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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

(blog.mozilla.org)
1602 points rebelwebmaster | 3 comments | 11 Aug 20 14:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.988s | source
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dblohm7 ◴[11 Aug 20 16:14 UTC] No.24122017[source]▶
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.]

One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.

OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."

Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?

Sure, Mozilla has made mistakes. Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?

People want to continue flogging us for these things while giving other companies (who have made their own mistakes, often much more consequential than ours, would never be as open about it, and often learn nothing) a relatively free pass.

I'm certainly not the first person on the planet whose employer has been on the receiving end of vitriol. And if Mozilla doesn't make it through this next phase, I can always find another job. But what concerns me about this is that Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet. To see it wither away because of people angry with what are, in the grand scheme of things, minor mistakes, is a shame.

EDIT: And lest you think I am embellishing about trivial complaints, there was a rant last week on r/Firefox that Mozilla was allegedly conspiring to hide Gecko's source code because we self-host our primary repo and bug tracking instead of using GitHub, despite the fact that the Mozilla project predates GitHub by a decade.

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anonymousab ◴[11 Aug 20 19:45 UTC] No.24125088[source]▶
For me, the feeling of getting kicked in the shins by a diva designer every-other update has risen dramatically in the past few years, as has the prominence of (at least the feeling of) 'closed wontfix dontagree' issues for common and longstanding gripes on the bug tracker and GitHub. The unfortunate nature of a bad feeling is that it will outweigh a positive feeling from another change of equal consequence.

I would not be surprised if it was the same for other users. It results in implicitly giving less benefit of the doubt when another potential controversy comes up.

Other application developers are held to a lower standard because they have already come out the other side - people already simply assume the worst about them. The paradoxical anger comes from the fact that they don't want to do the same with Mozilla, but feel more and more that they'll have to.

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1. icefo ◴[11 Aug 20 23:34 UTC] No.24127172[source]▶
The last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA.

The navigation bar on the bottom is an interesting expiriment but still I quickly moved it back up.

The new tab layout is worse. Each tab need much more space so you can display about half the number of tabs on the same space.

The top sites when you opened a new tab also disappeared. It seems you can put bookmark or something to replace them but the top site feature was really good. I'm likely to want to visit sites I visit the most and that used to be a touch away

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2. anonymousab ◴[12 Aug 20 00:07 UTC] No.24127353[source]▶
> The last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA

They had it as a separate app, as it was (seemingly) a rewrite that uses GeckoView. So having less features and unstable features was somewhat expected for users that went out of their way to install it.

Naturally, a lot of the old features weren't supported, and some were likely feeling like unmaintainable legacy code in the old version (Fennec) to begin with. So a rewrite may have made sense, for where the products were at and where they wanted to go. At least, in my opinion.

But for whatever reason, they decided that they had reached an acceptable level of feature and usability parity as to replace the old version with the new one (Fenix) in the play store. Somewhat forcibly moving all of the current users onto the new browser, silently for auto-updaters and update-all-ers. The downgrade path for those who want or need the old version is... well, I didn't see any documentation when I googled, so presumably it's "install the old APK and hope things work".

It's a cynical and somewhat egotistical approach to software development, disappointing to see from Mozilla and yet another entry on the list.

At this point, I would not be surprised if they find the idea of the extension whitelist - rather than a more open platform as is the desktop and was Fennec - far too appealing to move away from in the future.

That's somewhat doom-and-glooming, but many months ago I had thought they wouldn't end up trying to shove Fennec users onto Fenix in this way, and yet... here we are.

3. m4rtink ◴[12 Aug 20 11:07 UTC] No.24130717[source]▶
Also they basically removed the tablet mode - here I am with a 10 inch tablet and no tab bar, no back button on address bar & no keyboard shortcuts, perfect! :P

More things the dropped in lates "stable" Firefox for Android: - save as PDF - print support (!!) - downloade manager - full URL display - about:config (!!!) - extensions (other than 9 extensions they carefully cherry-picked)