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.”
Did the CEO take a pay cut?
does a bear shit in your mouth?
Depends… will it generate shareholder value?
Okay I’ll learn how to make better coffee
Damn bro, you didn’t have to roast yourself that hard
Come on over, I’ll put on a pot of
bear shitcoffee and see if you disagreeRoast the bean counters instead.
Are you going to tell him “no?”
Only if he stops.
Only if it wants too
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.
“Give that CEO a raise!”
Another Mozilla
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.
We are truly living in dark times.
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 👋
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?
That’ll certainly make it easier to pay the CEO.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
Wait they still had employees?
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 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.
There was a poll a while back on mastodon and the majority answered they’d be ok with 5$/year to support Firefox.
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.
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.
Dollars.
Google is giving hundreds of millions because they fear regulators getting involved.
A handful of people who follow Mozilla on Mastodon saying they’re willing to pay up to a meagre $5 per year won’t do anything.
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.
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.
I really wish Mozilla the best but if it were to fail I sure hope Ladybird will be stable by 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.
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.
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
On mobile, search Google for “election” and then try to zoom in on any state.
I guess the best option is to run edge in vm …
So, run Chromium?
