cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/46655413
The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”
Gee, I can’t imagine why they chose to drop this bomb today.
It’s like they wanted it to be drowned in other news.
It’s Mozilla. No one is going to see this anyway.
I’m seeing it
Why, what else happened today?
Tap for spoiler
/s
I brought it up with my family, my tech friends and coworkers and half the them just blankly stared at like I didn’t know what was happening. Both are important, one more than the other though.
God bean counters ruin everything good related to tech
wouldn’t it be nice if the profit motive wasn’t the only driving force of the economy?
I suspect their financial position has changed. Perhaps Google’s being found as a monopoly has made them decide not to help fund Mozilla’s efforts as substantially.
Ashley Boyd lead the advocacy team, here’s the kind of stuff they were doing:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-welcomes-ashley-boyd-vp-of-advocacy/
In fall of 2016, Mozilla fought for common-sense copyright reform in the EU, creating public education media that engaged over one million citizens and sending hundreds of rebellious selfies to EU Parliament. Earlier in 2016, Mozilla launched a public education campaign around encryption and emerged as a staunch ally of Apple in the company’s clash with the FBI. Mozilla has also fought for mass surveillance reform, net neutrality and data retention reform.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/05/mozilla-foundation-lays-off-30-staff-drops-advocacy-division/
“The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward,” read the statement shared with TechCrunch.
Reading between the lines, I’d keep an eye on them collecting your data and consider one of the privacy-focused forks.
Hundreds of selfies? Let’s go ahead and strike that vein bullshit from the record.
consider one of the privacy-focused forks
The Foundation is not linked to Firefox.
If by not linked you mean wholly owned by…
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/organizations/
The Mozilla Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, works with the community to develop software that advances Mozilla’s principles. This includes the Firefox browser, which is well recognized as a market leader in security, privacy and language localization. These features make the Internet safer and more accessible.
Getting rid of the advocacy part. That’s…not good.
So what does that mean in layman’s terms? They’re not going to have as much of a voice to sway heads about things like open internet, the flaws of copyright, the problems with privacy and surveillance.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the US Department of Justice is going to succeed in their antitrust efforts against Google. Currently, Mozilla gets something like 85% of their funding from Google for being the default search engine in Firefox. That may be deemed anticompetitive behavior by a judge, at which point Mozilla will be left with very little funding compared to their current situation.
I’d bet these actions are in anticipation of that happening.
Yeah, and although it will be painful for Mozilla in the short term - it would be a good outcome. It was always bad that Mozilla’s main source of funding was from their most powerful competitor. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. And obvious way to skew decision making. … But that money is just so addictive.
There will be some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms if the money gets taken away, but everyone will be healthier in the long run… unless the overpaid CEO continues to suck in all the remaining money and leaves nothing for the people actually doing the work. That would be bad. In that case, if the corporate structure chokes the company to death, I suppose we’d be hoping for Ladybird, or something like it to take Firefox’s place.
Their question is: how much would you pay for not using a Chromium based browser?
People switching to the browser and zapping all ads, demanding open source and vitriol for any kind of monetization. How can they survive? They would have to become a subsidized utility, which not even the Internet as a whole has achieved.
I get not wanting to use a google, microsoft or crypto laden browser, but I would be willing to use a well supported browser that used chromium as the page rendering engine. It seems to be extremely difficult to get another engine to be competitive in the marketplace. Maybe the resources would be better spent putting the chromium engine inside a different container. I’m sure there would be drawbacks, but I think there would be compatibility benefits too.
used chromium as the page rendering engine.
I believe WebKit is Chromium’s rendering engine, as is Gecko for Firefox.
Opera used to have their own but now they’re just rebranded Chromium.
There was a poll a while back on mastodon and the majority answered they’d be ok with 5$/year to support Firefox.
The kind of people you find on Mastodon following Firefox news are not the same as the average person. They are a bubble.
A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.
A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.
…people or dollars? ‘Cos i don’t think “hundreds of millions” of people are chippin’ in, it’s Google that’s financing “hundreds of millions” of dollars…
But yeah, that target audience is a bubble, normies don’t care.
Dollars.
Google is giving hundreds of millions because they fear regulators getting involved.
A handful of people who follow Mozilla on Mastodon saying they’re willing to pay up to a meagre $5 per year won’t do anything.
I wouldn’t mind paying money for a good browser. I paid for Opera back in the day, and browsers are significantly more complex (and cost several orders of magnitude more to develop) now compared to back then.
WTF. They had $1b banked a few days ago. This is a bit reactionary perhaps?
well you see. all the cool kids are laying off staff and Mozilla wants to hang out at their pool next summer.
They’re likely preparing for their funding from Google to be cut. Having a lot of money in the bank doesn’t matter if your income is lower than expenses, since you’ll run out of money eventually.
Expecting millions to be cut is still extreme when you have a fucking billion in the bank.
They get around $500 million per year from Google, so $1 billion is just two years worth of that. 86% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from that Google deal.
On mobile, search Google for “election” and then try to zoom in on any state.
Did the CEO take a pay cut?
does a bear shit in your mouth?
Okay I’ll learn how to make better coffee
Damn bro, you didn’t have to roast yourself that hard
Come on over, I’ll put on a pot of
bear shitcoffee and see if you disagreeRoast the bean counters instead.
Depends… will it generate shareholder value?
Only if it wants too
Are you going to tell him “no?”
Only if he stops.
CEO first please. He’s not worth it
That’ll certainly make it easier to pay the CEO.
Why the heck did Mozilla need 120 employees for anyway? I hate that Firefox is updated so often because I always get Firefox Update Fatigue. I hope that fewer employees means fewer Firefox updates.
Just turn the updates off. Might want to remove the seatbelts from your car too, so annoying having to put them on and take them off every time you need to drive somewhere.
Doesn’t work. Firefox keeps nagging me to update every freaking time I open the browser. Now if they let me turn the nagging off it wouldn’t be so bad.
I want an update once per quarter, not once per week. Only more often than that if there is a critical security fix.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/desktop-esr/
Here you go brother. Hope this helps.
How does that help with unwanted update nagging?
You will get one update per year, and “only more often that that if there is a critical security fix”.
There’s no winning. Some people use the regular version and complain about the updates, while others use the ESR release and complain that sites that use cutting-edge features don’t work properly.
The solution to updates is to use Linux, since then it’ll update through your distro’s package manager along with your other software.
Chrome does this just fine on windows. It just updates in the background so the only thing you need to do is (re)open chrome and it’s done. Firefox doesn’t, and waits until you try to launch it to update. On my laptop where I use FF infrequently makes it’s startup time about 30 seconds basically every time I open it.
Well this is a unique take. But don’t worry, there’s a Firefox for you, too. Try the ESR, or Extended Support Release, it
receives major updates on average every 52 weeks with minor updates such as crash fixes, security fixes and policy updates as needed, but at least every four weeks.
lol what?
This is not even about Firefox, you griefer.
I really wish Mozilla the best but if it were to fail I sure hope Ladybird will be stable by then.
Wait they still had employees?
Everytime I see comments regarding Mozilla’'s financials,I have the same effing question: How does a company like brave or opera maintain their browser ?? AFAIK both don’t have the level of community backing that Mozilla does nor do they have any (again AFAIK) agreement with a company like google for default search engine placement
Brave just tries to scam their users for money.
Like when they added “donate to the content creator” links on YouTube and such, then didn’t actually give the money to the content creators.
BTW, about Opera - the newest events with OpenAI and other stuff and Winamp devs not being prosecuted for GPL violations all lead me to one thought.
Are leaked Presto sources really-really illegal to use?
They use chromium.
Firefox does not.
The grand majority of software engineering effort goes into the browser development that they never have to work on for the most part.
Alongside what the other guy said, Opera definitely does have search engine deals, idk about brave since they launched their own. But brave has their own private advertising system
Brave and Opera are both forks of Chromium that incorporate upstream changes. Firefox is an entire browser.
Fair enough. Didn’t think that maintaining the engine is what Mozilla spends majority of it’s Firefox budget on
The grand majority of Mozilla’s spending is for engineers.
those are just rebranded chrome(ium). all browsers except firefox and safari are rebranded chromium or firefox. edit: there are some other projects but none are mature.
Apple also maintains their own browser engine, but that’s Apple.
yes, safari is apple.
Ah, I guess I read over the first bit to where you mentioned the rebrands, which didn’t include Safari.
To still add some useful information: all browsers on iOS are rebranded Safari, because Apple only permits their own browser engine.
(The EU ruling may change this, however)
All of my favorite browsers are forks of Firefox. Lately it’s been Zen browser. Watching Firefox smoulder and collapse over the years has been truly painful and makes me fear a chromium future in hell.
Same. In the late 2000s or so my father knew ot so much about computers so some family friend set it up and he installed Firefox. I ve been using Firefox my whole life since. I tried switching to ungoogled chromeium, Brave and cromite on mobile but just can’t. Like Firefox and its forks are in my muscle memory. It’s over. I won’t be able to use the internet anymore. Bye guys 👋
We are truly living in dark times.
