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Mozilla Announces Layoffs, Renews Focus on Firefox (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
submitted 9 months ago by petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[-] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 263 points 9 months ago

Having a separate, open source JavaScript engine is in everyone’s interests even if they don’t know what they’d lose without the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox. I’m a web developer and Mozilla has protected the open web for all of us and if people understood what they’ve done, they’d all donate.

Google and Microsoft cannot and should not control standards. Mozilla is the conscience of the industry. Support it or you won’t know what you lost.

[-] AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social 57 points 9 months ago

I was donating until I got an email telling me to donate more signed by their CEO or something who earns a couple hundred thousand a year.

Mind, I wasn't opted into communcation like that. Only updates and news this was neither. If their new CEO cleans house and refocuses as they said they will, I will consider renewing my donations again.

[-] GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml 47 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

She earned 7 million and then asked for 3.5 million in donations iirc.

[-] Orbituary@lemmy.world 32 points 9 months ago

A couple hundred thousand is a pittance if he's keeping shit together. When CEOs push 500 to over a million at a nonprofit, that's absurdity.

[-] Deceptichum@kbin.social 35 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

She received 6.9 million dollars in 2022 and 5 million in 2021, 3 million in 2020.

CEOs are scum who do not earn anywhere near close to that. They should be lucky to get a couple hundred thousand.

And fuck Firefox having the nerve to ask for donations.

[-] emax_gomax@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago

She.

And how are they keeping anything together. Market share isn't substantially better than before and rather than focusing on the product mozilla was created for they keep pivoting to weird BS like this AI grab. I actually think market shares gone up recently... cause google pushed through manifestv3. That would've happened even if mozilla did nothing. I think mozillq is still the better browser but that sure as hell doesn't seem to be because of whose in charge.

[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

When CEOs push 500 to over a million at a nonprofit, that's absurdity.

If any CEO should make this much, I think it's the one helping to keep browser choice a thing

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[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 28 points 9 months ago

The CEO of the Mozilla Corporation shouldn't be asking for donations. It's the non-profit Mozilla Foundation which collects donations (and owns the Mozilla Corporation). It is a bit confusing, yes...

[-] amju_wolf@pawb.social 15 points 9 months ago

...and, more importantly, none of the donations go towards Firefox development. Instead they go towards "causes" that Mozilla Foundation finds worthy, and usually they have nothing to do with the open web.

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[-] Vincent@feddit.nl 48 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Support it or you won’t know what you lost.

Note that the best way to support it is to actually use its products, Firefox in particular. That's what gives Mozilla the ability to influence the direction of the web and web standards.

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 28 points 9 months ago

They actually have money in the bank, they just aren't profitable on their own in any way, and rely on search partnerships for yearly funds. I think they are just being responsible here and cutting people who aren't working on relevant projects going forward.

[-] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 26 points 9 months ago

I’m not saying they are the right size. Just that if we lose Mozilla and Firefox, it’ll be almost as bad as losing Wikimedia for certain things. We need to protect the open web.

[-] mindlight@lemm.ee 19 points 9 months ago

The problem is that the vast majority of end users prefer apps over websites. They have no clue whatsoever that 99% of all apps are essentially just wrapped websites.

Since Mozilla has been unable to find a viable business model (No, relying on Google handouts is not a viable business model) I fear that there is only one possible future and a free web is not part of it.

[-] rwhitisissle@lemmy.ml 12 points 9 months ago

This is the only realistic answer. Corporations have effectively decided that the future of the web is closed source proprietary javascript bloatware apps that are all functional skinner boxes. Many people, especially young people, have no clue how to use an actual computer. It's "click the bubble to make it pop and give us your mom's credit card number to unlock super premium bubbles." That's the future of the internet. But probably worse.

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[-] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 18 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Mozilla (the foundation) is still involved with Firefox, so chance that your donation won't go toward maintaining the engine. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/

Mozilla (the company) manages Firefox and doesn't seem to accept donation. They do accept manpower contribution: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 10 points 9 months ago

Yeah, employing this many employees, the donations would not cover it and you can hardly guarantee a stable job position. It might take just one scandal (whether it's true or not) for everyone to stop donating.

The Mozilla Foundation uses donation money rather for political activism and they've also often distributed money to important open-source projects which are too small to collect donations.

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[-] 0xtero@beehaw.org 87 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.

Yeah, I'm not sure this is the "renewed focus" we're looking for, chief

[-] tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net 9 points 9 months ago

Hmm. Yeah might be a big mistake if they add more bloat.

[-] halm@leminal.space 5 points 9 months ago

Absolutely. I suppose the AI stuff could be disabled in config but it would still be more dead weight to download with every update, like Pocket and the other shit they built into the browser.

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[-] beerclue@lemmy.world 52 points 9 months ago

Despite Firefox’s declining marketshare on desktop the browser is in use health. It’s fast and feature enough to hold its own against its rivals

Huh?

[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 26 points 9 months ago

AI

[-] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 37 points 9 months ago

No AI writes this badly

[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

No, they usually write this worse. If this is Mozilla's AI they're fucking up something fierce.

[-] vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 9 months ago

And a bad one too. Modern LLMs can write flawless English at 7B.

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[-] words_number@programming.dev 46 points 9 months ago

"trustworthy AI"

Why? Why can't we have even a single decent browser? Servo is my last hope.

[-] halm@leminal.space 23 points 9 months ago

I'd never heard of Servo before this, but judging from the website it's nowhere near a GUI offering. The work they're doing on the engine looks solid (to me as not-a-developer) but it's a telltale sign that there are no UI screenshots on their landing page. So, not an alternative to Firefox yet.

[-] Mechanize@feddit.it 20 points 9 months ago

Because, as pointed in the page, Servo is being developed as a(n embeddable) Rendering Engine, not as a full blown end user Browser.
Its alternatives are not Chrome, Safari or Firefox, but Webkit, Blink and Gecko

There's an example GUI called Servoshell, but it is more of a testing ground and example on how to embed the engine in an app than a serious alternative to anything currently in the market.

Already this kind of work is difficult and daunting. Adding to it a full GUI would make it completely impossible for the current size and financial backing Servo has.

Big words aside it just means that Servo wants to be only one of the parts that compose a real browser: the one that takes HTML, Javascript, WASM and translates them into the things you see on your monitor. All the user facing functionality are left to the devs of the app that embed it.

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[-] Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi 13 points 9 months ago

While it's not an alternative right now, I think Servo's focus on being embeddable might help it in the long run. A big issue with Gecko is that it was difficult, if not impossible to embed. It'd be nice to see something like Vivaldi that runs on Servo.

[-] halm@leminal.space 5 points 9 months ago

Oh, that's fair. I'm not complaining about the work being put into a new browser engine, and there is definitely space for improvement over the ones we have.

Vivaldi, though? I'd vastly prefer an open source browser, and maybe one with less baggage than Vivaldi has — but I'll look forward to any GUI implementation of Servo, when and if, etc.

[-] Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi 3 points 9 months ago

I was more talking about Vivaldi feature-wise, FWIW. There's features I'd like from Vivaldi that don't have a close equivalent to Firefox, not even from its forks (tab tiling's my go-to example), and maybe in the distant future, there'd be a browser like it running on Servo.

[-] Hapbt@mastodon.social 4 points 9 months ago

@Flaky @halm be nice if you could just essentially plug-in engines and swap them out etc
in theory they are all supposed to support the same standards

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[-] words_number@programming.dev 5 points 9 months ago

Obviously not. Building a modern browser engine from scratch is an immense undertaking, so it's definitely possible that it will never be usable as a replacement for every day webbrowsing. But for now I won't give up hope :)

[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 4 points 9 months ago

I want them to make an untrustworthy AI so that I can post funny conversations online for internet clout.

Would probably be more useful.

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 43 points 9 months ago

Yes, focus on your main thing. It's the thing that makes you matter. I want your browser to stay competitive.

[-] rotopenguin@infosec.pub 42 points 9 months ago

The actual news is "renews focus on AI bullshit".

[-] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 7 points 9 months ago

I want an API to control firefox with ny own text gen open source AI. Locally and offline.

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[-] Kid_Thunder@kbin.social 38 points 9 months ago

In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.

That's pretty concerning. It could go either way but I assume they are going to try to shove more sponsored content in an effort to further monetize Firefox in spite of getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year in donations. Maybe I'm just cynical about Mozilla though.

[-] thehatfox@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

Yes, the change of focus is good news overall but there’s still reasons to be concerned about Mozilla. It’s good that they are moving focus back to Firefox from struggling ancillary projects.

But what they want to do with that additional focus could be a problem. Another round of gimmicks with some newer buzzwords isn’t likely to help Firefox.

[-] tryagain@lemmy.ml 25 points 9 months ago

And this only just after they enabled a whole raft of add-ons in their mobile browser that have already stripped away so much shit from my daily browsing experience.

I switched last year when Google entered their new phase of ad tracker evil and I bet I wasn't the only one. Feels to me like Firefox fucked with the money and they're being brought to heel.

[-] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 13 points 9 months ago

What? They're laying off people working on a metaverse platform, mozilla.social, and other assorted products nobody cares about. They're doing exactly what everyone said they should do, slimming down and focusing on Firefox

[-] tourist@lemmy.world 20 points 9 months ago

[-] heygooberman@lemmy.today 16 points 9 months ago

Cool, I'm liking this new Mozilla already! ...NOT!!!

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[-] LibsEatPoop@hexbear.net 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.

Eww.

I’ll need to switch browsers soon. I do not want AI crap.

Edit - There is also the reduction in their privacy services (VPN, Relay etc.). This could be the start of a trend in that direction too. Only time will tell.

[-] delirious_owl@discuss.online 6 points 9 months ago

Worry not. I'm sure Tor Browseeu and lots of other Firefox derivatives will simply strip out the AI bits

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[-] HollandJim@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That’s some serious spin there in the title.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

They finally woke up

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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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