Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favicon service (which HN billed as some sort of nefarious tracker).

Vanta bypassed all this by not playing to the Security Puffery crowd. Usually a quick way to do that is to require money because the Security/Privacy Puffery crowd doesn't have any.

I'm a happy Firefox and Chrome user. Honestly, it's been working fine for me.

Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users; casual users are more numerous and less demanding. Chrome won the war a decade ago when it decided to focus aggressively on casual users, leaving Mozilla to deal with the fractious dregs of the power user market.

Truth.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Non-nerds can no longer tell it's better, so I stopped doing that. No longer worth the effort, might even end up adding to my friends-and-family tech support burden rather than reducing it. I still use it myself anywhere Safari's not available, but yeah, it's a power-user-only product now.

Chrome only did better with regular users because 1) it was OS-bundled, and 2) they could shove "try Chrome!" banners at the top of every Google property. I don't think the product itself is significantly more focused on normal users. Google's just got a way, way better platform for promotion. They can snap their fingers and get a million installs of something in a day, if they really want to. But fact is FF doesn't have that. What they did have was power users doing all their marketing for them. Not so much, these days.

I will happily critisize Mozilla, DDG, etc when they come up short, but I will also happily celebrate their successes and continue to use and recommend their products as long as they don't stray too far. I want them to aim for perfection, but I completely recognize they will fall short.

There is a huge difference between critisism and condemnation.

I'm just disappointed about what Mozilla has become over the years. It wasn't supposed to be an "agile" tech company, with slick marketing and UI/UX, making deals to try to get market share.

It was supposed to be a non-profit foundation, making an open-source cross-platform browser engine, pushing for open protocols and standards. It enabled a few niche open-source operating systems to have a viable browser, it put a big dent in IE's market share, I would say it paved the way for Safari on iOS to be viable way back in 2009, and that obviously changed the world.

It still could have done that. It was making 100s of millions of dollars per year from the default search provider deal, for over a decade. It could have saved most of that money, spending it only on 50 to 100 browser engineers. Branching out to MDN and websocket or webrtc libraries would also make sense. But the rest of the crap, the marketing, the rebranding, the Pocket purchase and integration, Firefox OS, the voice recognition and AI stuff (and notice the announcement, they're keeping the AI division, really need that part apparently), stuff that nobody remembers, that's all a waste of money that could be saved by the non-profit foundation to just support the low-level engine keeping the open web viable.

I have no reason to think that your assessment of what's "crap" is a good one, while the assessment of those who actually work at Mozilla is somehow worse.

Being an as-good-as-the-competition web browser that's not the default on any major OS (yeah I use it, but the Linux desktop ain't major) and doesn't have something like Google's reach for massive promotion (like they did with Chrome) is gonna kill them as a viable product with broad appeal, at this rate. They need to find a way to make that so much better than the competition that people bother to install it (on others' computers, too, like how they got their start), and I'm not sure how they can do that, or they need to pick another crappy but super-popular web-related product and go for the throat.

[EDIT] for that matter, web chat/conferencing, and social. IMO the browser's a dead-end for them except as a supporting product, but they keep focusing on utterly dull, niche, or already well-served products. IE sucked, but everyone needed a browser. Firefox crushed it by thoroughly and entirely not sucking. Pick something else that sucks and do the same. Not... bookmarking or whatever Pocket does.

What OS bundles Chrome? Do you mean ChromeOS?

> and 2) they could shove "try Chrome!" banners at the top of every Google property.

That happened way later.

Maybe you have forgotten since it was so long ago, but the original wave of power users migrating to Chrome and bringing their non-power user friends along was exactly like the wave of folks who moved to Firefox. Chrome came out in 2008, had process-per-tab isolation and custom Chrome (i.e. window decorations, that's where the name comes from) that used less vertical space.

Your statement is revisionist history.

That makes zero sense.

Why Mozilla seems to be axing the Servo division? The only part that actually catered to casual users? Also by introducing a VPN and Pocket Premium is for casual users how?

Android.

Android.

[EDIT] and Chrome was better enough that it got power users switching (this is before "Google has become very obviously evil" was common geek opinion yet, which helped), but I'm not sure it would have gotten them installing it on normal folks' computers with quite the fervor we did Firefox, back in the day. The banner ads are what got them on normal people's computers.

At enterprise prices (i.e. thousands of dollars per user per year) it makes sense to accept the cost of dealing with power users. But not for a product that you give away for free.

I say this as someone who has been using Firefox for years, and you'll need to pry it from my cold, dead hands. I'm impressed that Mozilla has survived for as long as it has, I was sure they'd be financially kaput by 2016; at this point I think Google only keeps their search deal up as an attempt to avoid antitrust action. I don't know what the future holds for Firfox, but I hope it remains competitive. We need alternative competing implementations for the health of the web.

But I know what you mean. In the Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths text (which I don't necessarily fully subscribe to except for the naming conventions - which are useful), these people are the Mops. They aren't people who are actually concerned about security (Vanta is a successful product for those people) or privacy. They are the Mops of the Sec/Priv group.

They can't give you anything and you can't give them anything. So there's little point engaging with them. If you're interested, I have a friend working on something he calls overlay networks, to allow the Geeks to communicate with other Geeks while allowing Mops to provide the cultural mass.

I've met other people who were part of Firefox's big grassroots campaign that forever changed the web and won all of us the new standards-compliant web that Chrome has thrived in and a lot of them have remained Geeks. And I suppose almost all of them were Power Users. So I don't quite disagree with you, I just think the group is refinable and you definitely want the Geek Power User on your team - they become the fabled first adopter.

Those early adopters would have been adopting Phoenix 0.2^ which was released in September 2002, that was later released as Firefox 1.0^ two years later — at a time when the only power users could have been those same "early adopters".

Those early adopters would have been as I describe: technical users with the capability to install and operate an unfamiliar browser for the sake of curiosity. (I was still using MSIE in 2002, so it's not like it was universal among technical users either, yet.)

Those early adopters do not represent the total set of power users today.

^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history

Anyone can do better than Google when it comes to privacy, especially if you define "privacy" as "don't do what Google is doing". It is almost a tautology: we first define Google as the opposite of privacy and then market yourself as private by not being Google. In order to drive the point, you add some kind of blocking feature and, yay, private!

In order to be relevant, you need to do more than that. Firefox used to be a great browser not because it was private, but because it was a great browser. It had great support for the latest web technologies, tabbed browsing before IE, it was fast, etc... And because of that it managed to make a dent in IE market share. But now, what does it have that Chrome doesn't besides not being from Google? Firefox even lost most of its identity by discontinuing XUL (for good reasons, I know) and updating its UI to look more like Chrome. I use both browsers on a day-to-day basis and Chrome tends to work better on average, though Firefox seems to be slowly catching up. I don't know what the situation is with Servo but it might be what Firefox needs.

Another example would be DuckDuckGo. Again, it caught the "privacy" virus. Please, no, "private" just means you are a proxy for inferior Bing results in this case. The worst part is that DDG has more to offer than "privacy", like instant answers and bangs. Why not market these instead?

But i still didn't buy DDG's privacy stuff

> [Privacy/Security focused people] don't actually use [Firefox].

Is this what you mean? If so, I strongly disagree. I'd wager such 'power users' are the majority of Firefox users at this point. Casual users have all gone to Chrome, as well as many [but certainly not all] power users. I am still using Firefox and plan to continue doing so for as long as I can.

I'm concerned that Mozilla's mismanagement will make "for as long as I can" rather short. The only reason for this to concern me is because I use it. Writing off concerned commenters as non-users is a huge mistake.

Power users are certainly valuable for spreading the word but it's only one way, you can also actually advertise and market the thing like Google did. And even though power users can spread the word, you still need a superior product for casuals to actually win them over. How long has HN and other forums been beating the drum for Firefox now? Has it actually made a difference in their declining marketshare (at least for desktop, not sure about mobile)?

I don't think it has, and I don't think it ever will. If Firefox survives and resurges in popularity, it will be for a better, more polished, more optimized, slicker product for casuals. And many power users will hate them for it. Well, that's just my prediction.

Just thinking about all the money they burned through, how great would it have been, to bring XML up to current standards, and to support it well in Firefox. I mention this, because it is important, that we have at least one browser in the market, that understands XML native.

Or what would be if "Ubiquity" would have become an integral part of Firefox? Wow, just wow! I hate these people. They totally ignored the desire of many folks for a WYSIWYG XUL IDE back in the day as well... Instead they made Firefoxy parties, sold T-Shirts and coffee-mugs, implemented 'Persona', 'Hello' and what not! Did you just say, they bought 'Pocket'? Holy moly! I thought it was just a strategic relationship.

Instead of using DDG's !wiki or googling "wiki [topic]" you can configure a search keyword to send you to Wikipedia's search results page, cutting out the middleman. I have this done for a dozen or so sites I use frequently and this has cut my general purpose search engine usage down significantly.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

This is the sort of privacy enhancing feature that Firefox should streamline and advertise. I wonder if they don't make it known to users because it might influence how much money Google is willing to give them for being the default general purpose search engine..

That was a pretty blatant exposure risk for something trivial, and the employee who responded on it was shockingly inept. At some point the amount of stupidity becomes so incredible that Hanlon's Razor breaks down.

How do you have that much money for such a limited scoped mission and still get in over your head? And if so, what hope is there for anyone else?

How true. To paraphrase Henry Ford, if HTML5 developers asked instead what casual users wanted, we would now have a faster Flash.

It's history repeating itself over and over: developers and power users introduce or ask for something innovative, then casual users notice it, embrace it but also ask for it to be simpler to use ("50 knobs are too many, we want it to be usable with 3!"), therefore many functions are automated, other removed and interfaces are dumbed down to make the product palatable to the lowest denominator; however now the product has lost most of its "cool factor", not to mention some advanced functions, and doesn't attract power users anymore, many of them ending up migrating elsewhere. Rinse, repeat.

That is not going to happen to Firefox, since the war for conquering casual users has already been fought and won by Google thanks to their pervasive advertising telling everyone the lie that Chrome is better and safer. Mozilla should instead focus on giving power users the best possible product wrt security and privacy, two aspects where it would win hands down against Google, while at the same time try not to lose those among casual users who happen to be concerned about privacy and security and to whom Chrome would not be an option.

As for Mozilla's need to become profitable, why don't they attempt to use their widely known brand to sell personalized Pi-Hole-like boxes, hardware firewalls, VPN bricks that connect together from here to there, etc. Imagine two boxes with network plus audio ports: you connect mic, headphones, optional camera, a network cable, your laptop and the two boxes will establish an authentic E2E encrypted voice + video + data communication from anywhere to anywhere, no other operations required. Mozilla could surely provide the necessary services to get around NATted or filtered connections, and the shiny boxes with their logo would ease the association between the brand and the concept of private communications, security, privacy etc. helping as a consequence the adoption of Firefox as well. I think if they really want to focus on privacy and security they shouldn't ignore the hardware field where their brand can still make a difference.

I pay about $12/month to be able to use these things, which I regret only slightly less than not having the time to establish suitable alternatives.

I think some of the more encompasing efforts haven't all been bad. Rust as a language has been a great thing to come from Moz. Firefox OS could have been interesting as well.

For that matter I'd have been happy to see broader adoption of Mozilla's identity efforts, and don't so much mind them trying to get VPN as a secondary funding source.

I do wish their structure was more geared towards keeping the technical and developer teams as a focus of the organization over the more commercial aspirations.

I will say I did switch to Chrome around 2010 mostly because I really do prefer it's UI/UX ... FF is getting closer to that, despite some really not liking it and I've considered switching back.

I also find it ironic how popular electron has become, when XULRunner was such a great platform well over a decade before. I do think there's opportunity to create the next npm in concert with deno and firefox for supporting a greater module approach. There's still some unanswered bits there. Similarly, still would like a way to do bundled application packages; similar to jar or silverlight that's just a zip file of assets with a manifest and modules.

If often feels like Mozilla is doing their own thing to try and gain market share instead of working with the broader community.

I think a lot of times more technically driven products resist change a bit too much. Some of the best examples are Gimp and Firefox. Gimp's UI is hideous and despite Gimpshop builds offering a better experience to users, they still resist. Similar for Firefox's overall ui/ux when so many preferred chrome (including myself).

Not all UI change is for the better, but when the vast majority of users prefer a different experience, it's helpful to listen sooner than later.

None of this had to do with product quality.

I assume they’ll get rid of it at some point and then I’ll move, but it’s surely handy (OneDrive is completely terrible UX wise and has a 5TB hard limit).

Firefox of course got much better eventually, but by then the damage was done, and Chrome's ability to sync with the rest of Google products (and Android devices) made the browser extremely sticky.

This is quite mistaken, Chrome would not be the market leader without the best product quality. You can't force a worse browser into market leadership, as Microsoft can tell you. They've been aggressively forcing defaults and preinstalling their browsers at a far deeper level than Google was for years (and they're still doing it), yet they lost so badly they outright abandoned their own formerly dominant browser. Then even among techies and "power users" who know how to change defaults, Chrome gained incredible traction as the fastest and simplest browser.

Companies can push a browser all they want but getting the vast majority of people to actually use the browser that you've put in their face requires your browser to be legitimately better than the one they're used to. Everyone, including many "power users", could see how much further ahead Chrome was, especially in its early years.

I know some people prefer to think that Google has mind control abilities and can somehow trick users into using a product that provides a worse experience, but this is far from the reality. Effective marketing and delivery is only ever a fraction of the story. It's telling that even in the tech industry, full of professionals who know how to use computers, Chrome remains the dominant browser.

There was some relationship between the creator of Pocket and one or more Mozilla executives and/or board members that made the whole purchase stink in more ways than one.

First thing i do on a new Firefox profile (for the one machine I have still running Firefox) is disable Pocket.

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

edit... I'm sort of amazed the whole thing is licensed as CC

Android and ChromeOS pack a Linux kernel on their bottom layers, but nothing of it gets exposed to userspace neither for users nor for devs.

Android NDK explicitly doesn't have anything Linux related as part of the official stable APIs contract, and on ChromeOS Linux support is exposed via a container, WSL2 style.

Like this?

https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpx.html

People generally want privacy and security, as numerous polls show, but:

a) it's very hard to figure out if something is private/secure

b) the company can change the deal at any point

c) the market has stacked the deck against privacy and security.

Until there are laws with teeth which will punish transgressors, not much will change.

Basically, there's money in being an ecosystem like Apple's or Google's app store - you can take a 30% cut just for being the platform if you play it right - but Microsoft noticed with Windows phone and UWP that you can't just set up a store and rake in the cast unless you can attract developers to build things on your platform.

Then there's anchor products, a term from supermarkets for things like coke/pepsi (depending on the country you're in) - the idea being, if you don't stock these then your customers will shop somewhere else. If Facebook/Uber/Whatsapp/$COMPANY decides to develop their app for mobile OS 1 and 2 but not 3, then that's a strong disincentive for some people to buy OS 3, even if it's privacy-respecting and open-source and diverse and whatever. (The desktop counterpart to this is MS Office. For most companies, the choice is between Win and Mac, and will remain so unless Office ever becomes natively supported on Linux.)

Even the government has realised this, with their "clean app stores" plan - I read this part as "we won't outright ban US citizens from buying Huawei phones, but we'll make sure they only have access to a segregated app store and we'll lean on major companies not to develop a separate version for this store.

So if you ever want to launch a new platform, service or similar with a business plan that third parties will develop software for it, you'd better keep these third parties happy with decent developer tools.

However, I switched from Firefox to Chrome when the former changed how DPI were calculated, told everyone that the new way is the right way and it's up to websites to deal with it, and everything looked wrong in the meantime. And then I noticed that on Chrome, not only did things look a bit nicer to me (quite apart from the DPI issue), but the same sites I often used rendered just a little bit faster - faster enough to be noticeable.

At the time, at least for me, Chrome was at least equal to Firefox in terms of product quality.

Chrome won me over as a developer with its developer console, and I noticed Firefox Devtools has become a lot better now.

There are still quirks in Chrome's devtools and Firefox really has a shot if it focuses properly. For example working with large JS files are painful and the networks tab can be way more better.

Witness Firefox ran an Ad on the front page of newspaper with thousands of supporters names on it. It sure made us proud, the battle against IE. ( Which is why I get pissed when people say Safari is the new IE ) I dont know how long ago was that, early 2000? Must have been nearly two decade.

Pushed Firefox installation in a University Campus to thousands of PCs. Pushed through hundreds of installations in a few enterprise. Along with dozen of other things, communities, Mozillazine ( I think it is now in Read Only Mode) .

There are lots of help from others too. I am sure I am not the only one. I dont know and dont think Chrome ever got that much support.

If you are IBM or Intel, you can afford to do silly thing like acquiring McAfee. You can afford to waste money and inefficiency. The whole reason why Startup were able to compete with some of the big players is that they could get $10 out of $1 spend, while Enterprise could barely move even with $10. The inefficiency is real, the only exception to that is possibly Apple.

Mozilla has a large cooperate mentality, enterprise inefficiency, non-profits ideals and startup's moon-shot strategy. I dont know of any possible worst combination than that.

So after nearly three decades of Netscape / Mozilla, I moved on to a different browser. It was just too painful to watch.

Edit: I forgot to add, Google has yet to renew their contract with Mozilla. Given their new low in marketshare ( Judging from Apple, terms are likely paid per Active User basis ), I suspect the negotiation terms is substantially lower than previously. Hence the layoff.

Because it was.

And when Phoenix/Firebird came out how it was very basic but a slimmed down version of Mozilla.

It seemed they lost their way and just became the old Mozilla browser but with lots of features nobody wanted (Pocket??) and a tonne of other things I have no idea why they got involved in. Perhaps they just employed developers who liked writing new things.

>who know how to use computers

That's not much, even monkeys know how to use computers.

Chrome UI was (and is) total shit compared to Opera (Presto Opera, not the new Blink one). The tab bar was literally unusable for like 10 years if you had more than ~20 tabs open.

Last time I used Windows without an SSD, Chrome kept stalling on IO every couple minutes (for some profile or temp files bs), fixed by symlinking to a ramdisk.

Chrome still can't properly VSYNC, can't keep a stable framerate and has unnecessary frames of input lag.

When (if) they make ad blocking impossible, they will lose every single tech savvy user they have.

The Chrome UI is somewhat better and it also automatically creates these when you use a search somewhere, with a keyword equivalent to the site's domain.

I don't know why Mozilla doesn't just copy this old Opera UI: https://i.postimg.cc/1XCg1HG8/opera-search-edit.png

You can argue that Mozilla specifically shouldn’t do this, and you might be right. But no-one else has their profile. No-one else is doing it.

> b) the company can change the deal at any point

Yes! Don’t forget the time Firefox, bastion of privacy, forgot to update a critical cert that allowed addons to work, and then said, “don’t worry guys, the whole time we had the power to force our updates without your consent, under the guise of an analytics feature, and we used that to fix this!”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19825745

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19826827

Advocating against security is you advocating against yourself for no purpose other than sticking it to others. That's incredibly poor reasoning, and you're generalizing all groups as if they're all outrage for bad reasons.

Another fun fact, is that previously to Chrome, Google had been doing the same with the Google Toolbar for IE, which changed everyone's default search to Google as well. Chrome wasn't so much about "protecting the open web" as protecting Google: They were afraid (not inaccurately) that Microsoft was considering figuring out a way to prevent the Google Toolbar from hijacking the search settings in IE.

The nontechnical user flow at the time, was that they might have MSN Search or whatever on Internet Explorer 6, and then they'd hit a website that needed Adobe Flash Player. The Flash Player installer would have the "Also install the Google Toolbar" checkbox preselected, so it would install that browser toolbar and switch your search engine to Google.

The reason Sundar Pichai is the guy that ended up on top at Google is because the Google Toolbar (and then Chrome) was his baby, and that ushered in Google's monopoly much more than literally anything else at Google.

If it wasn't clear, a user is directly supporting Mozilla by using their product.

If coca-cola did some re-organization I didn´t like or spent money like a mad person on ridiculous products, I´d still buy coke until the company went broke.

Firefox lost most of its identity by updating its UI to look more like Old Opera. And it has been copying Opera since it was called Phoenix.

This is also the reason I use Firefox. It is the browser that more closely resembles Old Opera.