries to be an internet activist. Mozilla is an activist company that also happens to develop software to prove their point. So no, it's not just about the web browser.
Then they should prioritize actions over words. Their blog posts paint a very different world from the one where they often ignore their users.
Ubuntu tried that one, and it wasn't very effective.
FYI elementary OS does that and they have public analytics where you can see how many people skip it: https://plausible.io/elementary.io
Their "payment skipped" goal has 57.9k conversions, while "payment complete" has 1k conversions. This is <2 months of data, since they've started using Plausible pretty recently.
Excellent! How much are you planning on contributing?
Default search engine does.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Are you saying it would not have been worth it?
Yes the whole situation sucks, layoffs are never fun. I'm sure this decision was genuinely hard for her to make and she doesn't need to self-flagellate to prove to anyone that she cared.
Silly or not, it would have shown that Mitchell Baker is a leader. This way it shows that she is not.
Guess what happens to organizations without a leader.
You should never give a CEO a pay cut for doing their job and making the hard decisions to help keep the company in the black.
Seeing up close and personal several CEOs that laid off people, I saw very little evidence of that. Some even happily talked about vacations and buying yachts, when not in employee company.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/29/thank-you-chris/
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-name...
> When the Mozilla Corporation was launched as a taxable subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation on August 3, 2005, Baker was named the CEO of the new entity. In addition, she joined the Mozilla Corporation's Board of Directors, though she also kept her seat on the Mozilla Foundation's board, as well as her role as Chairperson.
In 2014, she wrote this piece[0] (while she was not CEO, but Chair), justifying putting ads in Firefox.
[0] - https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/02/13/content-ads-cauti...
It appears that she has been setting the direction at Mozilla for a really long time, CEO or not.
The way I see it, the employees that had almost no control over Mozilla's direction over the last years are suffering the consequences.
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.
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.
Mozilla is very engineering-heavy. While I don't know other people's salaries, I do know that the fully loaded cost of a developer almost anywhere is much higher than $100k/yr.
In 2018 she received almost $2.5 million comp from Mozilla. Assuming that her comp has not decreased since then, that would be 25 FTEs (according to your numbers) that she could have chosen not to fire at no other cost than her compensation. Do with that what you will.
The irony of these folks whining about Mozilla's priorities...
Since they ousted Eich (and maybe even before that), they've been focusing on everything except Firefox, and as a result they've steadily lost market-share. They screwed up.
Case in point:
>New focus on product. Mozilla must be a world-class, modern, multi-product internet organization.
What do you mean 'multi-product internet organization'? You have Firefox, and ... what else? Nothing. Firefox is the only thing that keeps them relevant and provides employment for their people. But let's instead focus on everything else?
It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it. Even if Google plays entirely fair - not optimising things like GMail & Google Maps for Chrome at all - it has the resources to keep up with anything Mozilla can do.
Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy. It makes sense for them to diversify. Inevitably there will be some failures (Firefox Phone seems like a bad idea with hindsight, but hindsight is always 20/20), but some things are having a bit of quiet success, like Firefox Send or their 'Privacy not Included' guides. How they create revenue, I have no idea, though their new VPN is one idea.
If you remember, they gained market-share by competing and beating another direct competitor with vastly more finical muscle.
>It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it.
Have they tried? Why isn't Firefox front-and-center in this blog post. Why wasn't Firefox listed in their five areas of focus?
But if their attitude is that they will never be able to compete with Chrome, maybe they should just adopt CEF and move on to building all those new products they alluded to.
>Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy.
They have one egg, one basket. Firefox is the only thing that makes them relevant. Without Firefox they have nothing. That they have delusions of grandeur is their problem. To me, not having Firefox be the core focus of Mozilla is considerably more risky than trying to figure out new products.
Microsoft wasn't really interested in the web, and let IE stagnate for years. Google makes an enormous amount of money through the web, and consequently puts a lot of resources into developing Chrome.
Sounds like Mozilla and Firefox.
But let's step back. If your contention is that Firefox cannot raise its adoption and/or cannot compete with Chrome - then Mozilla is in big trouble. In that case, they should free up their dev resources by dumping Firefox and either getting out of the browser game, or adopting CEF like everybody else and build their services (like 'Pocket' and 'VPN') on top of that.
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.
I think that as developers we could be doing more to help with that. Using Firefox, testing with Firefox, avoiding Blink-only APIs, etc...
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.
Also note it's not just Edge we're talking about. Microsoft is one of the main Electron stewards, and products like VSCode are built on that platform.
The benefits to common engine are too high.
https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
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/
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.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo...
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.
> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.) [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/11/30/mozilla...
Please name these revenue generating services from Mozilla.
I get that they have to build a browser but come on. Is that it?
Or am I misunderstanding?
I wouldn't do a deal with the devil that is also competing with you. Especially in the name of privacy.
Maybe settling for less cash, and working with partners you don't directly compete with, like DuckDuckGo and the like, would be a better long-term strategy even if it means less cashflow and a smaller company in the short term.
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.
I haven't used a Mozilla product since- until their leadership and mission change meaningfully to remove themselves from identity politics, I will continue to not use them.