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.”

  • hypertown@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    6 days ago

    I really wish Mozilla the best but if it were to fail I sure hope Ladybird will be stable by then.

  • Reygle@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    6 days ago

    All of my favorite browsers are forks of Firefox. Lately it’s been Zen browser. Watching Firefox smoulder and collapse over the years has been truly painful and makes me fear a chromium future in hell.

    • Nino477@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      6 days ago

      Same. In the late 2000s or so my father knew ot so much about computers so some family friend set it up and he installed Firefox. I ve been using Firefox my whole life since. I tried switching to ungoogled chromeium, Brave and cromite on mobile but just can’t. Like Firefox and its forks are in my muscle memory. It’s over. I won’t be able to use the internet anymore. Bye guys 👋

  • anticurrent@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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    6 days ago

    Mozilla keeps digging Firefox’s grave, and seeing how other opensource projects like Gimp struggle to even keep up with their own release schedule and very slow development rate. I fear we will be left with only chrome to use.

  • snowcrushed573@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    7 days ago

    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

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      6 days ago

      BTW, about Opera - the newest events with OpenAI and other stuff and Winamp devs not being prosecuted for GPL violations all lead me to one thought.

      Are leaked Presto sources really-really illegal to use?

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      7 days ago

      They use chromium.

      Firefox does not.

      The grand majority of software engineering effort goes into the browser development that they never have to work on for the most part.

    • fatalicus@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      7 days ago

      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.

    • sibachian@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      7 days ago

      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.

          • tb_@lemmy.worldEnglish
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            6 days ago

            Ah, I guess I read over the first bit to where you mentioned the rebrands, which didn’t include Safari.

            To still add some useful information: all browsers on iOS are rebranded Safari, because Apple only permits their own browser engine.

            (The EU ruling may change this, however)

    • morrowind@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      7 days ago

      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

    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      6 days ago

      Unfortunately I don’t think there’s much Mozilla can do other than cut costs with it seeming like the Google funding will be getting severely hampered.

      They can’t get money from thin air.

  • Marthirial@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
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      6 days ago

      There was a poll a while back on mastodon and the majority answered they’d be ok with 5$/year to support Firefox.

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        6 days ago

        The kind of people you find on Mastodon following Firefox news are not the same as the average person. They are a bubble.

        A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.

        • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
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          6 days ago

          A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.

          …people or dollars? ‘Cos i don’t think “hundreds of millions” of people are chippin’ in, it’s Google that’s financing “hundreds of millions” of dollars…

          But yeah, that target audience is a bubble, normies don’t care.

    • panicnow@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      7 days ago

      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.

      • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
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        6 days ago

        used chromium as the page rendering engine.

        I believe WebKit is Chromium’s rendering engine, as is Gecko for Firefox.

        Opera used to have their own but now they’re just rebranded Chromium.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
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      7 days ago

      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.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
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      7 days ago

      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.

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
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          6 days ago

          They get around $500 million per year from Google, so $1 billion is just two years worth of that. 86% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from that Google deal.

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      7 days ago

      well you see. all the cool kids are laying off staff and Mozilla wants to hang out at their pool next summer.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      7 days ago

      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.

      • Virkkunen@fedia.io
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        7 days ago

        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

  • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    7 days ago

    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.