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    Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

    (blog.mozilla.org)
    1602 points rebelwebmaster | 12 comments | 11 Aug 20 14:03 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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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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    renewiltord ◴[11 Aug 20 17:56 UTC] No.24123463[source]▶
    Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.

    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.

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    kibwen ◴[11 Aug 20 19:54 UTC] No.24125193[source]▶
    > Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.

    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.

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    qzw ◴[11 Aug 20 21:10 UTC] No.24126018[source]▶
    Sure, power users can be a pain in the ass, but if everything were up to casual users, we'd all still be on IE 1x, i.e., whatever that wraps the same broken, insecure, non-standard-compliant MSHTML engine in the shiny Windows UI toolkit-du-jour. Power users were the first to pick up Firefox when it was split off from the old Mozilla suite, and power users were the ones who began using and recommending Chrome when it was the upstart browser. If Firefox survives and (hopefully) returns to a reasonable market share, it'll probably be thanks to power users who stuck with it or gave it another chance.
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    themacguffinman ◴[11 Aug 20 22:48 UTC] No.24126899[source]▶
    Except Chrome was significantly better in ways that even casual users could see and be sold on: simplicity and speed, which initially turned away a significant number of power users who heavily rely on and prefer a wide variety of addons and settings to customize Firefox.

    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.

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    1. ocdtrekkie ◴[12 Aug 20 02:26 UTC] No.24128035{3}[source]▶
    This is a very revisionist explanation of how Chrome succeeded: Simply put they paid to be injected into Adobe Reader and Flash Player installs. When Android came around, every manufacturer was required to include Chrome as default.

    None of this had to do with product quality.

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    2. ◴[12 Aug 20 02:49 UTC] No.24128140[source]▶
    3. themacguffinman ◴[12 Aug 20 02:59 UTC] No.24128208[source]▶
    > None of this had to do with product quality.

    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.

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    4. untog ◴[12 Aug 20 04:11 UTC] No.24128531[source]▶
    That doesn’t match my memory at all. I recall a lot of word of mouth between non tech friends about “this new fast browser Google made”. At the time it really was eye-poppingly fast by comparison to the competition.
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    5. bronson ◴[12 Aug 20 05:19 UTC] No.24128812[source]▶
    Plus Google‘s browser cared deeply about developer tools. They were a generation better than anyone else at the time and had great support/evangelism. That alone converted my team of 15 in a year.
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    6. andrewflnr ◴[12 Aug 20 07:42 UTC] No.24129539{3}[source]▶
    Were they not already using Firebug? I remember seeing Chrome's devtools and thinking "oh, like Firebug but built in."
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    7. red_admiral ◴[12 Aug 20 08:22 UTC] No.24129704[source]▶
    I don't disagree with your first paragraph - though I also remember, in London, giant billboards and cinema ads for chrome too as well as advertising for it on the google search page.

    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.

    8. 72deluxe ◴[12 Aug 20 11:11 UTC] No.24130764[source]▶
    I used the first version and remember it being like a stripped-down version of Firefox at the time. It was the same codebase but with most of the useful UI ripped out.
    9. GoblinSlayer ◴[12 Aug 20 12:00 UTC] No.24131148[source]▶
    Casual users use only one browser, the very concept of a worse browser doesn't exist for them.

    >who know how to use computers

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

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    10. ocdtrekkie ◴[12 Aug 20 15:36 UTC] No.24133105[source]▶
    There was definitely tech crowd excitement about Chrome back when it was actually fast, but you don't get a 71% market share that way. You get a 71% market share by cutting deals with other vendors to inject your app, which is exactly what was done.

    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.

    11. nnt38 ◴[12 Aug 20 17:39 UTC] No.24134592{3}[source]▶
    Everybody under 30 knows the meme "IE slow, Chrome fast"
    12. bronson ◴[12 Aug 20 17:56 UTC] No.24134807{4}[source]▶
    Firebug was pretty buggy, especially the JS debugger. Lot of upgrade-and-break and downloading different versions. Dev Tools just worked.