This is how you lose. I only use FF. I will switch to another browser if they enshittify with AI.
Honestly, it sucks, but I expected hundreds in line with the other huge layoffs we’ve seen. It being 60 seems more reasonable
Well guys we had a good run, free and open source software is officially over
It’s remarkable really. They are competing against another browser which users have to actively go out and find, then install.
Some people are used to how chrome looks and that’s powerful glue, of course, but very few normal users (ie almost none of us in here on Lemmy) needs things beyond what both Firefox and Chrome does equally well.
The simple difference in adoption rate is this: Google pushing Chrome through people’s use of Google. Diminish the need for Google, diminish people’s discovery of Chrome.
Also, I cannot understand why they need this many people. If 5% of their workforce is 60 people, they have 1200 people employed. I can almost guarantee that Google’s Chrome team isn’t 1200 people strong.
Maybe Firefox would be better being smaller and more nimble. Maybe they should stop pretending they’re a company and start pretending they’re a foundation (which is what they are). 300 people working on a core browser seems a lot of full time people, still, and that’d be a quarter of what they are today.
Also, Mozilla’s inability to produce a simple interface for embedding Firefox is simply baffling to me. The reason so many other skin-browsers are built on chromium is that it’s a LOT easier to embed.
I speak as someone who’s run Firefox since the day it was born.
Well it was 1200 people at Mozilla, not necessarily directly working on Firefox. They have multiple products and they still need HR and lawyers and all the other support roles any other company needs.
This world blows
They've said they want to do local AIs though. If that's the case I'm all in.
Why Mozilla? You had so much good faith
Because money.
A non-profit that begs for donations has become a money making machine netting their ceos over $10m in 3 years.
Lol when that airbnb fuck took over I knew things were going to go south.
oh good firefox. Wonder what other browser i can use, oh wait...
Can someone just make a minimalist browser that isn't chrome/firefox based?
There are plenty of browsers. Dillo, NetSurf, surf, w3m, Lynx, Links, Via, Midori, Pale Moon although it's based on a fork of Gecko, Tunnel, qutebrowser. And there are even options for a search engine, although the only one worth considering that isn't just a layer on top of other search engines is Kagi which costs $10 a month, and I wouldn't exactly call it minimalist.
The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades and are almost unchangeable, without sacrificing basic web functionality and just making it a worse experience than it needs to be at least. The fact is that practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, on top of HTML and CSS which take a lot more resources to utilize/display than it looks, meaning 3 interpreters constantly running that must be sandboxed to each tab you have open with a lot of overhead to manage security.
In an ideal world we'd all just be using provably-safe high-performance compiled WASM-but-stronger (from functional languages or more likely Rust or something less boiler-platey but similar), without having such a complex and fucked dependency situation*, where we wouldn't need to sandbox interpreted languages and slaughter performance. Of course, in an ideal world, we also wouldn't have to be concerned about aggressive tracking, ads, clickbait, SEO abuse, scams, or even malware, so there's not much use in imagining a reality where we actually have quality web browsing.
The actual answer to using the web without the fucked-ness of browsers is to not use a web browser at all for sites you use frequently. Use stuff like this instead.
*seriously, you can write the most basic website with JavaScript and it'll probably rely on tens of thousands of expressions of code which realistically should just be expressable in like a small page or two, you do webdev and you'll probably accidentally be implicitly committing a sacrifice to some Aztec God in order to check if a number is even or odd
Also just imagine if all of web dev was just ML/Scala/Rust/Swift/Erlang without compiling to JavaScript 🤤 That is the definition of a perfect universe
Unfortunately none. Developing a rendering engine that can handle css, html, javascript, while also rendering a website in the exact same way as Chrome and Firefox is a huge tasks, and not something a hobby programmer can whack out in a few weeks. Thats the reason why even Microsoft abandoned their own rendering engine, because things did always look and work different in IE.
Looks like I'll need to switch to one of those browsers that only take and show characters I can type on a keyboard. Like F and U.
Long time FF user, things really aren't looking good for Mozilla as a whole.
90% of these comments didn't even read the article. Its local only, and doesn't even send data to mozilla.
Yeesh people here are salty.
Honestly, if they make it optional and/or give the option to run it locally, I could see this being a good thing.
Lord knows the competition is going full bore on AI, and if FF wants to stay relevant with the mass market they'll need to keep up.
Tell me you don't understand your userbase without telling me you don't understand your userbase
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