Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division | TechCrunch
Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division | TechCrunch
This is the second layoff at Mozilla this year, the first affecting dozens of staff on the side of the organization that builds the popular Firefox browser.
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/46655413
The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”
God bean counters ruin everything good related to tech
Everytime I see comments regarding Mozilla''s financials,I have the same effing question: How does a company like brave or opera maintain their browser ?? AFAIK both don't have the level of community backing that Mozilla does nor do they have any (again AFAIK) agreement with a company like google for default search engine placement
those are just rebranded chrome(ium). all browsers except firefox and safari are rebranded chromium or firefox. edit: there are some other projects but none are mature.
Apple also maintains their own browser engine, but that's Apple.
Brave just tries to scam their users for money.
Like when they added "donate to the content creator" links on YouTube and such, then didn't actually give the money to the content creators.
Brave and Opera are both forks of Chromium that incorporate upstream changes. Firefox is an entire browser.
Fair enough. Didn't think that maintaining the engine is what Mozilla spends majority of it's Firefox budget on
Alongside what the other guy said, Opera definitely does have search engine deals, idk about brave since they launched their own. But brave has their own private advertising system
GODDAMMIT MOZILLA. YOU ARE MAKING ADVOCATING FOR BETTER INTERNET HARD
Gee, I can't imagine why they chose to drop this bomb today.
It's like they wanted it to be drowned in other news.
Why, what else happened today?
Tap for spoiler
/s
It's Mozilla. No one is going to see this anyway.
Regardless, don’t use chrome.
If Mozilla does become defunct, it does raise the question of whether Chrome would be considered a Google monopoly, and therefore subject to antitrust legislation.
I can't imagine any governments would look kindly upon internet access being guarded behind a single company's product.
They could try to employ some kind of Apple defense, like, you wouldn't hit Apple for having monopoly on iOS. As long as it's not the only solution on the market. And for web, most of time, you could access the same resources and get similar experience by downloading... the apps... wait, they have a monopoly on that, too. Well, they are completely screwed in that case.
I suspect their financial position has changed. Perhaps Google's being found as a monopoly has made them decide not to help fund Mozilla's efforts as substantially.
Ashley Boyd lead the advocacy team, here's the kind of stuff they were doing:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-welcomes-ashley-boyd-vp-of-advocacy/
In fall of 2016, Mozilla fought for common-sense copyright reform in the EU, creating public education media that engaged over one million citizens and sending hundreds of rebellious selfies to EU Parliament. Earlier in 2016, Mozilla launched a public education campaign around encryption and emerged as a staunch ally of Apple in the company’s clash with the FBI. Mozilla has also fought for mass surveillance reform, net neutrality and data retention reform.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/05/mozilla-foundation-lays-off-30-staff-drops-advocacy-division/
“The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward,” read the statement shared with TechCrunch.
Reading between the lines, I'd keep an eye on them collecting your data and consider one of the privacy-focused forks.
consider one of the privacy-focused forks
The Foundation is not linked to Firefox.
If by not linked you mean wholly owned by...
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/organizations/
The Mozilla Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, works with the community to develop software that advances Mozilla’s principles. This includes the Firefox browser, which is well recognized as a market leader in security, privacy and language localization. These features make the Internet safer and more accessible.
Hundreds of selfies? Let's go ahead and strike that vein bullshit from the record.
That'll certainly make it easier to pay the CEO.
CEO first please. He's not worth it
Their question is: how much would you pay for not using a Chromium based browser?
People switching to the browser and zapping all ads, demanding open source and vitriol for any kind of monetization. How can they survive? They would have to become a subsidized utility, which not even the Internet as a whole has achieved.
I get not wanting to use a google, microsoft or crypto laden browser, but I would be willing to use a well supported browser that used chromium as the page rendering engine. It seems to be extremely difficult to get another engine to be competitive in the marketplace. Maybe the resources would be better spent putting the chromium engine inside a different container. I’m sure there would be drawbacks, but I think there would be compatibility benefits too.
I wouldn't mind paying money for a good browser. I paid for Opera back in the day, and browsers are significantly more complex (and cost several orders of magnitude more to develop) now compared to back then.
WTF. They had $1b banked a few days ago. This is a bit reactionary perhaps?
They're likely preparing for their funding from Google to be cut. Having a lot of money in the bank doesn't matter if your income is lower than expenses, since you'll run out of money eventually.
Expecting millions to be cut is still extreme when you have a fucking billion in the bank.
well you see. all the cool kids are laying off staff and Mozilla wants to hang out at their pool next summer.
Oh geez the leadership is making more mistakes.
Not necessarily. If they're low on cash then cutting unnecessary costs is not unreasonable. What is Mozilla's core goal? Perhaps the "advocacy" and "global programs" divisions weren't all that relevant to it, and so their funding is better put elsewhere.
Let's wait and see how this funding won't be talked about ever again and later on the CEO coincidentally gets yet another raise
Why the heck did Mozilla need 120 employees for anyway? I hate that Firefox is updated so often because I always get Firefox Update Fatigue. I hope that fewer employees means fewer Firefox updates.
Well this is a unique take. But don't worry, there's a Firefox for you, too. Try the ESR, or Extended Support Release, it
receives major updates on average every 52 weeks with minor updates such as crash fixes, security fixes and policy updates as needed, but at least every four weeks.
Just turn the updates off. Might want to remove the seatbelts from your car too, so annoying having to put them on and take them off every time you need to drive somewhere.
This is not even about Firefox, you griefer.
lol what?