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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 5 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.857s | source
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sstangl ◴[15 Jan 20 23:42 UTC] No.22060115[source]▶
I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case.

I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10 years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.

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_kp6z ◴[16 Jan 20 00:22 UTC] No.22060406[source]▶
Sounds like a pretty clueless layoff, I guess I expected better from Mozilla than usual corporate derp. If there was truly no dead weight, surely the management could have scaled back their own comp for misdirecting the company? Very few people understand what it means to be a leader in corporate world.
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ksec ◴[16 Jan 20 04:13 UTC] No.22061633[source]▶
> for misdirecting the company?

As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised.

At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again.

>Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.

Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser, But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few senior engineers with a decade of experience.

I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.

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pergadad ◴[16 Jan 20 05:01 UTC] No.22061789[source]▶
What's the alternative? Google? Not really better even if this disappoints about Mozilla.
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qbaqbaqba ◴[16 Jan 20 06:28 UTC] No.22062143[source]▶
Edge or Brave. Different business models than Google's and to some extent Mozilla's.
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m3adow ◴[16 Jan 20 06:58 UTC] No.22062228[source]▶
Still 100% depending on Google, still supporting a near monopolistic position for the browser. Every Chromium fork is part of the problem, not the solution.
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BrendanEich ◴[16 Jan 20 07:34 UTC] No.22062377[source]▶
Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.
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m3adow ◴[16 Jan 20 12:34 UTC] No.22063895[source]▶
To stay in the martialistic metaphor: In this fight you merely wield the weapons your opponent forges for you. If Google decides to dull your edge in the fight for privacy, you have little influence to sharpen it again.

The only reason you are even able to fight this battle is because of the existance of Firefox. All of the Chrome based browsers are toothless tigers without Mozilla.

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BrendanEich ◴[16 Jan 20 16:13 UTC] No.22065880[source]▶
I am a for-real founder of Mozilla so spare me. I poured 16 years into it, including a bunch of coding as well as recruiting key talent, managing, and strategic decision making. We restarted the browser market when conventional wisdom said it could not be done. This enabled us to restart web standards (WHATWG => HTML5, ECMA-262 new editions). We did that (not you, unless I know you from old days).

But Google is a monopoly now and has tied its browser to its other products to take over adjacent markets, or buy other companies that pioneered such markets. Mozilla depends on Google for most of its revenue, and on a declining (traffic) basis. Reality requires acknowledging my and others work on Mozilla but not dying on that nostalgic hill. Especially not with such arrant mismanagement as is going on there now.

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1. spenrose ◴[17 Jan 20 05:10 UTC] No.22072062[source]▶
I left Mozilla (brief undistinguished tenure; briefer overlap with you) in part because I felt it simply refused to acknowledge that the Internet of 2005 (dominated by 500M people using web browsers in democracies) was not the Internet of 2015 (3B people, mostly apps on smartphones, tracked by their SIM cards and social networks). I was thrilled to start working on FirefoxOS, then soon experienced it as a kind of doubling-down of denial. Skimming Brave's About page, I don't see anything that addresses the existence of Verizon or Windows OS-level security, let alone WhatsApp. I have no idea the extent to which other people think this way, but to me the silence of Mozilla and Brave on the extent to which browsers on laptops have simply been overwhelmed by the rise of other tools and other layers makes it hard to take their pronouncements seriously.

PS, thanks for saving the Web when you did. It seems genuinely heroic to me.

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2. BrendanEich ◴[17 Jan 20 06:28 UTC] No.22072379[source]▶
Brave isn’t making an OS or network (yet), but the browser is still critical, to the degree that bigs spend billions on their own, and now privacy law and user blocking demand are reshaping the $330B+ online ad ecosystem. That is a good place to start fighting for the user, imho.
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3. BrendanEich ◴[17 Jan 20 06:31 UTC] No.22072387[source]▶
On FirefoxOS, of course gal cjones shaver & I launched it (not quite with all the other execs on board) to address the next billion internet users. I’m glad it worked out but sorry the place and name are KaiOSTech — it was Mozilla’s to see through but they faded.
4. spenrose ◴[20 Jan 20 17:08 UTC] No.22100250[source]▶
"User" is a perfect encapsulation of the mindset we need to leave behind. For the people who use web browsers, Google's ad tracking is the least of their worries. Here's Schneier:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/opinion/facial-recognitio...

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5. BrendanEich ◴[20 Jan 20 22:51 UTC] No.22102729{3}[source]▶
Oh come on -- that was a Tron ref and no offense to the clueful (which includes people on HN).

If you want to boil the ocean before helping people in an important segment of the population, good luck. Or were you just being defeatist?