- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
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.”
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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.
I really wish Mozilla the best but if it were to fail I sure hope Ladybird will be stable by then.
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.
lol what?
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.
Doesn’t work. Firefox keeps nagging me to update every freaking time I open the browser. Now if they let me turn the nagging off it wouldn’t be so bad.
I want an update once per quarter, not once per week. Only more often than that if there is a critical security fix.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/desktop-esr/
Here you go brother. Hope this helps.
How does that help with unwanted update nagging?
You will get one update per year, and “only more often that that if there is a critical security fix”.
There’s no winning. Some people use the regular version and complain about the updates, while others use the ESR release and complain that sites that use cutting-edge features don’t work properly.
The solution to updates is to use Linux, since then it’ll update through your distro’s package manager along with your other software.
This is not even about Firefox, you griefer.
Regardless, don’t use chrome.
I’ll just use Safari
With privacy extensions…
We’ll go back to gopher if we have to, it’s time for burning chrome.
lynx ftw
Also, Ladybird is looking very promising, so in a few years we should have a true fourth browser engine.
Let’s just separate GOOG from Chrome / Chromium and Google Search completely. So that the direction of the most used browser, most used search engine and the biggest advertiser don’t circle jerk each other.
I’ve moved to Vivaldi recently and it’s been refreshingly not-suck.
That’s good. Are you happy with the built-in privacy, or do you find extensions are needed?
I’d still argue it’s chromium.
If this Firefox trend continues, then we won’t really have a choice in the matter anymore.
You’d sacrifice your privacy because of layoffs?
No, because there won’t be anything but Chrome.
WebKit based browsers don’t support google!
And websites don’t support Webkit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Like which ones?
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.
Google should be subject to antitrust legislation regardless.
Their position as a monopoly is what enables this.
The firefox browser could exist without quite a lot Mozilla does. A large chunk of its cash isn’t spent on the browser.
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.
There is a new browser based on WebKit (safari), called Orion that looks promising. However, it’s only on macOS and iOS at this point. Hopefully Linux and Android will be a consideration at some point.
There’s also a new browser based on Firefox/Gecko called Zen. There’s way too many browsers based on Webkit or Blink.
Zen has less frequent security updates. But yes zen is a good gecko alternative.
zen integrates every upstream change a few hours after release, it is built as a set of patch on top of firefox just to make that easy
Hmm. Well, I’ll have to give it a go. Thanks.
Chrome’s engine was originally forked from WebKit. That makes them too similar (even years later) for WebKit to count as a real alternative.
The point is to leave a google controlled ecosystem… which means it counts as a valid alternative. What would you suggest besides chromium and gecko?
w3m
Haha. So I really do wish that all websites had a text version, or like markdown. Can you imagine how damn speedy things would be? Every website would have the same layout. As much as I appreciate good web design, there’s a lot of bad UI choices out there.
I strongly disagree with this. In practice, supporting chrome does not imply supporting safari and vice versa. In particular, Safari is much, much slower about adopting new web technologies. Google basically implements support for anything they can think up, Apple waits for it become a ratified standard and then implements it only if they want to. Their JavaScript implementations are also completely different.
I can’t imagine any governments would look kindly upon internet access being guarded behind a single company’s product.
laughs in 2001
Splitting Chrome from Google wouldn’t make Chrome not a monopoly, though, right?
The split might leave a monopoly still, if it’s the only major browser.
It would be a lot easier to compete with though, since Google couldn’t treat it as a loss leader that still bring them in search revenue by default.
I guess the best option is to run edge in vm …
So, run Chromium?
CEO first please. He’s not worth it
Getting rid of the advocacy part. That’s…not good.
So what does that mean in layman’s terms? They’re not going to have as much of a voice to sway heads about things like open internet, the flaws of copyright, the problems with privacy and surveillance.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the US Department of Justice is going to succeed in their antitrust efforts against Google. Currently, Mozilla gets something like 85% of their funding from Google for being the default search engine in Firefox. That may be deemed anticompetitive behavior by a judge, at which point Mozilla will be left with very little funding compared to their current situation.
I’d bet these actions are in anticipation of that happening.
Yeah, and although it will be painful for Mozilla in the short term - it would be a good outcome. It was always bad that Mozilla’s main source of funding was from their most powerful competitor. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. And obvious way to skew decision making. … But that money is just so addictive.
There will be some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms if the money gets taken away, but everyone will be healthier in the long run… unless the overpaid CEO continues to suck in all the remaining money and leaves nothing for the people actually doing the work. That would be bad. In that case, if the corporate structure chokes the company to death, I suppose we’d be hoping for Ladybird, or something like it to take Firefox’s place.
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.
I’m seeing it
God bean counters ruin everything good related to tech
wouldn’t it be nice if the profit motive wasn’t the only driving force of the economy?
Wait they still had employees?
“Give that CEO a raise!”
Another Mozilla
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.
I fear we will be left with only chrome to use.
Will, ungoogled-chromium (Windows version) is an thing. So we got that.
GODDAMMIT MOZILLA. YOU ARE MAKING ADVOCATING FOR BETTER INTERNET HARD
This is more of a symptom the cause is the monopolization of the internet largely by Google
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.
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
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
The grand majority of Mozilla’s spending is for engineers.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
yes, safari is apple.
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)
