Mozilla Laying Off Around A Quarter Of Their Employees

[hotaru]

Do you have enough donations to cover their current work? I don't see any guarantee that can function so far.

it'd be better than what they're doing now, since we know for sure that that is not functioning.

[starshipeleven]

dissolve Mozilla Corporation, and develop the browser (and not any of that Pocket or VPN shit) as a real non-profit organization

That would slow down development significantly, killing even more of what is left of Firefox's marketshare.

Facts of life: opensource does not scale well without some serious corporate sponsor.

[starshipeleven]

it'd be better than what they're doing now, since we know for sure that that is not functioning.

Change isn't always better.

Change can also be much worse than staying the course.

[Aeder]

So, we are holding our breath waiting for fixes on their Firefox Android browser that they broke with the 'big change' 2 months ago.

The big change fixed my grievances (it used to render the entire phone unresponsive if you ever opened a video on twitter or a few other sites, because it would spam the system with media notfications until it could no longer keep up) so I don't particularly mind that it now crashes gracefully every now and then, when I consider the massive improvement in both perfomance and the vast amount of fixed bugs.

[horizonbrave]

Thanks god they still focus on pocket!
For a moment I worried.

Now more seriously:
if the CEO really earns that money wouldn't be more convenient to move the head office to a place like India (semi third world country? with an high population of very good developers?)
With that amount of money 500 new employee could be hired and still a decent pay for the new wannabe non-amerikan CEO (sorry but no international flights allowance perhaps).
Should I give a ring to their financial/executive office now to sort it out?

[M@GOid]

It's easy to say, but browsers don't make money. How are you proposing them to be sustainable?

Well, for starters, they can stop paying their CEO 2,5 million a year, as someone posted above.

And browsers DO make money, look at Opera for example. The main source is making someone's search engine the default on the installation. Firefox alone gets over 100 million annually from Google doing that. Another way is selling space on the default bookmark entries. And obviously, you can sell user da... I'm sorry, "telemetry" to third parties.

Is not difficult to see that, Mozilla's money problem is management related. Is one of two things: or their board of directors are sucking their finances dry, or they are grossly incompetent on their jobs. Excuses saying otherwise may fly out off their asses, but only the naive will believe in it.

[Jabberwocky]

I don't understand this hate towards Mozilla. Having your skeletons aired is better than having them hidden, because then you likely have a lot more as you got good at hiding your skeletons.

I'm a fan of Mozilla since 2003, still am. Mozilla has/had skeletons hidden. The studies that they ran were auto-enabled without opt-out function. Only after they were exposed did they provide an opt-out feature. That said, they still are likely the most transparent (IMO).

True, their browser isn't the fastest at everything, but the reason it's losing marketshare isn't performance, it's because chrome installs itself with so many other software. It's practically pre-installed on every android/windows device, so people already have it.

I have the same speculation as you. There are other reasons too for example popularity of nodejs and electron/C.E.F. (used by VS Code, SteamGameOverlay, Slack, Discord, Ionic Framework, and many others). People like to use what they develop for and advocate based on that, in some cases they will support it better too.

Furthermore, Google has proven themselves to be terrible custodians of your privacy, and they actively block efforts to make tracking more difficult.
You really have to be thankful that Firefox is so competitive, as it forces standards to be more open. You really gotta thank them for that, else we would have been living in binary blobbed NaCl or ActiveX applications that has more access to your system due to obscurity.

+1 They have been driving this for many years, hopefully this will continue for a long time. Around Firefox V2 and V3 they were the heroes, I'll never forget that.

Something people forget is that very very few people use vscode-oss/vscodium, same goes for chromium. Majority of people use proprietary Chrome. In the grand scheme it's Firefox (FOSS) vs Chrome (Proprietary). If a government website doesn't work in Firefox you still stand a chance to persuade them to fix it. If you say you're using chromium they will just ignore you and say it's working in Chrome. People will complain if Mozilla goes away, but for now they are just complaining about Mozilla...

[polarathene]

I agree, except that I have to use Firefox to manage my router because it allows me to view websites with an invalid certificate, unlike Chrome/Chromium.

There's a chrome flag to allow invalid certs, but I think it's only for localhost. To support elsewhere, I think you need to add the cert to your system as trusted, curl docs describe how to do that, but I'd probably just use Firefox at that point for such too.

[ThoreauHD]

Guess they shoulda kept that AntiFa donation.

[ed31337]

I don't have much to say about Mozilla, but let me tell you, Google's stewardship of Chromium sucks ass. The source code is bloated beyond belief, yet Google continues taking away features (http, ftp, etc)... What in the world is going on inside there to keep making the thing bigger and bigger while dropping features left and right?

Qt uses Chromium code for their Qt Web Engine component. I spent a month making my own web browser using said pieces, optimized for reducing my cell phone's hot spot data consumption by restricting video and image downloads plus ad blocking. My browser had special buttons for letting the user selectively load individual images, while permanently caching and displaying previously downloaded images to improve the visual appearance while minimizing data consumption. It made viewing your frequently visited websites load super fast, having nearly as much (desired) imagery as a normal browser, but without anywhere near the amount of bandwidth usage.

Unfortunately, Google continued working on Chromium and somehow broke the abiliity to redirect image loads from https to my local perm-cache. A month of my time wasted, because Google decided it's "insecure" to load images from localhost (more like, it thwarts Google's ability to force feed advert banners)... ARGH!

Web Engine takes all night to compile on my Raspberry Pi 4 and it often crashes due to Google's use of "jumbo" source files that somehow makes the compiler use TONS of memory. Plus that horrible "ninja" make replacement has no respect for overloading the system with too many processes running in parallel. Google doesn't document how their internal disk cache operates and they seem to be purposely working to make everything difficult. It's "open source," but hardly a shining example of open source.

A browser shouldn't have to be this freaking complicated. Both Google and Mozilla are writing their own compilers and build tools to support their web browsers. WTF?!