OK but seriously, is the Firefox security team gone? If so, how do they propose to ship a browser without anyone making sure it's secure? That sounds kind of irresponsible.
Indeed, what remains of the core teams? Why didn't they transfer talented engineers from canceled projects instead of canning them?
I hope this will all resolve in a sensible way. But this could be Mozilla's equivalent of Nokia killing both Symbian and Maemo. If so in a few years the ashes will be sold and, we have to hope, a new phoenix will rise.
Typing this from Firefox on Android, have been following and using Firefox since it was called Phoenix, and Netscape before that since 1.0.
The stupidity of actually killing the very core team of their very core product leaves me speechless. The managers behind that decision are so obviously inept that they should be unemployable in the future.
Is it more likely that they are “so obviously inept” or that there are underlying reasons for the change?
They’re pivoting, or perhaps they are simply not profitable enough to keep them on.
We don’t know what’s going on in their strategy room. It could very well be a good business move, or a terrible one. We don’t have all the information.
Pivoting would be nearly the same level of stupidity. Mozilla is not a startup where the founders want to be entrepreneurs, no matter what they are selling. Mozilla makes a very important browser. I am not interested in them creating electric cars or ebooks. I need a non-google, free software browser FFS.
The majority of Mozilla’s revenue currently comes from partnerships with Google. If you want truly independent, Google-free software then a a change in their strategy is definitely required.
Top comment under this post does. Gecko/Firefox/Security is unaffected according to the very twitter posts linked. Servo and Infrastructure services are not.
> As an administrator in the main job and helper in the private sphere for some people, Firefox as a browser can no longer be an option. The danger of unpatched security holes and lack of further development in the core area endangers the infrastructure and systems.
I think this is the killer for Mozilla. Most people knew about Mozilla because of Firefox. Most non-tech people knew about Firefox because their tech friends recommended it to them. Now, I think that recommending Firefox to your non-tech friends is a disservice to them.
Despite what people say their priorities are, what their priorities are become evident when they are forced to make cuts. What gets cut is not the priority no matter how loudly they proclaim it. What remains is the priority no matter how much they may say it is not. Firefox, Servo, Security these all got the axe. They are not the priority at Mozilla.
Most non-tech people don't care about Firefox. Chrome already won the browser war and the internet is increasingly becoming apps and appstores as far as consumers are concerned anyway. Firefox has for years been the browser of tech enthusiasts and privacy activists, people who by definition don't care if the experience is subpar so long as it's not Chrome and lives up to their idealism. I'm not saying it isn't sad but it's been obvious for awhile to anyone that actually talked to people outside tech circles that Firefox is not something the mainstream cares about. It's far more practical to shift focus to areas where gaining a profitable foothold has real potential.
Well, its sort of true. Open source doesn't pay the bills and their projects Firefox and Rust are used for free and doesn't help them generate revenue other than getting a contract with a trillion dollar company against your privacy.
They have to stand on their own if they want to be true to their mission rather than taking in a privacy abusers money, or just admit it and drop that mission statement.
If Mozilla focused on better technology, that would not solve its money problem. It currently depends on other companies (Google search, Pocket) to survive. This post does not make any suggestions how to make Mozilla profitable.
Indeed, Mozilla provides utilities, services and advocacy that provide value to many people and companies. We take that for granted somehow, and don't reward their efforts. We want everything for free and better and faster and with no ads.
I wish France or the EU provided funding for Mozilla to reduce the internet dominance of Google.
I be'd willing to pay for Pocket again if the project didn't seem on life support.
One of my favorite features of Readablilty was the browser search integration -- when I searched from the browser bar it would include results I'd saved in Readability.
This article has no substance, and the tweets it links to explicitly contradict it's core message. Maybe the author isn't aware of the difference between Servo and Gecko?
This is irrelevant to the discussion, the point being that Mozilla's financial position as a company needs to be discussed if it has any chance of surviving.
This seems like a knock on effect from the recent layoffs.
I wonder if they made Firefox Enterprise paid would have been a better option.
EDIT: Downvoters not accepting reality obviously...
Mozilla better switches to a management that understands building experiments to move the company forward based on data / evidence. Why not establish an experiment based on the the concepts of Brave? Why not evaluating if people have money to get advanced dev tools (e.g. I'd buy session replay tools).
Killing of teams related to Firefox will definitely hurt their reach, especially in enterprises.
What kills me is that I was unaware of just how badly Mozilla was struggling. As an avid Firefox user, I would have paid a monthly subscription to help keep the Mozilla dream and values alive. A world with just Google/Chrome is too depressing.
> What kills me is that I was unaware of just how badly Mozilla was struggling.
It's been fairly evident these last 5 years (since Brendan Eich was forced out and Baker entered?) that Mozilla has been growing really fat on Google money.
They have (or have had) initiatives for pretty much everything not the core product: social justice initiatives, “diversity” campaigns, internet newsletters, AI (sic), router-firmware, online services (startup competitors), in-browser ads and what not.
What has been most common for most of these initiatives (besides a complete lack of direction) is that many of them haven't made sense from an engineering point of view, and many have been wildly at odds with the community Mozilla has managed to build around Firefox. Many (most?) of them seemed either fluffy on technical details/merit, or just completely political, some even divisively so. (Not to mention Brendan Eich was kicked out for purely political reasons in a SJW witch-hunt)
In short, for the last half decade, it seems Mozilla has put politics first and engineering second.
For a political player that might make sense. For a software-company, not so much. So what is Mozilla? To me, it's the browser-company. For Mozilla itself... It seem they have another idea? It's getting increasingly unclear and vague.
While having "infinite" Google-funding, that sort of lack of focus wasn't that big a problem, since they could afford it.
But now with the very near and real threat of that funding going away, there's a lot of fat to cut in order to maintain within budget.
The Mozilla I love and know (and I don't say that about many companies!) would swiftly cut its political arm, and all the other dead-end projects, and focus on its core products:
The open-source browser and possibly email client too. And make sure they have a good mobile-story to tell, because that's where the users are heading.
The new Mozilla seems to cut all that and keep the pointless political activism, and dead-end technological adventures without any clear technological story about how they're supposed to make sense.
For me it sounds like a completely managerial failure, from end to end.
> Not to mention Brendan Eich was kicked out for purely political reasons in a SJW witch-hunt
It’s hardly an “SJW witch-hunt” when your boss is donating thousands of dollars for the explicit purpose of ensuring you don’t have the same rights as other people.
That action seems very much at odds with being an effective leader. You must take care of your team.
One feature of totalitarism is suppression of dissenting political views. Somehow modern democracy (de)evolved from "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" to current cancel culture.
This has nothing to do with cancel culture, and everything to do with being a bad leader.
> Somehow modern democracy (de)evolved from "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" to current cancel culture.
Brendan has a right to express his opinion. Mozilla has a right to fire him for it. There's nothing totalitarian here.
They only did so after the SJW lynch-mob showed up on twitter and demanded him fired.
Personally I'm not OK with rule by lynch-mob, and I hope you see how allowing such a culture to take hold may one day backfire, also on the things you hold dear.
Thing is, if people really feel like "I can't support this company while X is there" are they just supposed to be quiet?
Cancel culture is probably toxic to public discussion. But what is the alternative if people want to vote with their feet? If people want to make choices based on their morals, that seems awesome to me.
It's only if people are bluffing things into being canceled that I see an issue here.
> Thing is, if people really feel like "I can't support this company while X is there" are they just supposed to be quiet?
This! isn't that the whole point of capitalism? Love it or hate it, dollars = votes. Withholding it via firing or boycotting it's the same deal. The market decides what 'stands' and doesn't, what people can get away with and what they can't.
At one point you could get away with refusing service to black people. Pressure from the markets and community changed that. Every change we've gotten is because someone fought back some way.
You can't want unfettered capitalism (looking at the right/libertarians), and then cry when capitalist companies bow to pressure from the masses online and cancel shit.
Privatize them, go dictator/socialist then the state/constitutions can say how a business is ran, and they maybe censorship is banned, or maybe they only censor whatever the state wants to censor...as long as there's 'at will employment' and businesses are free to censor content on their platforms, (which I approve of, personally), nobody should be able to complain about being silenced.
Go start a facebook competitor, or your own company and compete (ironically that's what he did with Brave browser).
I am not talking about refusing service. I am talking about refusing being a customer. Big difference.
We can force people to provide service to customers. We can't force customers to demand service from certain vendors. Especially with culture (comedians, pundits, writers).
Yeah. "I disapprove of what you say, so your employer must fire you and we'll destroy your career", so people know to keep their mouth shut about their views. Nothing totalitarian here, right.
If you had an employee sitting outside your office literally just saying all day to anyone walking by, my boss is a "effing <insert-racist-or-homophobic-slur>" would you allow them to continue working there? If not, are you not totalitarian?
If Brendan Eich didn't want to be fired from Mozilla, he wouldn't donate towards the attacks on human fucking rights. Homophobia is unacceptable, and combatting it is not totalitarianism, especially because every single totalitarian country out there was and still is homophobic. Period.
Interesting. The whole thread proves to me the exact opposite. That free speech is very alive since nothing here has been censored yet. The only way I can explain our disparate perceptions is that we're talking about entirely different things.
By "free speech" I mean not being arrested or physically harmed for saying something.
Is it possible that by "free speech" you in contrast mean being entitled to be invited, keeping your job, and/or remaining uncontradicted?
Well, we’re still neither arrested nor physically harmed, aren’t we? So our speech is still free. Ycombinator is not obliged to give our discussion a visible platform.
No. That's not what free speech is. Free speech is being able to speak your mind without restriction. There is no such thing as free speech in the US, either culturally or legally. This is not to be confused with the 1st amendment which does not guarantee "free speech", but rather guarantees political speech against the government.
You should read A History of the Freedom of Thought by JB Bury[0].
If we let intolerant people thrive, we will build a system where intolerance thrives while tolerant people, as well as the people the intolerance is directed towards, will be dealt with in a totalitarian way. "Paradox of tolerance" is a fundamentally liberal idea coined by Karl Popper, and it is fundamental to a free society, as the Soviet and Nazi regimes have shown by essentially targeting the same people under different coats of paint.
I have heard this "Paradox of tolerance" mantra many times. And in my opinion it is the doorway to a totalitarian society, which is perfectly demonstrated to us by cancel culture excesses. It is basically a terrorist tactic, scaring people into making them keep their mouths shut.
If you claim to be 'tolerant', but do not tolerate those who aren't, you are not really tolerant. Period. What a truly tolerant person should do with those who aren't, is to find ways to persuade them to change their ways. It is not impossible. Civil rights movements in 1960s or suffrage movement achieved success not by scaring 'white racists' or 'male supremacists' into submission, but by persuading a sufficient number of them that segregation or discrimination based on sex is bad.
So, you should tolerate Nazi's, even if they are jumping at the bit to kill and murder jews and bring back gas chambers? What if somebody runs on that very platform issue for congress -- legalizing the murdering of jews? would that be okay? should we tolerate it? I mean ... if it's legal...it's a perfectly good view point (it is NOT ...devils advocate).
Tolerating people being themselves and living their own lives independent of you VS tolerating specific hate speech and allowing it to thrive online are TWO totally different things. There is no comparison betwixt the two.
> What if somebody runs on that very platform issue for congress -- legalizing the murdering of jews?
There's nothing illegal about wanting to change the law to make something which currently illegal into something legal. All major changes in society the last century has happened by doing so. Think about cannabis-legalization if you need a slightly less morbid, but more recent example.
If I understand your point of view correctly (and I hope I don't), by your logic it should be illegal to argue legalization of anything which is currently criminalized. That would IMO be conflating legality with morality, a common error, especially among the conservatives.
Obviously anyone should be allowed to argue that there are reasons for why killing jews (or Canadians, or white people, whatever) should be legal. And we should, as a mature society, be there and be prepared to tell them why they are wrong.
Well, you found the flaw in their logic and by focussing on that, you kind of missed their point. Replace "legal" with "morally allowed“. Would you then tolerate the legalization of killing jews?
I 100% agree that we as a mature society, should be there and be prepared to tell them why they are wrong. But I think you are overlooking the possibility that they shrug and start killing. We should be prepared for that too.
Moral allowances change with times rather dramatically, and a very relative, so I wouldn't rely on them too much. For example, a few centuries ago it was perfectly normal in Europe to marry 13 year old girls.
If it comes to being confronted with the question whether legalizing genocide is tolerable, you claim moral beliefs are so relative that you would not rely on them too much.
If it comes to judging „what a truly tolerant person should do“ you make an absolute normative, hence moral claim.
This strikes me as rather inconsistent and therefore unconvincing.
I am a product of our time and morals of late 20th century. Of course for me, a person born in this age, the idea of genocide looks bad. But if I was born in Russia in 14th century, I'd probably be very fine with the idea a complete and full extermination of every single mongol: men, women, children, all of them. And for a person born in 25th century the idea of genocide might look fine again. Moral is too relative and comes from education and surrounding society, not from some universal rule of what's good and what's bad.
On being 'confronted' with the question about legalizing genocide. Well, if there ARE people with such ideas, it's not like making the ideas illegal will stop such people from having them. So open discussion about it and democratic voting will have just 2 outcomes: nazis will be either reduced to nothing and their political base will dissolve, or they'll get to power and a genocide will happen. However, I believe that a society that will openly vote for genocide is beyond saving, whether you criminalize some ideas or not.
When you are not allowed to hold an opinion because it goes against the current SJW-held one-true-way and fired from a job you are otherwise excelling at (much more so than Baker does now), I would call that a SJW-witchhunt.
You are free to hold your opinion though. That's a value I hold, unlike the SJW-crowd.
Anyhow, my to not distract too much from the point at hand, my claim was that Mozilla had been increasingly politicized, and Eich's firing was a clearly in line with that.
Sexism is very clearly an issue in tech, and this particular thing was one of the manifestations of sexism in tech. I can't blame the people reacting to this when they face this kind of culture pretty much every day.
If cost-cutting is the ostensible goal then I presume there have been layoffs in non-engineering divisions too? Why are we not hearing anything on Twitter about that?
This makes no sense. Its free product, that doesn't mean it gets made for free. And same holds true for any other browser or any other open source project.
Reading the public docs shows Google contributes 90+% of Mozilla's revenue, basically it has been keeping Mozilla alive so that it can avoid antitrust allegations. But if you look at the tweets and stuff from their blog post, mostly they have killed off their R&D, which is actually where all the interesting stuff from the last few years has come; wasm, rust, servo, vr & ar. Without that stuff and since Google has squeezed the money pipeline, they're reduced to BS areas which are already super competitive like vpns. What next, antivirus? Fn goodluck with that. Mitchell Baker should have been put out to pasture long ago and the new exec ranks look stacked with diversity hires. Inclined to agree with OP.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadI hope this will all resolve in a sensible way. But this could be Mozilla's equivalent of Nokia killing both Symbian and Maemo. If so in a few years the ashes will be sold and, we have to hope, a new phoenix will rise.
Typing this from Firefox on Android, have been following and using Firefox since it was called Phoenix, and Netscape before that since 1.0.
They’re pivoting, or perhaps they are simply not profitable enough to keep them on.
We don’t know what’s going on in their strategy room. It could very well be a good business move, or a terrible one. We don’t have all the information.
I think this is the killer for Mozilla. Most people knew about Mozilla because of Firefox. Most non-tech people knew about Firefox because their tech friends recommended it to them. Now, I think that recommending Firefox to your non-tech friends is a disservice to them.
Despite what people say their priorities are, what their priorities are become evident when they are forced to make cuts. What gets cut is not the priority no matter how loudly they proclaim it. What remains is the priority no matter how much they may say it is not. Firefox, Servo, Security these all got the axe. They are not the priority at Mozilla.
This is not true. Do not spread FUD.
They have to stand on their own if they want to be true to their mission rather than taking in a privacy abusers money, or just admit it and drop that mission statement.
Indeed, Mozilla provides utilities, services and advocacy that provide value to many people and companies. We take that for granted somehow, and don't reward their efforts. We want everything for free and better and faster and with no ads.
I wish France or the EU provided funding for Mozilla to reduce the internet dominance of Google.
One of my favorite features of Readablilty was the browser search integration -- when I searched from the browser bar it would include results I'd saved in Readability.
https://twitter.com/gcpascutto/status/1293519587967983616
> Fwiw, afaict, almost all Gecko / platform devs are unaffected (I'm pretty relieved about that, I started my day with a totally different feeling).
> These layoffs are still devastating personally, but if anything, Mozilla is not ditching Gecko.
and
> To combat some FUD: my Security and Hardening team working on Firefox also appears to have survived.
> I conclude that a secure Gecko is still considered key to achieving Mozilla's goals.
> I'm happy to still be here. We have key improvements in the pipeline that I want to ship.
I wonder if they made Firefox Enterprise paid would have been a better option.
EDIT: Downvoters not accepting reality obviously...
Killing of teams related to Firefox will definitely hurt their reach, especially in enterprises.
It's been fairly evident these last 5 years (since Brendan Eich was forced out and Baker entered?) that Mozilla has been growing really fat on Google money.
They have (or have had) initiatives for pretty much everything not the core product: social justice initiatives, “diversity” campaigns, internet newsletters, AI (sic), router-firmware, online services (startup competitors), in-browser ads and what not.
What has been most common for most of these initiatives (besides a complete lack of direction) is that many of them haven't made sense from an engineering point of view, and many have been wildly at odds with the community Mozilla has managed to build around Firefox. Many (most?) of them seemed either fluffy on technical details/merit, or just completely political, some even divisively so. (Not to mention Brendan Eich was kicked out for purely political reasons in a SJW witch-hunt)
In short, for the last half decade, it seems Mozilla has put politics first and engineering second.
For a political player that might make sense. For a software-company, not so much. So what is Mozilla? To me, it's the browser-company. For Mozilla itself... It seem they have another idea? It's getting increasingly unclear and vague.
While having "infinite" Google-funding, that sort of lack of focus wasn't that big a problem, since they could afford it.
But now with the very near and real threat of that funding going away, there's a lot of fat to cut in order to maintain within budget.
The Mozilla I love and know (and I don't say that about many companies!) would swiftly cut its political arm, and all the other dead-end projects, and focus on its core products:
The open-source browser and possibly email client too. And make sure they have a good mobile-story to tell, because that's where the users are heading.
The new Mozilla seems to cut all that and keep the pointless political activism, and dead-end technological adventures without any clear technological story about how they're supposed to make sense.
For me it sounds like a completely managerial failure, from end to end.
It’s hardly an “SJW witch-hunt” when your boss is donating thousands of dollars for the explicit purpose of ensuring you don’t have the same rights as other people.
That action seems very much at odds with being an effective leader. You must take care of your team.
> Somehow modern democracy (de)evolved from "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" to current cancel culture.
Brendan has a right to express his opinion. Mozilla has a right to fire him for it. There's nothing totalitarian here.
Personally I'm not OK with rule by lynch-mob, and I hope you see how allowing such a culture to take hold may one day backfire, also on the things you hold dear.
Cancel culture is probably toxic to public discussion. But what is the alternative if people want to vote with their feet? If people want to make choices based on their morals, that seems awesome to me.
It's only if people are bluffing things into being canceled that I see an issue here.
At one point you could get away with refusing service to black people. Pressure from the markets and community changed that. Every change we've gotten is because someone fought back some way.
You can't want unfettered capitalism (looking at the right/libertarians), and then cry when capitalist companies bow to pressure from the masses online and cancel shit.
Privatize them, go dictator/socialist then the state/constitutions can say how a business is ran, and they maybe censorship is banned, or maybe they only censor whatever the state wants to censor...as long as there's 'at will employment' and businesses are free to censor content on their platforms, (which I approve of, personally), nobody should be able to complain about being silenced.
Go start a facebook competitor, or your own company and compete (ironically that's what he did with Brave browser).
We can force people to provide service to customers. We can't force customers to demand service from certain vendors. Especially with culture (comedians, pundits, writers).
<x> is unacceptable is a typical totalitarian pattern. In free societies all views deserve a place, even those that you personally don't like.
By "free speech" I mean not being arrested or physically harmed for saying something.
Is it possible that by "free speech" you in contrast mean being entitled to be invited, keeping your job, and/or remaining uncontradicted?
Go out in public and read random passages from the bible. See how long you go before being assaulted and/or arrested.
Around the same time the San Fransisco morning/lunch shift kicked in?
You’re only allowed to have such “controversial” discussions here in European time-zones it seems ;)
Here’s the obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1357/
No. That's not what free speech is. Free speech is being able to speak your mind without restriction. There is no such thing as free speech in the US, either culturally or legally. This is not to be confused with the 1st amendment which does not guarantee "free speech", but rather guarantees political speech against the government.
You should read A History of the Freedom of Thought by JB Bury[0].
[0]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10684/10684-h/10684-h.htm#:~....
If you claim to be 'tolerant', but do not tolerate those who aren't, you are not really tolerant. Period. What a truly tolerant person should do with those who aren't, is to find ways to persuade them to change their ways. It is not impossible. Civil rights movements in 1960s or suffrage movement achieved success not by scaring 'white racists' or 'male supremacists' into submission, but by persuading a sufficient number of them that segregation or discrimination based on sex is bad.
See the paradox kicking in?
No paradox.
Tolerating people being themselves and living their own lives independent of you VS tolerating specific hate speech and allowing it to thrive online are TWO totally different things. There is no comparison betwixt the two.
> What if somebody runs on that very platform issue for congress -- legalizing the murdering of jews?
There's nothing illegal about wanting to change the law to make something which currently illegal into something legal. All major changes in society the last century has happened by doing so. Think about cannabis-legalization if you need a slightly less morbid, but more recent example.
If I understand your point of view correctly (and I hope I don't), by your logic it should be illegal to argue legalization of anything which is currently criminalized. That would IMO be conflating legality with morality, a common error, especially among the conservatives.
Obviously anyone should be allowed to argue that there are reasons for why killing jews (or Canadians, or white people, whatever) should be legal. And we should, as a mature society, be there and be prepared to tell them why they are wrong.
I 100% agree that we as a mature society, should be there and be prepared to tell them why they are wrong. But I think you are overlooking the possibility that they shrug and start killing. We should be prepared for that too.
If it comes to judging „what a truly tolerant person should do“ you make an absolute normative, hence moral claim.
This strikes me as rather inconsistent and therefore unconvincing.
On being 'confronted' with the question about legalizing genocide. Well, if there ARE people with such ideas, it's not like making the ideas illegal will stop such people from having them. So open discussion about it and democratic voting will have just 2 outcomes: nazis will be either reduced to nothing and their political base will dissolve, or they'll get to power and a genocide will happen. However, I believe that a society that will openly vote for genocide is beyond saving, whether you criminalize some ideas or not.
You are free to hold your opinion though. That's a value I hold, unlike the SJW-crowd.
Anyhow, my to not distract too much from the point at hand, my claim was that Mozilla had been increasingly politicized, and Eich's firing was a clearly in line with that.
Besides, your point is complete bollocks bc Google also funds said initiatives a lot.
The most vocal and extreme left how have nothing to do but gather internet points will do anything to signal their virtue.
For example, remember the head of team that landed probe on a comet.
https://time.com/3589392/comet-shirt-storm/
He was attack for a shirt that his wife got him.
Do you considered that a justified attack on him?
In tech and almost every other aspect of life.
> and this particular thing was one of the manifestations of sexism in tech
How? He wore a shirt his wife bought him. He was never accused by his coworkers of anything.
> I can't blame the people reacting to this when they face this kind of culture
I can blame them. That was unjust character assassination. It was objectively wrong and UNjust that's the opposite of the second letter in sjw.
And that's the core issue with this thinking. I am right even when I am wrong as long as I fell like i am fighting against evil.
Good bye, Mozilla Firefox, looking forward to the forks a few years down the line.
Not mining user data.
Mozilla might be changing, but it's not dead:
Mozilla Extends its Google Search Deal - http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ksxPwXG1UyY/...