A job for advocacy division is to, uhm, advocate for the product and mission.
We all know how that has worked out in the last decade or so (down to <3% market share from 14% in 2014 and 31% in 2009, though I wonder about absolute numbers as number of Internet users has gone up).
It's fine for Mozilla to recognize this as a failed approach (or team), without dropping their mission altogether.
A lot of people here will react to the advocacy cuts, and the idea that advocacy make up such a large portion of the workforce.
30 percent seemed like a lot, but I think it's just 30 percent of the foundation's direct staff. I suspect the corporation employs more people than the foundation? So stuff like development is not included in that count.
I do wonder if the cuts are because of anticipation of lower search revenue from Google with tech restricting legislation on the horizon and google's focus pivoting to AI.
I doubt it. This company seems to have major structural problems, and cutting some stuff here and there isn't going to fix it. Its expenses are huge, and it pays its executives obscene amounts of money, and meanwhile they've been wasting tons of money on stuff like Pocket, AI crap, and now they're pissing off supporters by getting into ads.
I think what we really need is for a new company to get started in some other country, where the cost of living and the cost of executive salaries is much, much cheaper. Have that company fork the Firefox codebase, and then only concentrate on Firefox (Newfox? Betterfox?) browser development and maintenance, and nothing else. They could work more like Wikipedia, just taking donations and building up an endowment with that to fund themselves, and keeping their operations very lean so they don't need that much money to begin with.
Yes, definitely. It would have been easy back then to build an endowment if they hadn't blown money on so much BS and prepared for a future where they wouldn't have all that money coming in. I think it's too late for them now, and I don't see how they can possibly trim things down into a lean, efficient organization, especially not in the US. That's why I think someone in a cheaper country needs to fork the thing and take over Firefox development. This will probably have to wait until Mozilla is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy though.
Why haven't some EU and/or Latin American countries funded a Web browser in a meaningful way, in an effort to be less under the thumb of US tech companies?
They could fork Firefox or Chromium, poach some current developers, hire some more, and assert a strong presence on standards.
Microsoft gave up on building a Web Browser engine and you think a government can? Browser engines are really hard to build. They requires a lot of (very expensive) niche technical talent. Not to mention the need to keep up with the rate of Google's improvements to Chrome/Blink. We're at a point where Chrome has a 10 year head start to any other engine other than Firefox, building a general purpose new engine from scratch is basically off the table, and hard forking Chrome/Blink is also off the table (because why would you toss the ~1bn$ Google puts into chrome every year?). We're in a world of a single browser engine, no way to go back for the foreseeable future.
>Why haven't some EU and/or Latin American countries funded a Web browser in a meaningful way, in an effort to be less under the thumb of US tech companies?
As with many things, it's just like Dark Helmet said in Spaceballs:
"Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
Not to say that the US (or Mozilla or Google) is evil and the EU and LATAM are good (LATAM in particular is a really screwed up place, with a few exceptions that aren't as broken like Chile), but while the US obviously has its problems and does really stupid stuff (see the current election), other places do incredibly stupid stuff too (see Germany disarming, shutting down all its nuclear power and trying to make itself dependent on Russian fossil fuel energy). Honestly, I think the main reason the US is still doing as well as it is (see the strength of the USD) is because everyone else is so busy shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun.
So yes, I totally agree: theoretically it should be pretty simple to just fork Firefox (or Chromium, though I think the former is a much better choice so we don't the whole web dependent on a single browser engine, if for no other reason), poach some current devs, hire some new ones locally, and then become the new "open standard". But good luck getting some national government (or even a group of them, like with the EU) having some vision and backing such a move.
Not sure that'd even work. The best developers would get paid a lot more by working for a for-profit company, probably US-based. It's just too tempting.
IME, the best developers tend to be genuinely passionate about principles.
They aren't necessarily working for Mozilla now, because they can see right through a lot of obviously bad moves Mozilla has made, and ridiculously overpaid executives.
"Go where the biggest paycheck is" is people who care more about career than mission. Why would you even want those people, unless you can't get the mission ones.
Maybe, but if you actually want to poach people, you have to make large pay offers to get them to jump ship. So instead of just paying the prevailing rate for SWEs in $country, they need to actually look at how much those devs are making in the US and match that. Sure, it'll be expensive, but if it's only a handful of key people, it doesn't matter.
Trick is to start some sort of commune in Colombia and attract talent with the local amenities. Nice private community full of 10-15 software engineers, private chefs, security, etc would be less than $1-2k/month per person. Maybe turn it into a vacation spot: “tired of your work? Take 6 month sabbatical to come party in LATAM while making meaningful software. Work hard/play hard - apply by linking to the most meaningful PR you have contributed to an FOSS project.”
Either they need to do drastic cuts & focus on fundamentals. Or a fork with less funding entanglements can. Or an alternative project like LadyBird can.
The managemant behind firefox does not care about web browsers. They carre about their vision of social justice and the browser is just a tool to get funds for that.
I use FF as well. I think the problem is lack of focus on core workflows. This is a problem with all major browsers.
For example, why is the address bar so tiny on high resolution screens? One would think this is an easy fix that would improve the UX for many people. Yet years go by with unresolved issues in the trackers.
That is the problem that got them into this situation in the first place.
No consistent leadership vision or direction - do everything and anything their staff wanted, almost none of which was actual tech. They hired activists - not technologists.
On the other hand, random side-projects are necessary for finding new ground before it craters you - like how Microsoft was absolutely cratered by the "smartphone" thing and their too-little-too-late Windows Phone.
You can google Firefox market share, Thunderbird market share, Mozilla's financial standing over the past two decades, all of their failed social justice endeavors, etc.
The company rotted from the inside by allowing the inmates to run the asylum. Now Mozilla is severing the limb responsible for endless side-quests - but probably way too late.
FTA: "Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We’re revisiting how we pursue that work, not stopping it"
How about you just make the best damn web browser imaginable?
One of the most important and influential technology companies ever ate itself into a failed advocacy group with a couple mediocre tech hobbies. What a joke...
Your diagnosis is off. So many of the good workers got poached by Facebook and all the other companies that HNers dream of working for. Not all of them ever even worked for Mozilla Foundation or its subsidiaries—some simply got reassigned by the company that was actually paying them. Pre-Chrome, for example, the Firefox lead was a Google employee.
And not that it's the product of any of the people who were let go, but developer.mozilla.org is a pretty valuable and high-impact resource. It's more "advocacy for a free and open Internet" than it is "making a browser".
This presupposes that decisions made by the collective would be better than the direction the execs have given. They won't. It will be just as ineffectual as the Mozilla we've known for the last 10 years.
They seemingly spent the last 20 years actively figuring out ways not to make money. It's a terrible shame. They coast on the memories of yesteryear - a shell of their former selves.
And then proceeded to lay off the Rust team and force it out on its own. That probably worked out for the best in the end, but they don't get to claim credit for Rust's subsequent successes.
A job for advocacy division is to, uhm, advocate for the product and mission.
We all know how that has worked out in the last decade or so (down to <3% market share from 14% in 2014 and 31% in 2009, though I wonder about absolute numbers as number of Internet users has gone up).
It's fine for Mozilla to recognize this as a failed approach (or team), without dropping their mission altogether.
A lot of people here will react to the advocacy cuts, and the idea that advocacy make up such a large portion of the workforce.
30 percent seemed like a lot, but I think it's just 30 percent of the foundation's direct staff. I suspect the corporation employs more people than the foundation? So stuff like development is not included in that count.
I do wonder if the cuts are because of anticipation of lower search revenue from Google with tech restricting legislation on the horizon and google's focus pivoting to AI.
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42054867
Hopefully they'll replace them with people who'll make firefox better.
I doubt it. This company seems to have major structural problems, and cutting some stuff here and there isn't going to fix it. Its expenses are huge, and it pays its executives obscene amounts of money, and meanwhile they've been wasting tons of money on stuff like Pocket, AI crap, and now they're pissing off supporters by getting into ads.
I think what we really need is for a new company to get started in some other country, where the cost of living and the cost of executive salaries is much, much cheaper. Have that company fork the Firefox codebase, and then only concentrate on Firefox (Newfox? Betterfox?) browser development and maintenance, and nothing else. They could work more like Wikipedia, just taking donations and building up an endowment with that to fund themselves, and keeping their operations very lean so they don't need that much money to begin with.
What they should have done was build an endowment when they were getting crazy google money. It obviously wasn't going to last forever.
Yes, definitely. It would have been easy back then to build an endowment if they hadn't blown money on so much BS and prepared for a future where they wouldn't have all that money coming in. I think it's too late for them now, and I don't see how they can possibly trim things down into a lean, efficient organization, especially not in the US. That's why I think someone in a cheaper country needs to fork the thing and take over Firefox development. This will probably have to wait until Mozilla is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy though.
Why haven't some EU and/or Latin American countries funded a Web browser in a meaningful way, in an effort to be less under the thumb of US tech companies?
They could fork Firefox or Chromium, poach some current developers, hire some more, and assert a strong presence on standards.
Microsoft gave up on building a Web Browser engine and you think a government can? Browser engines are really hard to build. They requires a lot of (very expensive) niche technical talent. Not to mention the need to keep up with the rate of Google's improvements to Chrome/Blink. We're at a point where Chrome has a 10 year head start to any other engine other than Firefox, building a general purpose new engine from scratch is basically off the table, and hard forking Chrome/Blink is also off the table (because why would you toss the ~1bn$ Google puts into chrome every year?). We're in a world of a single browser engine, no way to go back for the foreseeable future.
>Why haven't some EU and/or Latin American countries funded a Web browser in a meaningful way, in an effort to be less under the thumb of US tech companies?
As with many things, it's just like Dark Helmet said in Spaceballs: "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
Not to say that the US (or Mozilla or Google) is evil and the EU and LATAM are good (LATAM in particular is a really screwed up place, with a few exceptions that aren't as broken like Chile), but while the US obviously has its problems and does really stupid stuff (see the current election), other places do incredibly stupid stuff too (see Germany disarming, shutting down all its nuclear power and trying to make itself dependent on Russian fossil fuel energy). Honestly, I think the main reason the US is still doing as well as it is (see the strength of the USD) is because everyone else is so busy shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun.
So yes, I totally agree: theoretically it should be pretty simple to just fork Firefox (or Chromium, though I think the former is a much better choice so we don't the whole web dependent on a single browser engine, if for no other reason), poach some current devs, hire some new ones locally, and then become the new "open standard". But good luck getting some national government (or even a group of them, like with the EU) having some vision and backing such a move.
Not sure that'd even work. The best developers would get paid a lot more by working for a for-profit company, probably US-based. It's just too tempting.
IME, the best developers tend to be genuinely passionate about principles.
They aren't necessarily working for Mozilla now, because they can see right through a lot of obviously bad moves Mozilla has made, and ridiculously overpaid executives.
"Go where the biggest paycheck is" is people who care more about career than mission. Why would you even want those people, unless you can't get the mission ones.
Maybe, but if you actually want to poach people, you have to make large pay offers to get them to jump ship. So instead of just paying the prevailing rate for SWEs in $country, they need to actually look at how much those devs are making in the US and match that. Sure, it'll be expensive, but if it's only a handful of key people, it doesn't matter.
Trick is to start some sort of commune in Colombia and attract talent with the local amenities. Nice private community full of 10-15 software engineers, private chefs, security, etc would be less than $1-2k/month per person. Maybe turn it into a vacation spot: “tired of your work? Take 6 month sabbatical to come party in LATAM while making meaningful software. Work hard/play hard - apply by linking to the most meaningful PR you have contributed to an FOSS project.”
Honestly not a bad plan.
not that easy if your money source is your competitor... conflict of interest
Google being the source of their money did not, in any way, prevent Mozilla from spending their money more wisely and putting some into an endowment.
And yet, it did.
Either they need to do drastic cuts & focus on fundamentals. Or a fork with less funding entanglements can. Or an alternative project like LadyBird can.
What's wrong with Firefox? It's my daily browser and works great. What am I missing?
The managemant behind firefox does not care about web browsers. They carre about their vision of social justice and the browser is just a tool to get funds for that.
That doesn't really have anything to do with how it works though. I was looking more into its actual operation as a browser.
I use FF as well. I think the problem is lack of focus on core workflows. This is a problem with all major browsers.
For example, why is the address bar so tiny on high resolution screens? One would think this is an easy fix that would improve the UX for many people. Yet years go by with unresolved issues in the trackers.
It's funded by its main competitor.
The workers should fire the execs and convert Mozilla into a democratically controlled worker-owned company.
90% of 2010’s Mozilla employees are gone. Most core employees are gone. Most Firefox-era developers are gone.
Most PM and directors were brought in after firefox got big.
They can’t even find a CEO.
The people who made Mozilla great are now working somewhere else.
where somewhere else = Google
That's incredibly sad. I wish those people had forked Firefox and created their own company to rival Mozilla. I would have switched.
That is the problem that got them into this situation in the first place.
No consistent leadership vision or direction - do everything and anything their staff wanted, almost none of which was actual tech. They hired activists - not technologists.
Look at the results.
>No consistent leadership vision or direction
On the other hand, random side-projects are necessary for finding new ground before it craters you - like how Microsoft was absolutely cratered by the "smartphone" thing and their too-little-too-late Windows Phone.
What are the results? I can't seem to Google that and get anything meaningful.
You can google Firefox market share, Thunderbird market share, Mozilla's financial standing over the past two decades, all of their failed social justice endeavors, etc.
The company rotted from the inside by allowing the inmates to run the asylum. Now Mozilla is severing the limb responsible for endless side-quests - but probably way too late.
FTA: "Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We’re revisiting how we pursue that work, not stopping it"
How about you just make the best damn web browser imaginable?
One of the most important and influential technology companies ever ate itself into a failed advocacy group with a couple mediocre tech hobbies. What a joke...
Your diagnosis is off. So many of the good workers got poached by Facebook and all the other companies that HNers dream of working for. Not all of them ever even worked for Mozilla Foundation or its subsidiaries—some simply got reassigned by the company that was actually paying them. Pre-Chrome, for example, the Firefox lead was a Google employee.
And not that it's the product of any of the people who were let go, but developer.mozilla.org is a pretty valuable and high-impact resource. It's more "advocacy for a free and open Internet" than it is "making a browser".
In which illusionary world would HNers dream of working for Facebook, the ultimate evil cooperation, even more evil than Oracle, the CIA or Palantir?
> How about you just make the best damn web browser imaginable?
Difficult if you compete directly with your main money source
But that's their reason for being. So they have to try.
This presupposes that decisions made by the collective would be better than the direction the execs have given. They won't. It will be just as ineffectual as the Mozilla we've known for the last 10 years.
I’ve been following them for over 20 years. Mozilla’s problem is idealism. One project to the next. At the end day, you have to pay your bills.
They seemingly spent the last 20 years actively figuring out ways not to make money. It's a terrible shame. They coast on the memories of yesteryear - a shell of their former selves.
They did create some things of lasting value though, like Rust.
And then proceeded to lay off the Rust team and force it out on its own. That probably worked out for the best in the end, but they don't get to claim credit for Rust's subsequent successes.
[dupe]
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42054867