Mozilla Laying Off Around A Quarter Of Their Employees

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Laying Off Around A Quarter Of Their Employees

Mozilla today announced they are laying off around 250 of their employees with Mozilla Corporation and closing up their Taipei, Taiwan operations...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mozilla-Laying-Off-250

[Alexmitter]

Mozilla needs to switch from a company that desperately tries to make money from a web browser and some extras to a organization that focuses on making a good browser and only that. No weird experiments or marketing.

When they are at it, they could also scrap that toxic dictation of what its members and contributors are allowed to think and say in their private time. Mozilla is one of the worst offenders in restricting freedom of speech and opinion.

[perpetually high]

Subbing in for tildearrow today who is on vacation.

typos:

quarter of their pad staff.

and and their new VPN offering.

[Danny3]

This is awful and very sad!
But FFS, they should've listened to their users when they complained about the slow performance compared to Chromium, about less good support for HTML5, compared to Chromium, about wasting resources in the wrong directions like VR, which I think represents only 0.0001% of their users.
Same with Web Assembly, they wasted so many resources for something that will be broken by design since many of us will block it anyway because of security reasons.

They lost too much marketshare, all because they don't listen to users that are screaming here and everywhere else for the real important things to fix.
I still don't know how could they have not understood that the performance is a top priority issue.
Not everybody has a high-end computer where the differences in speed between Firefox and Chromium based browsers are not really visible.
A lot of people have older computers, older operating systems, or bloated operating systems that make the computers slow anyway and the differences between Firefox and the others are not so subtle anymore.

I don't know, but Mozilla looked to me like Canonical all these past years.

Users complaining on deaf years.

At least they managed to bring video hardware decoding on Linux, which is very nice!

[Spooktra]

Am I the only one shocked to learn that they actually have any employees, let alone about 1000? I truly believed it was a 1 or 2 man operation at this point.

[Alexmitter]

At least they managed to bring video hardware decoding on Linux, which is very nice!

That effort came from a Redhat guy.

[nazar-pc]

Same with Web Assembly, they wasted so many resources for something that will be broken by design since many of us will block it anyway because of security reasons.

WebAssembly is even more restricted that regular JS, which is sandboxed. Doesn't make any sense to block it whatsoever.
If you disable random browser features without necessarily knowing what they are and what they do, that doesn't yet mean those features are broken by design.

[LinAGKar]

they should've listened to their users when they complained about the slow performance compared to Chromium

Same with Web Assembly, they wasted so many resources for something that will be broken by design since many of us will block it anyway because of security reasons.

That's there to increase performance. Otherwise, sites would use NaCl instead.

At least they managed to bring video hardware decoding on Linux, which is very nice!

They didn't. Red Hat did.

[Danny3]

That effort came from a Redhat guy.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that, but they still should get some credit for having the browser as open source, similar to AMD having the driver open and Valve contributing.

[ssokolow]

WebAssembly is even more restricted that regular JS, which is sandboxed. Doesn't make any sense to block it whatsoever.
If you disable random browser features without necessarily knowing what they are and what they do, that doesn't yet mean those features are broken by design.

Yeah. WebAssembly can't even access the DOM yet, because working with GCed types is still on the drawing board. They just got the ability to have JavaScript pass in opaque handles to GCed types so you can do things like having your WASM store and return references to things like JavaScript callbacks.