Mozilla lays off 70

Mitchell Baker should be ashamed of her performance at Mozilla. Serious missteps in the development of Firefox led to the rise of Google Chrome, and only recently (and arguably too little, too late) have they seen the light and prioritized the re-development of Firefox.

Nearly all of the other projects at Mozilla that aren't related to the browser itself have been abject failures. They have not only failed in their core product against Google, but have shown that they are completely incapable of innovation in other areas of tech.

Her letter reads like someone who is completely clueless. Getting rid of people while earmarking $40 million for a so-called "innovation fund" with no real strategy?

They are hoping some half-baked VPN product generates enough revenue to make them independent of Google's search deal? Please remember this post when that product fails to deliver. It's not a matter of time, it just makes no sense in any kind of timeline and at this point Mitchell Baker is grasping at straws.

Firefox did become horribly slow compared to Chrome and lost a lot of market share in the tech savvy community because of it. I also don't understand how they could fall so far behind with their primary product.

(they finally caught up again now, I switched back to Firefox about 2 years ago)

But:

Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imaginable.

Then came the rise of mobile and tablets, with forced Safari on iOS and Chrome by default on Android/Chrome OS, with little incentive to switch...

The bulk of market share loss was inevitable.

I am not certain that Chrome replacing Firefox market share was not inevitable with a reasonable product. Between the promotion on google properties and android name, it had to be bad to not get significant market share.

> Firefox did become horribly slow compared to Chrome and lost a lot of market share in the tech savvy community because of it. I also don't understand how they could fall so far behind with their primary product.

This happened in 2011-2015 when Google was investing looooooooots of money in Chrome and Mozilla was betting the farm on FirefoxOS. Since then, Mozilla has improved Firefox a lot, but it's hard to compete with a company that has a way larger budget on essentially the same product.

Fun fact, they promised hundred of thousand in revenue and got less than 1000.

The people let go weren't the people working on the failures for the most part. It looks like each was told "you have to save x% of money from your current operating budget. This can be lay off or by other means"

So layoffs all around,any engineers, some managers, some directors. This means mostly people who are paid more but not essential, hence you see senior people who worked a long time at Mozilla being let go, because most teams don't run services that cost a lot of money.

Note that this directive come from the new CFO and board. Feel free to look em up. When the previous CFO left I feared this would happen (previous CFO had some integrity)

> Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imaginable.

That makes me wonder, why did something like BrowserChoice.eu not happen for google?

> That makes me wonder, why did something like BrowserChoice.eu not happen for google?

Infinite this.

Google shouldn't be allowed to deploy their browser to their OS that defaults to their search engine and locks you into their paid app store. That's anti-competitive af.

Microsoft was skittles compared to what Google does today. And MS' telemetry has nothing on Google's pervy panopticon.

Google shouldn't be allowed to do browsers.

> Firefox did become horribly slow

FF was never really fast. Early versions worked OK but that was because websites were way simpler and user expectations lower.

Chrome was a big step in performance and all that time until FF 57 Quantum was Firefox simply catching up ...

It did in Google Play for Europe. You got a screen showing a list of alternative search engines (eg. DDG, Qwant) and browsers (eg. Firefox, Opera). Though, that didn't change Google and Chrome being the default.

I think you're assuming Chrome's very existence was inevitable, but it wasn't.

Chrome was created partly because Page just wanted to do a browser, but that wasn't enough by itself. Schmidt blocked a browser project for years on the grounds that it was a low priority and there wasn't much reason because Firefox was doing fine.

What changed things was Google trying to work with Mozilla to contribute resources, push the web forward faster and running into huge problems again and again. Political, corporate, technical. The Firefox architecture was over-engineered but also the Firefox guys thought they were top dog and kept dropping or ignoring Google's contributions for what looked like spurious reasons. Frustration grew amongst engineers who cared about improving HTML and with Page having always wanted to do a browser, now there was pressure from the top and the grassroots. When they got a few key hires who showed they could do a new browser with a much better architecture, and move way faster than cooperating with Mozilla, events were set in motion.

But there's a parallel universe in which Mozilla welcomed the Google contributions with open arms, in which Gecko had been written in normal C++, was easier to work on/better documented, where the app architecture was more conventional and thus more amenable to sandboxing etc. And in that world maybe Firefox would be even more dominant than Chrome. I don't think Mozilla realised back then they either could learn how to work with the Google engineering teams, even to the extent of giving up some architectural control, or Google would wipe them out.

> When they got a few key hires who showed they could do a new browser with a much better architecture, and move way faster than cooperating with Mozilla, events were set in motion.

They also bought up a significant fraction of the Firefox core devs -- there's a lot of "crushing the competition" you can do when your money pit is basically bottomless.

Mozilla was a firehose of money back then. Financially they were and still are Google: literally they get a fraction of Google's own revenue stream. That was more than sufficient to reward their developers in whatever way they liked.

Those devs weren't leaving Mozilla because of money. They left because they were being given a nearly blank slate on which to create a browser they felt would be much better.

I disagree. Though I am not in a position to evaluate her performance as interim CEO, I feel Mozilla and Firefox have moved on a lot in the last few years.

When I returned to Firefox a few years ago initially it felt quite behind Chrome, and few odd things like Pocket etc, but these days I can't see any reason to use Chrome. Love the container add-ons, thew new picture-in-picture works great. The leaner Quantum works better. I appreciate the work they do with Rust and webassembly. etc.

So what would be your strategy to increase the Mozilla revenue?

If I were Mozilla, I'd focus my efforts on creating a search engine. Search engine tech and computational resources are available these days and dare I say it's perfectly feasible to create an alternative to Google. In addition to that, create a Google docs or at least good Gmail competitor. They have the technical talent to do it, and they could capture a real market of people who would pay for such products, if done well, that are concerned with privacy and don't want to use Microsoft or Google products.