Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

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.

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.

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?

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.