Mozilla lays off 70

> politics (e. g. “safe-sync”)

I’m continually impressed by what people are willing to label “politics”. And by how badly people must hate whatever they understand “politics” to be.

well, it's not directly related to browser/app development (which is still the purpose of the non-profit Mozilla foundation???), but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO? coming from traditional dead-tree press in germany... I also shuddered when I saw right under layoff-press that the marketing VP comes straight out of facebook. Instead of building a beacon of a non-commercial, individual and free web, it seems that people at Mozilla are more concerned with having just another carreer but with a better image up front (facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!)

>well, it's not directly related to browser/app development (which is still the purpose of the non-profit Mozilla foundation???)

"The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions"

Making a browser was part of supporting FOSS and open web standards.

>but instead it's all part of the rebranding of Mozilla as a consumer SaaS-company which is currently taking place. And there is no cause for that, except politics around the internet together with an influx of people who are trying to do their marketing shitshow the righteous way this time. Integrating pocket was basically the idea of the CIO?

Whilst I agree that the implementation was horrendous the idea behind it was good. Do you know what I love? I can bookmark something and have that bookmark available at home. I can log in somewhere and quickly do it elsewhere. That's firefox sync. Nobody complains about it because it isn't noticed as such a service.

The main dominator of the web currently is Google's chrome. It goes beyond even that. A lot of chrome's convenience and incentive for use for people comes from providing an ecosystem. Keep, calendar and the like and despite how terrible the limited functionality for addons is they all nicely integrate with the browser by defaault and their mobile versions everyone gets on android. Tried an addon for keep on firefox? It's trash. There's no convenient alternatives and without pushing them they won't appear.

Additionally they're entirely dependent on funding from their competitor who pushes the monopolising of webstandards and implementation that they try to combat.

>facebook is evil, everyone knows. but the foundation needlessly transforming into the same type of service business is ok, you know. they are doing it for good!

The fuck are you on about. moz literally implemented facebook containers to keep the tracking out and their defined data privacy principles can be trusted. Facebook isn't even a consumer or product focused service business (with some exceptions of course) they're generally in it for your data for advertising purposes given that you don't give em a dime for the privilege of using their social media.