Mozilla lays off 70

https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for-subscription-products-to-generate-revenue

by ameshkov • 7 years ago

929 824 7 years ago

techcrunch.com

ameshkov5• 7 years ago

Brendan Eich tweeted that they laid off about 70 people: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217517703914643456

This is about 7% of all their employees.

People report that a lot of QA, security, and release management folks were sacked.

A lot more details in the TechCrunch article: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-...

In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this decision

edit: fixed the numbers, added some more details.

pasttense01• 7 years ago

From the 2018 State of Mozilla annual report: With over 1,000 full-time employees worldwide https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/

ameshkov5• 7 years ago

I don't know why, but for some reason, I was thinking there were about 600 of them. Thanks for the link, I've edited my comment.

WilTimSon• 7 years ago

I'm surprised they're laying off security and QA, considering how focused on privacy and security their marketing campaign seems to be. In the last 6 months, I think 90% of cases where I saw Mozilla mentioned were about how it's the 'hot new browser' for the privacy-concerned. Although, perhaps, that's more to do with a good marketing team and less with a sprawling security department? Would love to see some expert opinion on what this means for the company's current trajectory.

dman3• 7 years ago

Perhaps Rust is delivering better than expected results.

dan_quixote• 7 years ago

Unless they really were redundant, firing QA/Security/Release engineers strikes me as an act of desperation. Cutting back on those disciplines will really jack up the interest rate on your tech debt.

raister• 7 years ago

It was Microsoft (or other company I don't recall) that every 5 years would lay off 5% of its work force (the least capable or productive people) - this would cause those that remain to work harder next year. Then, they would open positions. Rinse and repeat.

drcross• 7 years ago

See: stack ranking

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Microsoft

walshemj• 7 years ago

General Electric was famous for doing this is the problem is you cant keep doing it every year.

Also people just game the system and only do what will get them a good review.

I know some on at a big UK company who was bucking for a promotion and they blew through 1 Mill and 15 Man years for no good reason.

throwawayhhakdl• 7 years ago

Note, the fatal mistake in Microsoft’s case was not laying off the bottom 5%, it was laying off the bottom ranked people WITHIN small groups, even if said groups were doing very well.

If you’re going to lay off the bottom x% every n period of time, it might be fine. But you’d better be damn sure your metrics are good (sales comes to mind though even then there’s a lot of ambiguity). If you’re dropping the weakest performer in groups you’re not only going to create the most toxic environment ever, you’re going to lay off plenty who are probably middle of the bell curve.

Microsoft’s plan was, in addition to being unwise, just poorly reasoned statistically.

sithlord• 7 years ago

it also makes for a miserable work environment

disordinary2• 7 years ago

Microsoft used to do stack ranking which puts everyone on a curve and ranks them against each other but they got rid of it when the regime at the top changed.

This sort of ruthless management is a way to destabilise the workforce and disrupt the team. What I've often found is management might cull the worst performing people but the best people follow them voluntarily because of the toxic culture, and then there's the fact that the worst performing person in the best performing team might be better than the best performing person in the worst performing team.

D-Coder• 7 years ago

I think they don't do that any more. For one thing, it was too easy to game the system by hiring lousy people as targets for the next year's firings. And if a group was all good people... you ended up firing someone anyway.

tracker14• 7 years ago

I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place.

I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product on the server component. As much as I hated Lotus Notes, something between Lotus Notes, Outlook and MS Teams could be something great and that the Mozilla org would be in a good position to create.

I know they may have good reach with the VPN service as well... I'm unsure how they can reduce security, qa and release management people when orchestration, automation and verification are such huge needs.

They get enough income from search (for now) that they could concentrate on best of breed tech, build mindshare from that, then re-introduce marketing for critical mass.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

Totally, I'd be a lot happier if they cut efforts on the branding side of things and strengthen the technical one.

Sammi2• 7 years ago

The world today is different. Can't skimp on marketing any more, as the competition is extremely heavy on marketing.

jorblumesea• 7 years ago

It's hard to say one way or another without the data. How big is the marketing team and budget/headcount/overhead? What's their ARR? How many QA people were laid off and at what salary ranges? How big was QA compared to other departments?

vkou• 7 years ago

I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place.

Which worked because IE 6 was a dumpster fire for both users and developers. Developers were looking for any excuse to jump ship off it.

The browser market in 2020 is 'good enough' for users and developers. It's like gasoline - nobody cares which refinery the gas in their tank comes from.

Nextgrid2• 7 years ago

I see a big gap in the market when it comes to self-hosted Office 365 or G Suite alternatives. Microsoft Exchange is a beast both in terms of complexity as well as licensing cost, and I think most small/medium orgs don't actually need the complexity which is why they're going towards G Suite which is a less complex product to manage.

I can see them succeeding with an open-core enterprise e-mail & calendar solution where the base features are free to use and an enterprise version with extra features, like the Gitlab model with self-hosting as the key selling point.

afterburner• 7 years ago

Marketers are usually pretty good at selling themselves.

Vinnl2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure why they don't (...) concentrate on community outreach from the developer side.

Unless e.g. Lin Clark was among those who were laid off, they've been doing some excellent developer-side community outreach through the Mozilla Hacks blog in the past couple of years.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

TechCrunch has more info:

"Mozilla lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue"

https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-...

dang5• 7 years ago

Ok, we changed to that from https://twitter.com/KingstonTime/status/1217498737397903363. Thanks!

falcolas7• 7 years ago

70 employees, at a grossly over-estimated cost of $200,000 a year each (QA "leads" would probably cost a fraction of that), would cost Mozilla about $14M to retain. They are retaining their $43M budget for blue sky research intact (per TFA).

It feels like a better compromise could have been made.

petagonoral3• 7 years ago

Would love to see the compensation their board members and execs are claiming.

falcolas7• 7 years ago

""" For VPs and above, we benchmark compensation against a blended peer group comprised of 70% similarly-sized public and private tech companies and 30% non-profit organizations. This approach serves to reinforce our mission-first orientation. Consistent with market best practice, at least 70% of compensation for senior leadership is “at risk” and tied to individual and company performance. """

The CEO (Mitchell Baker) made around $2.3M in 2017.

mozcomp• 7 years ago

Because the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, this information is public, at least partially! The latest numbers are from 2018.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo...

Check out page 7.

ameshkov5• 7 years ago

This might be a sign for other employees that they need to focus on the things that can help Mozilla actually earn more and not just be a good guy. It may sound horrible, but considering their market share dynamics it makes sense.

Hydraulix989• 7 years ago

Remember the PR disaster they had when they bundled Pocket?

falcolas7• 7 years ago

Employees don't drive a large company's focus. Driving the focus and direction of the company is the job of Mozilla's leadership. It's the directors' job to transform that direction and focus into actionable plans, the managers' job to drive those plans, and the employee's job to implement the plans.

The employees, in all reality, don't have the power to drive the direction and focus of a large company; that's a benefit limited to startups and small businesses.

rob74• 7 years ago

Or it might be a sign for other employees (typically the ones the company would actually like to keep) to start looking for other, safer, jobs. Layoffs are always bad for morale...

dangwu2• 7 years ago

Cost per employee can be much higher than their compensation. Maybe around 25% higher.

falcolas7• 7 years ago

Yes, I baked the employer tax and non-monetary compensation into the $200,000 estimation.

Rebelgecko• 7 years ago

I don't know what Mozilla's benefits are like, but 25% may still be pretty conservative. Just payroll taxes and 401(k) matching can be ~15% of salary, before you take into account things like health insurance. At my company, I cost about double my actual salary.

Yoric8• 7 years ago

It can actually be 100% higher in some countries.

tyingq• 7 years ago

200k may not be overestimated. Employees cost a lot more than their salaries. There's the employer share of payroll taxes, unemployment, health insurance subsidies, 401k matching, training, travel, etc.

somebodythere• 7 years ago

Not to mention office space!

madamelic• 7 years ago

Like cutting the CEO's bonus for her obvious failure.

I hate that layoffs like this can happen, no executives take blame and they continue to make 4, 5, 10x what those laid off made.

kelnos• 7 years ago

$200k doesn't just include salary; there's also equity comp, benefits, payroll taxes, etc. That can sometimes cause an employee's total cost to be at least 2x their salary.

DarkCrusader2• 7 years ago

QA "leads" would probably cost a fraction of that

While I agree with the sentiment here, there is no need to diminish the work of QA people. They are a very important of the development process. A good QA is hard to come by and I often see them single-single handedly carry a project to completion despite working with a team highly incompetent "developers"(see what I did there).

baud1472583• 7 years ago

Yeah, we have the chance of having a few good QA in our company and they are very important in getting the SW through the door not overly late and without too many serious defects

stuff4ben• 7 years ago

Besides donating and the as-yet-to-be-released VPN service, how else can we support Mozilla? I don't see anything they're actually selling and I hate for stuff like this to happen.

rchaud• 7 years ago

I feel like the kind of money Mozilla needs to keep going each year isn't something that can be crowdsourced like Wikipedia. Unfortunately I think big corps will continue to be Mozilla's major donors. And the big cheques they cut will come with strings attached, just not in writing.

Nextgrid2• 7 years ago

From what I heard from other HN comments, donations don't actually go to the browser's development, instead they go to auxiliary projects of (IMO) dubious value like community outreach, etc.

yoasif_3• 7 years ago

Personally, I run nightlies and report bugs -- I think that is more effective (but people who want more assurance may want to run beta instead) than most other things I might do (and doesn't really require a lot of commitment).

You can also donate your voice here: https://voice.mozilla.org

chrshawkes• 7 years ago

I find it interesting they are laying off 7% of their staff while hiring new developers. I say this as they had a job post in DC recently saying we could join their growing company. Are they growing or retracting?

blackearl• 7 years ago

Maybe it's like a controlled burn. Get rid of a bunch of low performers or those who they don't really need currently, hire quickly into what they do need.

grilled_cheese• 7 years ago

remember you're talking about people who just lost their job...

yborg• 7 years ago

It hasn't been my observation as a daily driver of Firefox that Mozilla needs a lot less QA.

quotemstr• 7 years ago

People are not fungible.

tus882• 7 years ago

I thought Mozilla was a foundation not a company.

mattl• 7 years ago

Mozilla Foundation owns Mozilla Corp.

tus882• 7 years ago

There is a Mozilla Corp? Who knew...

teraflop• 7 years ago

It's not quite clear to me -- were the laid-off employees working for the foundation, or for the corporation?

kevingadd2• 7 years ago

It's both. When I worked there, the Foundation (non-profit) owned the Corporation (for-profit). If you donate to Mozilla it's going to the non-profit org.

dullroar2• 7 years ago

Would be interested in hearing more about your views on this. I use Firefox and Thunderbird almost exclusively, and every time I think about donating money I then remember all the wasted time and effort they've poured into what seem to be pipe dreams over the years. I WANT them to succeed. I WANT there to be an alternative on the desktop to Chrome (now that Edge is basically rebranded Chromium), and on iOS to both Chrome and Safari, I WANT to support their excellent documentation portal (which everyone else rides on the back of - even MS points to it a lot now). But man, I just don't trust the powers-that-be there to make non-braindead strategic decisions, year after year. Talk me out of that prejudice against them, please?

jahlove3• 7 years ago

I don't understand Mozilla. How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends $450m annually and dedicates $43m just for future endeavors? Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?

jen20• 7 years ago

Would you cut, say, Rust?

echelon2• 7 years ago

Rust is perhaps the best thing to come out of any corporation in years. Protobuf, Envoy, Kubernetes, ... -- I struggle to think of anything better for our industry than Rust.

jimbokun• 7 years ago

How many people are they paying to work on it?

ameshkov5• 7 years ago

Nowadays, a small team is simply not enough to develop a browser and keep up with the competition. Unless you fork Chrome, of course.

diegocg2• 7 years ago

Indeed. Even Microsoft decided to give up their own browser, and they have plenty of money.

jahlove3• 7 years ago

They made $450m in revenue in 2018. What fraction of that is actually needed to keep a productive browser team afloat?

jakearmitage2• 7 years ago

I also don't understand why they keep pushing useless services.

BitwiseFool• 7 years ago

I think they're trying to become an ecosystem. Evidenced by all the times they try to get me to make a Mozilla account.

mintplant• 7 years ago

Because otherwise they're almost entirely reliant on search partnerships for funding. Which means Google, i.e., their biggest competitor.

burtonator• 7 years ago

Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?

Risk... companies that make too much revenue from one product or too much from one customer risk death.

newnewpdro2• 7 years ago

Empire building tends to be irresistible to those in positions eligible.

8ytecoder• 7 years ago

One metric of power that has been constant throughout human history is the number of people you are in charge of. You'll find this to be the most common measure of power across all of industries, militaries, cultures and governments.

thrower1234• 7 years ago

Bloated headcount destroys most software. People still think you can throw more people at it and it will get built faster and better, as if we were building the pyramids.

jldugger5• 7 years ago

How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends

Well, I mean, they started off as a HTTP server company with a not lightweight browser, won an antitrust case but lost the war, and reformed as a non profit. Or, well, a for profit company wholly owned by a non profit. At which point they went about rebuilding Netscape suite, the one with mail clients and calendars (and IRC and nntp), as open source software. Then some rogue employees and interns thought 'nobody wants this shit' (https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...) and firefox was born. Well, phoenix, because engineers never do trademark searches when naming projects. So yea, I don't think anyone fully understands Mozilla, except maybe a few annoyed IRS auditors.

I don't know when Mozilla started taking money for search engine placement, but whoever invented the idea should get a few mil, because now that nobody buys HTTP servers, it's all Netscape/Mozilla has left.

From Google's perspective, it's quite easy to see why they fund chrome: each user that converts to chrome is money they dont have to pay Mozilla. Somehow, despite that depressing metric of user share, mozilla's been making more money every time search bar placement contracts are up for renewal. Some of that was likely competition in search engine space, with both Bing and Yahoo under Marissa chomping for some revenue. I guess the layoffs signal that isn't going to happen again?

Or maybe it signals that you don't need users if your main value anymore is to prove to the DOJ there is no monopoly?

zozbot2347• 7 years ago

Phoenix^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFirebird^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFirefox.

BrendanEich39• 7 years ago

Not accurate. Netscape was the browser company, with servers too (I worked with the McCool twins and Ari Luotonen in first month on board). I have no idea what "not lightweight" means but Netscape took over the market from Mosaic and pioneered SSL (now TLS) for secure e-commerce. This is all pretty well known and many still alive who saw it. Taher El Gamal among them. Why do people make up fables on HN?

petagonoral3• 7 years ago

in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets:

2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...

wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. nice job if you can get it.

edit: 1 million USD in 2016 and before.jumped to 2.3 million in 2017! pg8 of form 990 available at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-records/

ntsplnkv2• 7 years ago

is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company.

Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.

demygale• 7 years ago

I’ll do it for 1.5.

csdreamer72• 7 years ago

I disagree. The CEO seems to be hinting at lean years ahead. She should be cutting her pay instead. Like Nintendo's management did during their Wii U years.

plufz• 7 years ago

There are surely other studies but according to an MSCI-study the correlation between ceo salary and company performance is negative. Guessing there is some lower limit though. https://www.msci.com/www/research-paper/are-ceos-paid-for-pe...

thatfrenchguy• 7 years ago

Given their results that person is clearly not worth that money. I’d feel terrible as a CEO laying off those people while not docking my own pay.

fauigerzigerk2• 7 years ago

Probably not but that is what the market cost is.

Is it really? The average pay for the CEO of a company of Mozilla's size is somewhere around $800,000 according to [1]. And a pretty large chunk of that is performance related.

Of course salaries may vary a lot between industries, but given Mozilla's performance, their CEO's salary appears to be on the high side.

[1] https://chiefexecutive.net/ceo-and-senior-executive-compensa...

bscphil6• 7 years ago

Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.

This is a dangerous limb to go out on an HN, but what if they just didn't have a CEO? Do you think the quality of the resulting product would be significantly worse?

EduardoBautista• 7 years ago

I don't see how that is an unreasonable salary for the CEO of a highly influential tech company. CEO pay for other large tech companies is much higher.

dangerlibrary• 7 years ago

I'll do it for a cool 800k.

aaomidi2• 7 years ago

There's hundreds of other engineers that can probably do as good of a job or better than him.

Just because someone has a CEO label doesn't mean they have to be paid extreme amounts of money.

metajack2• 7 years ago

They were not the CEO until a few months ago. They aren't even Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. They are the chair of the Mozilla Foundation board of directors.

trox• 7 years ago

I think you overestimate the size of Mozilla Corp. As somebody mentioned above, the average CEO salary for a similar sized company is 800k.[1]

[1] https://chiefexecutive.net/ceo-and-senior-executive-compensa...

vondur• 7 years ago

What I don't understand is why they chose a lawyer to run a software development company.

jonathankoren• 7 years ago

Mitchell has been influential in Netscape and Mozilla since the beginning. Also, Mozilla isn’t just a software company. It’s also an technology and public policy advocacy organization.

bduerst2• 7 years ago

An open-source software development company, which is influential on web standards.

C14L3• 7 years ago

From what I read in this thread, it sounds more like she's a political activist.

andrekandre• 7 years ago

1.5 million divided by 70 employees comes to around 35,000 per year...

is this ceo really worth that considering they aren’t making their goals (who’s responsibility would ostensibly be that of the ceo?)

minikites2• 7 years ago

is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company

Change the number and this will apply to most CEOs.

https://www.glassdoor.com/research/ceo-pay-ratio/

According to these numbers, CEOs work 204 times as hard as regular employees.

jaywalk• 7 years ago

CEOs work 204 times as hard as regular employees

That's an interesting (and ridiculous) way to spin the numbers.

One doesn't have to work x times harder to bring x times more value to a company.

melling• 7 years ago

How much harder do software developers work than coal miners?

smm2000• 7 years ago

And average Google engineer work 15x harder than average WalMart employee in US and 200x harder than laborer in India.

A4ET8a8uTh07• 7 years ago

I find it annoying each time nonprofit compensation for various executives is raised. I don't want to derail the thread, but it is especially appalling in education, where entities brand themselves as nonprofit where administration swallows ridiculous amount of money.

Where do you get those executive jobs for relatively unknown entities that pay millions? Isn't there an entire IRS publication about how it is suppsed to be reasonable?

malachismith8• 7 years ago

Mozilla Corporation is NOT a non-profit.

rburhum• 7 years ago

Playing devil's advocate, if you are able to close a deal that is bringing more than 2.5 million a year, then you are definitely worth that amount.

shard972• 7 years ago

Under that premise the .org sale was good for everyone because they managed to make a deal.

marcinzm4• 7 years ago

I mean, Mozilla brings in $450 million a year in revenue and manages $600 million worth of assets.

If she's able to increased the revenue or efficiency by just 1% then she's paid off almost twice her salary.

edit: Fixed pronoun, apologies.

zozbot2347• 7 years ago

She. I don't usually focus on the pronoun thing, but I'll make an exception for once.

staticassertion4• 7 years ago

But Mozilla is doing worse than last year, not better, no?

pbhjpbhj6• 7 years ago

Any employee [at Mozilla] who increases revenue, you just give them the revenue? (Or half of it?)

shawndrost2• 7 years ago

The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its ~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profitable source of the $368 million in Foundation assets that parent cited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

I understand why people are generally peeved about executive compensation, but this conversation is very rote and this is a particularly flamebait-y framing of it.

petagonoral3• 7 years ago

She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet

Like what? The wiki page doesn't tell.

You are making it sounds like she created Mozilla & products herself, rather than an admin/exec role throughout. And also making it sound like her presence alone is what is bringing in ~$500 million.

Is there some connection you would like to disclose?

by the way, I'm not arguing her position.i'm arguing her compensation. nice chart from brendan eich (formerly of mozilla) https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584

malachismith8• 7 years ago

What "foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the Internet" did Mitchell Baker "directly author"?

If you make a claim like that, you need to provide some evidence or citation to back it up.

zelly11• 7 years ago

Why not do if for less, if you are so dedicated to the supposed Mozilla cause? It is a non-profit after all. Random non-profit: Goodwill (way bigger than Mozilla) CEO makes $1,114,375[1]. PETA's CEO makes $31,285[2]. TOR Project executives receive $0 compensation[3].

[1] https://paddockpost.com/2018/02/03/executive-salaries-at-goo...

[2] https://www.peta.org/misc/how-much-money-does-ingrid-newkirk...

[3] https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2017-TorProject-For...

phonon8• 7 years ago

She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did.

https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...

dom964• 7 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks no single person should be earning more than $1 million per year? especially if they are working for a non-profit?

athms• 7 years ago

She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet.

This statement is a fabrication. She was trained and worked as a lawyer. She went to Berkeley, not to study computer science or electrical engineering, but to study law. She graduated and went to a San Francisco law firm that specialized in intellectual property and had many clients in Silicon Valley. She eventually left and worked for Sun in the legal department. Netscape recruited her to help set up their legal department and that is how she became an executive at a technology company. She stayed at Netscape when it was bought by AOL to work on policy issues, but was eventually fired during a series of layoffs.

The only "foundational" piece of Mozilla she authored was the Mozilla Public License.

Any company that lost that much market share would have fired their CEO. At a minimum, she should take a deep pay cut and her compensation needs to be tied to performance.

pnako3• 7 years ago

For comparison, Linus total compensation at the Linux Foundation is around 1.6m; Greg KH around 400k.

staticassertion4• 7 years ago

Has she brought 2.5m of growth to the company in the last year?

zelly11• 7 years ago

This will discourage people from donating. Absolutely disgusting. Maybe it's good for them to go bankrupt, so that other non-profits will learn from their mistake.

ReverseCold• 7 years ago

The minute Mozilla goes bankrupt and Firefox loses funding is the minute the internet is dead. Imagine only having a single client for HTTP (Chrome/WebKit).

The_rationalist4• 7 years ago

How much do they have in assets in 2020?

WhatIsDukkha2• 7 years ago

I'm looking forward to some paid products from Mozilla (including the vpn).

Privacy focused personal zeroknowledge cloud things are needed.

I'd love to have a more elaborate version of Firefox Sync that worked across chromium (and I'd pay for it).

The obvious calendar, mail, etc.

I'd pay for a zeroknowledge hosted Berners Lee Solid service.

Do this stuff and I'll pay well for it.

Andrew_nenakhov4• 7 years ago

Why do you want sync with chromium?

Firefox syncs just fine with Firefox on any platform, including mobile. Just use it everywhere, no?

WhatIsDukkha2• 7 years ago

Because, to me, even lockin to Firefox isn't a good thing.

I still use Chromium for garbage web time coughhackernews*cough for example.

All my actual work and projects are Firefox (tons of vertical tabs) and I don't want them polluted with my trash reading but would still like to see history/tabs etc at least browseable across browsers.

Containers are getting a bit more viable to combine work and consumption but not quite there.

edit - and yes I'm actually just about 100% Firefox mobile already

Spivak• 7 years ago

But then your bookmarks only live in Firefox which isn't always convenient. NextCloud Bookmarks, Floccus for browser sync and an API to add them everywhere else is really nice.

I get that Pocket exists but the whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth -- paying $5/mo to remove ads in a bookmarking service that should just be a built-in feature of sync is gross.

doctorpangloss• 7 years ago

Maybe just keychain integration on macOS. It's too bad that's not a priority. [1]

Keychain support is the only reason I recommend Safari, because password sharing with iOS is so important.

On Windows it's a big mindshare problem. So I'm supportive of their marketing efforts.

Their best bet is to do affiliate selling. E.g. discount Dropbox subs originating from Firefox.

Don't focus on stuff that Google does well, like e-mail. Focus on stuff Windows does poorly, like OneDrive.

So you're right on the money with password sync. Basically nonexistent in Windows. 1password affiliate selling = A+.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400

strict9• 7 years ago

Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops large and small over the past 10 or so years.

In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop, and manage.

But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs, though usually with mixed results.

For Mozilla, axing quality and security first is a bad look when those are crucial aspects of a privacy-first company value.

jonny_eh• 7 years ago

Especially just after this happened: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/10/mozilla-firefox-update-...

weberc22• 7 years ago

I wonder if it's improvements in automation or if QA responsibilities are increasingly rolling up into standard developer roles or because the line between QA and dev is blurring (e.g., software testing now requires stronger dev/automation skills so the QA job looks more like standard software engineering)?

ivan_gammel• 7 years ago

I don't think automation or shift of testing responsibilities to developers is harming QA role in any way, it's just the first candidate for layoffs, because it does not have immediate impact on business. Independent SQA is still relevant, even it it becomes a developer specialization.

xemdetia• 7 years ago

I agree with the concept that it is turning into something else, as I see DevOps/SRE/CI/PM people doing QA work through trying to just make the thing go. It just is leaving a lot of gaps in longevity, complex setup, and building tests either manual or automated to do that better. In the last dozen or so teams I've interfaced with this is just getting worse as I'm seeing lots of situations where things like backup/restore breaks from the last hotfix, upgrade a system a few sequential versions, and only covering X-1/X critical features in ordinary testing. These are things that a traditional QA team would cover after it burns the business/org in one way or another, but since it's not a core focus of some of these people covering parts of the same role it's leaving a lot of not-obvious gaps in a lot of groups.

thrower1234• 7 years ago

Developers are just turning into glorified hatracks at this point, and the results are discouraging. It's no wonder that people burn out when they are expected to do ever more and more with less.

rogueresearch• 7 years ago

The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs

Heck, the burden can be shifted to users! But then you might not have so many users in the future. :(

dgellow• 7 years ago

That seems to work for Microsoft so far.

traskjd• 7 years ago

We see this at Raygun with our Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring products (measuring errors, and end user experience in general). Nearly all power users are more likely to be in product, or very senior/executive developers.

Very low engagement out of QA. I'm not sure if they just have a way they like to work, or they think that if they exist then no bugs make it to prod (don't laugh, plenty of our twitter adverts get comments from folks thinking you don't need any monitoring if you have a tester on the team or if a dev writes unit tests).

Understand how the end user experiences your software. That's the actual source of the truth.

scarface742• 7 years ago

i.e. Netscape.

It was a point of nerd pride on Usenet how well your operating system could handle a Netscape crash back in the day.

Aperocky2• 7 years ago

The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs

This in itself is a not a problem, coming from an oncall minded company. You take care of code you write and you're given time budget to KTFLO.

crazypython• 7 years ago

Mozilla uses AFL, which is a genetic algorithm that tests code paths. They are also transitioning to Rust, which will give them a much bigger safety guarantee over most of their code and a much smaller audit surface for the rest.

Thaxll• 7 years ago

Rust has nothing to do with QA things since most bug are business logic / UI / UX related. QA don't test for those kind of errors.

zozbot2347• 7 years ago

They're transitioning quite slowly, a sibling comment mentions https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_Components this page. Even accounting for how they're obviously prioritizing their efforts to get the best bang for the buck, there will be a lot of critical C/C++ code in Mozilla products for a pretty long time.

SEJeff• 7 years ago

American Fuzzy Lop? It's a fuzzer. I've never heard of a fuzzer described as a genetic algorithm that tests code paths, but that is technically correct.

A fuzzer is not going to replace unit tests or good SDLC, which often involves QA.

zelly11• 7 years ago

Mozilla is good at everything except making browsers. rr is the best debugger I've used. I wonder if there's a way for them to monetize Rust. It seems impossible to monetize a programming language without owning a platform e.g. Microsoft (*.NET), Apple (Swift), Borland (Delphi), JetBrains (Kotlin). FirefoxOS for mobile with Rust as the first-class citizen would have been huge for them. Maybe it's not too late. Take note Mozilla.

If there's anything they're going to be in the history books for, it's going to say Rust, not Firefox.

throwaway5752• 7 years ago

It sounds organizational. The one reference to QA is that the leads were let go, which might mean that the teams were re-orged under a product aligned structure.

There is a lot of "shift-left" emphasis out there, but ultimate their is a conflict of interest problem. I think there's no need to go beyond the "we are losing money" explanation and QA is considered more of a cost center.

zelly11• 7 years ago

If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$.

I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.

Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.

la_fayette• 7 years ago

Cpu usage of chrome is higher on chrome on mobile. Cpu affects battery life more than memory... so firefox is a good choice on mobile.

saagarjha17• 7 years ago

If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$.

And further contribute to the browser monoculture?

I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.

And you've reported this, I assume?

Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.

Really? I explicitly avoid Chrome on my computer because it can't handle the web without chewing through my RAM.

Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.

I would like the experienced Mozilla team to continue to work on their pro-privacy browser than a decent number of people use.

fencepost3• 7 years ago

Could you clarify "recently" a bit more? Clearly it's after the release of uBlock Origin, but I'm pretty sure that there was a big effort to clean up memory use a few years ago.

Maybe it's poor Linux support, I have a distressingly high 4 digit number of tabs open on a Windows box and I don't think I've seen it go past 8gb with multiple weeks of runtime.

Edit: Win10 Pro on a Xeon with 48gb ram available

basch• 7 years ago

SpiderMonkey? SM and V8 are javascript engines. Gecko is a browser/layout engine.

roca9• 7 years ago

I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.

Of course this is not the experience of the vast majority of Firefox users, so it's pointless to suggest that this means something about Firefox's overall quality. You can easily find people making the same sorts of complaints about Chrome.

toyg4• 7 years ago

You were probably not using a production-grade Mozilla build, or a recent one. All sorts of shenanigans go on in the Linux world when it comes to builds.

smnthermes• 7 years ago

Weren't Quantum/Servo/e10 Firefox's saviors?

saghm2• 7 years ago

I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites.

Not sure what was going on with your experience, but I use Firefox on x86_64 machines with far less than 28 GiB of RAM daily and several extensions (including uBlock Origin), and I've never had anything like that happen. I'm not sure how JS-heavy the sites I visit are though, as I don't have any issues, so I don't really pay attention to that.

pitay2• 7 years ago

This is probably too late for anybody to notice but I got FF memory usage down significantly by:

1) Not using the recommended performance settings. Setting 'Content Process Limit' to 2 removed more than half the memory usage IIRC. There are other settings that you will need to go to about:config to change like what size images are cached to memory etc.

2) Use the 'Auto Tab Discard' extension. You will have to configure this to not discard tabs on certain sites or you may lose info you have typed into a webpage. Fortunately this is easily configured by right clicking a tab.

At the moment Firefox is using 700MB to display 5 tabs. 4 HN and on Reddit tab. Given that these sites are close to just text I find 700MB absurd, but that is just the web these days.

wesgarland3• 7 years ago

How, exactly, would you replace Gecko with V8?

One is a layout engine, one is a JavaScript interpreter.

specialist• 7 years ago

Obligatory: quality assurance is not testing.

"...de-emphasizing QA departments..."

I feel like we (the industry) have forfeited. I did a stint as a SQA manager. Coming from a dev background, I took it very seriously, totally immersed myself in the domain, transmuted from skeptical to true believer.

I honestly don't know what to make of today's state of affairs.

For example, today's business analysts often do many of the tasks we used to associate with the QA role. Testing, verification, liaison with customers. Did we just rename the role?

Did "Agile" smother QA? Until very recently, I've never heard an Agile explanation for how to do QA/Test. I mean really do it, not just wave your arms. The "Test Into Prod" thesis, strategy, whatever, is the first intellectually honest, actionable, constructive (criticizable) methodology I've seen which is tailored for our new market realties.

I've never understood Agile. My teams were way more "nimble" (to use a different adjective) using PMI, critical path, iterative, lightest weight decision making, front loading work, managing risk, and so forth. All the battle hardened time proven stuff people untrained in project management pejoratively call "waterfall".

One correct criticism of all failing methodologists, including Agile, is lack of feedback loops. The "throwing over the wall" of work downstream. We designed feedback loops into our processes, some of what today would be called CI/CD. We were definitely not waterfall. (Another is managing transaction costs, something Agile has manifestly failed to do.)

Rant over. Sorry. Now get off my lawn.

celticmusic4• 7 years ago

For example, today's business analysts often do many of the tasks we used to associate with the QA role. Testing, verification, liaison with customers. Did we just rename the role?

The person asking for a features should absolutely be the one signing off on the feature.

tapoxi4• 7 years ago

Mozilla should just ship Chromium with privacy oriented features. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel and keep iterating on Gecko when its obvious there's less and less demand for it, especially when it costs them so much money.

If Firefox was actually gaining share I'd feel differently, but I'd rather see Mozilla switch tech stacks than fizzle out and die.

Andrew_nenakhov4• 7 years ago

Firefox is our last bastion of hope against the browser monoculture.

If you think that the new browser monoculture would be any better than the previous one (IE5-6), you are horribly, horribly wrong.

tapoxi4• 7 years ago

I don't understand that argument, IE was a closed source browser, Chromium is BSD-licensed. If anything the closest comparison is probably the widespread use of Linux.

samantohermes6• 7 years ago

Google controls web standards and Mozilla, so Firefox won't save the web. Mozilla didn't make anything to fight against DRM.

sciurus3• 7 years ago

Statement from Mozilla: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/01/15/readying-for-the-fu...

dman3• 7 years ago

Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time.

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

dralley• 7 years ago

I don't much care for Eich but that graph (as in, what it represents) is just shameful.

aidenn03• 7 years ago

The salary of top executives has gone way up in the past 20 years or so across industries, and largely without relation to company performance.

BrendanEich39• 7 years ago

Remember, I'm the bad guy. Ignore this looting operation amid market share tanking, also do please ignore past board members tied to Epstein. It's all about me. :-/

dpflan• 7 years ago

Wow. This makes me wince. My mind is making an emotional connection here to the .org fiasco and recent posts about "the internet of yore". Something(s) odd, unethical seems to be brewing/happening.

malachismith8• 7 years ago

To be clear... this charts the comp of ONE person at Mozilla (the Board Chair - and now interim CEO).

iamaelephant• 7 years ago

What's your point? That was already immediately clear from the comment, the tweet and the chart. So what's your angle?

bscphil6• 7 years ago

I think your point is the most important one. This is not "Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share" as Eich says. This appears to be a misleading graph of how much one guy has been paid. His salary went way up in 2016, unsurprisingly (shortly after Eich was fired), and Firefox has continued its downward slide from when Eich was there.

sgentle• 7 years ago

I was curious so I put together a chart comparing Baker, Eich, James Cook (the treasurer, not the explorer), and a baseline of 500k with a 10% raise per year:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR2HoMXrWo3H...

throwaway123x22• 7 years ago

It's crazy how much FF's marketshare has dropped. It's such a great browser.

zys5945• 7 years ago

It was

lizzard2• 7 years ago

It is definitely a great browser. I think the market share dropping has a lot to do with browser lockin on specific hardware, and site-specific apps being used more and more. We are losing more and more of the open, public infrastructure of the open web.

pier2510• 7 years ago

Hmm I don't know. I switched to FF 4 months ago and while the engine and dev tools are great, it's simply not as polished as the competition.

For example just look at the alert popups[0], or the non native contextual menus, or the video pop icon. The UI is full of little quirks like that. The tab bar is by far the ugliest one of all current browsers, at least on macOS.

It also misses important features such as multilingual spell checking. For people writing in multiple languages it's a real PITA. I know this functionality can be added with an extension but it slows down FF too much IMO.

[0] https://imgur.com/lODjWSm

fock2• 7 years ago

given Mozillas funding and the fact that most users don't care about browser marketing (except for sneaky performance "tricks" or Google's "want some more speed"-in your face mechanism) I really think, they should focus on the core (e.g. building a browser) and just leave politics (e.g. "safe-sync", "better media integration" - e.g. pocket) out of it completely... And yeah, I'd be more than happy to subscribe to my browser-vendor at this point if this means freedom or not. But not if I look at what Mozilla (and wikipedia) which are raking in money from corporate shills and still want my money to develop their "business" (which is very much specified and as a not-for-profit I don't see the need to "expand")

pastor_elm2• 7 years ago

Firefox Focus too.

shpeedy2• 7 years ago

Firefox eats memory. 4GB of memory is barely enough to run browser and show few tabs.

disconnected• 7 years ago

The decline of Firefox is largely due to Mozilla's incompetence.

If you look at their own statistics [1], you will notice that (worldwide) usage started declining after the introduction of Quantum (November 2017), and dropped substantially after the April 2019 addons outage.

This would suggest, IMHO, that Firefox loses market share when beloved features - customization, addons - stop working or got worse.

This is unsurprising to anyone who has been using Firefox for a long time: the primary differentiation factor of Firefox has always been customization. Messing with that would always be a risky proposition. Nuking the whole ecosystem entirely and starting over in the space of a few of months was simply idiotic. Disabling everyone's addon's because of an admin screw up was just the icing on the fucking cake.

[1] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

paul79863• 7 years ago

Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.

aidenn03• 7 years ago

I don't live in SV, but the impression I get is that nobody cares what you did 25 years ago.

TylerE• 7 years ago

Ubiquity doesn't equate to profitability. In fact, most of the big internet Startups (Twitter comes instantly to mind) lose and money and likely always will.

Thorentis3• 7 years ago

Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry).

tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded Brave instead.

xmprt• 7 years ago

Creating a language 20 years ago doesn't mean you're responsible for everything the language produced. If javascript didn't exist something different would have taken it's place and produced just as much value.

samantohermes6• 7 years ago

HN itself wasn't affected by JS in the life of HN readers, LOL

BrendanEich39• 7 years ago

If it wasn't obvious from my tweet, in a thread on "cancel culture", many valley investors were scared of being mobbed if they invested in me.

bearcobra• 7 years ago

This chart feels a bit disingenuous given that Mozilla's form990s show Eich's salary tracking along basically the same line until his departure in 2014.

hoistbypetard• 7 years ago

Yep.

Blake_Emigro4• 7 years ago

It also doesn't take into consideration revenue growth, which according to the corporation's Wiki page grew much faster and higher in multiples than her salary.

As well, according to the same Wiki, "There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid." It would be a bummer to run a company of that size, be dedicated to it for so long, and not have any stake in it. Imagine her opportunity cost...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

BrendanEich39• 7 years ago

I made a bit over 800K, at the top. Mitchell jumped to 2.5M. Math, do you do it?

pastor_elm2• 7 years ago

Most stats I see put Firefox market share at around 5%. Am I reading the chart wrong?

leeoniya• 7 years ago

taking into account mobile browser traffic (50% of all traffic)...in the US it's about half that based on our visitors. (home remodeling industry / DIY, e-commerce).

ChrisArchitect• 7 years ago

man, the chromium-based MS Edge browser launched today....hm

johanekblad• 7 years ago

Hacker news, please block topics from techcrunch- and verison media-articles. They use a lot of third party cookies, ad banners, fingerprinting and other evil stuff.

floatingatoll• 7 years ago

You should email this to the mods using the Contact link in the footer, as they'll be able to see your comment and respond to it.

jeremyperson• 7 years ago

If you are a Mozilla product user, this is the link to donate to a great nonprofit. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount...

csdreamer72• 7 years ago

This feels really bad. I feel she seems to be hinting that they are cutting people in case they lose revenue.

As others have posted their financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...

They seem to be very dependent on search engine revenue: 91% and 93% for their revenue. Once again, I feel she is worried Mozilla will be cut off very soon.

Still feels like really bad news for Firefox. Microsoft cut their QA people for Windows. Windows 10 to this day still has update issues.

I do agree that Mozilla needs more products to stay competitive. Especially when the Google docs team doesn't fix issues that make Google sheets very frustrating to enter data into with Firefox. Just listen to Linus(TechTips) complain about Google Calendar issues when he pays for the commercial version of GSuite.

I wonder if Mozilla gets cut off from search engine revenue means they will start to develop products/fund OSS competitors to GSuite?

Still, when you introduce new products, that is when you need Q/A the most.

However, Pocket is not one these products. I disable the pocket button on every new Firefox install I do. They have an entire page on it in their financial statement.

And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m). Nintendo's management took a pay cut during their Wii U years before the Switch. And that is what management in general should be doing well before a layout.

The Mozilla steering committee certainly didn't consider this when "we plan to eliminate about 70 roles from across MoCo... ...(were) considered as part of our 2020 planning and budgeting exercise only after all other avenues were explored."

Yoric8• 7 years ago

I wonder if Mozilla gets cut off from search engine revenue means they will start to develop products/fund OSS competitors to GSuite?

How would Mozilla fund this?

And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m).

Where do you find this? At the moment, Mozilla doesn't have a CEO, only an interim CEO, are you sure that's her?

flurdy2• 7 years ago

Where do you find this?

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584

ndesaulniers• 7 years ago

Some of my friends are affected; does anyone have advice from experience that could help?

Yoric8• 7 years ago

1. Don't panic.

2. Your worst enemy at this stage is depression/exhaustion. Sport and social life are important to keep this at bay.

3. Brush up your CV, your interview skills.

4. Organize cross-reading of CVs, simulate interviews for each other.

5. You may need to go through numerous interviews. It sucks.

aazaa• 7 years ago

All of this is part of the organization’s plans to become less reliant on income from search partnerships and to create more revenue channels. In 2018, the latest year for which Mozilla has published its financial records, about 91 percent of its royalty revenues came from search contracts.

This raises the question of what products Mozilla plans to make that will generate revenue. The article doesn't address this.

I found these after a quick search, all of which appear to depend on Firefox to some extent:

- VPN/password manager called Lockvise

- Pocket recommendations and sponsored content

- Firefox Monitor, "a free service which allows people to check whether their email address has been a part of a recent security breach"

- "DNS over HTTPS" and "Encrypted Server Name Indication", "... both of which we’ve partnered with Cloudflare to test in the U.S. market."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/

ww520• 7 years ago

Mozilla should provide products and services that are one level above the cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GC) since it doesn't have the scale and datacenter resources to compete. Mozilla should provide at the product level that's consumer facing.

Mozilla can focus on online related communication and collaboration products. Some examples: email, messenger & audio/video conference, online identity, and security.

Email - make a web-based and an offline version.

Messenger & audio/video conference - can be easily tied in with the browser.

Online identity - people and company pay to have verified online identities and brands.

Security - encrypted communication/email/message, anonymous services, vpn, etc. SSL, domain name, DNS.

elkos• 7 years ago

Mozilla blog update: "Readying for the Future at Mozilla" https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/01/15/readying-for-the-fu...

mjw10072• 7 years ago

I wonder if they got less (if anything) from the settlement from the Yahoo (Oath) lawsuit than they'd been planning on.

tanilama• 7 years ago

If MSFT bought Mozilla to counter Google, that will be hilariously glorious to fulfill a cycle, but makes logical sense.

jml7c5• 7 years ago

Come to think of it, did Microsoft ever consider replacing their rendering engine with Gecko, rather than Blink? I'm surprised they ceded such control over the future direction of the web to Google.

thrower1234• 7 years ago

If it was still Ballmer Microsoft, this would be absolutely on brand - spend a couple years and a huge effort on pivoting Edge to Chromium, then acqu-hire a different product in the same lane and mothball all of that investment.

pos52• 7 years ago

Sad

lizzard2• 7 years ago

Well, it's been a truly amazing place to work, and I've enjoyed it so much, right up until being laid off today. Really the smartest and coolest engineers I've ever known and the best community! I have had my hand in shipping every version of Firefox since around version 30 and it's been great. Especially working in such an open environment. Onward to the next adventure.

mattlondon• 7 years ago

Sorry to hear you were laid off today.

Good luck with your next adventure and thanks for your work with Firefox!

Yours,

An appreciative Firefox user.

x2f10• 7 years ago

I'm sorry to hear that. Thank you for helping create an amazing browser. Best wishes!

Aperocky2• 7 years ago

As someone who jumped from chrome since quantum came out, I can't appreciate Mozilla enough, sadly things are not made to last...

I'm guilty too having used such great tool but haven't directly contributed anything.

But from what I hear, it seem the layoffs are directed not by technical reasons, and amazing people were let go. In this case, I fear for the future of firefox, which are not well protected or funded like the open sourced titan Linux.

pbhjpbhj6• 7 years ago

Mozilla gets $$$$ from Google, they seem pretty well funded?

shaklee3• 7 years ago

Sorry to hear that, but hope you find something you like just as much.

chaz6• 7 years ago

As a long time Firefox user, thank you! If Mozilla fails, the world wide web will be owned by corporations.

remote_phone• 7 years ago

My friend used to work for Mozilla. She said she has never had a more boring job. She said there was no work to be done, her boss was remote and never asked her for deliverables. She was well paid with a 40% cash bonus and she would go on yearly boondoggles. I told her she should stay but she couldn’t bear it so she left after 2 years.

She said part of it was that they couldn’t save money because they were a non profit so all the money they got they had to spend, which caused over hiring.

zozbot2347• 7 years ago

This would be the Mozilla Foundation (not Corp), right? And I don't think it's literally true that a charitable foundation has to spend everything it gets - they can still save for a rainy day or even build up an endowment over time. They can't disburse profits obviously, but AIUI that's not the same thing as saving money internally.

IfOnlyYouKnew3• 7 years ago

She said part of it was that they couldn’t save money because they were a non profit so all the money they got they had to spend, which caused over hiring.

She-if she exists-is wrong. And I’m doubting her existence because nobody working at an NGO would be able to hold onto such superficial misconceptions for long.

mindfulhack• 7 years ago

This article and thread has put a baad taste in my mouth regarding Firefox.

But like Tesla, I still want Firefox to succeed. I'm not sure I'll donate again however. They seem to be just fine on their own.

sida• 7 years ago

I am starting to see a lot of tech layoffs. Bubble popping?

musicale2• 7 years ago

“You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen

I don't want subscription garbage, and I don't want Firefox advertising stuff to me.

However, I have no idea how I'd try to fund Mozilla when most of their work is on a product that they give away for free.

I can't imagine that grants from foundations or the government could cover their budget, and I can't really see them being amazingly successful with apps (although I would pay for a bulletproof, high quality ad blocker for iPhone) or hardware (although Purism's phones and laptops seem kind of in Mozilla's ballpark, I doubt they are making much money.) Nobody wants to pay for web services, and it's hard to compete with the many cloud incumbents, so those don't really seem like a good options either. Running a consulting business to fund the browser doesn't seem like a winning idea. Development tools seem to be free from the likes of {Microsoft, Apple, Google} as well, so that doesn't seem like a great business. I can't imagine many people paying for Rust or webasm tools either. Perhaps web game development tools or platforms? Anyway, it's a hard problem.

So HN, does anyone have any actual, serious, good ideas on how Mozilla can make money and keep delivering a good Firefox browser (and Rust, webasm, etc.) for free?

rudolph9• 7 years ago

Donate.

mtm7• 7 years ago

This is a difficult problem. Donations wouldn't be reliable/stable enough to fund the company, and selling a different product (SaaS, consulting, etc.) would realign Mozilla's incentives to have its best people working on its revenue generator instead of the browser.

I know this'll be an unpopular suggestion (and it's not something I necessarily want), but the elephant in the room is _selling_ Firefox: I would be happy to pay for their browser provided it was more polished than the competition. I would even pay a yearly fee. (Again, not ideal, but I'm just brainstorming.)

Or maybe find a way to sell an "enterprise" Firefox to nontechnical companies who are privacy-oriented? I'm not sure how realistic this is.

The only other way they're going to be able to do this is to find something as creative as reCAPTCHA's business model [0]. With so many users, maybe there's an idea there.

[0] https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/recaptcha-...

musicale2• 7 years ago

Some of the better Mozilla product suggestions I've seen that I could imagine people paying for:

- @firefox.com email hosting without advertising/tracking (besides advertising firefox in the domain!)

- blog hosting without advertising or tracking

- non-dodgy vpn service

pnako3• 7 years ago

Why not something like the Linux Foundation?

Stop all the marketing and the nonsense advocacy, focus on developing a browser, get other companies to fund development. It's in the interest of quite a few vendors to have a good, neutral browser.

modo_mario6• 7 years ago

The linux foundation gets money because quite a lot of products, companies depend on it. Their servers, their iot devices, etc, etc A lot of the code contributions come from the industries that depend on it not just volunteers or people payed with donations by small time linux lovers.

Nobody directly depends on Mozilla and or features in their product and so nobody will give them money because of that. (you can argue rust trough kubernetes and such is an example of the opposite but despite their big influence and contribution it's not really a mozilla product) Electron has chromium at it's core, CEF apps have chromium at their core, all the other popular alternatives have chromium at their core and google has nice control. Despite that this dominance is ultimately bad for everyone. Google gets too much control over internet standards and their implementation. It is trash. and Mozzila depends on them too for their funding.

I'd say we even risk that they wouldn't get hit with monopoly rulings if Mozilla and firefox dies despite their competition being utterly dependant on and at the mercy of the direction of their product.

rexreed• 7 years ago

Why does Mozilla Corporation have 1,000 employees? Just an honest question.

bzbarsky6• 7 years ago

Because browsers are hard. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059393 for some comparative numbers.

ausjke• 7 years ago

I guess, in addition to Chrome, Microsoft just _Edged_ Mozilla out a little more.

I use Linux as desktop and for me Chrome has been the choice for the last few years. The only thing I use most often from Mozilla is its MDN site, which is absolutely great.

modzu• 7 years ago

i submit a bug report to the ff bugzilla and their reply to me was, "can you fix it"? i thought, uh oh..

Slashbot2• 7 years ago

Well I dunno.,. maybe it was good.. ever since Windows 8 came out (which was a pile of fucking shit) I would say things have gotten worse.. Windows is complete garbage as far as actual desktop improvements.

From Win98>Win2000>WinXP>Win7 it has been a slow but steady improvement in stability and features.. sure could have been better, but compared to Linux desktop distro's which none of them can barely even fucking match WinXp in terms desktop features and stability.. nvm the power shell extensions and eco system which don't exist. Because that only comes from good API's documentation and community that isn't completely stupid ... I would say that MS had a fairly good team of people up until the release of Win7, after that they seemed to have got a retarded shit for brains CEO Satyan noob tard, and replaced all the skilled people with fellow idiots.

And now Win10 is a stinking pile of broken and bug infested noob trash... it's built on the work that proceeded it, but they sure have done as much as possible to ruin that while doing fuck useful as an improvement in the underlying system let alone the UX/UI which hasn't improved at all its at best worse, they've just tacked on crap everywhere.

disordinary2• 7 years ago

I don't have the same issues with Windows 10 but I only really use it for work and some gaming so I'm hardly an authority on it. Any issues you have might be due to the fact that they got rid of the Windows team awhile back.

lostmsu• 7 years ago

Sadly, I have to agree. There have been just a few of really good features in Windows after 7: app sandboxing, first party VR support (if not for that, we'd only have locked down VR platforms like PS VR and Oculus), the new Mail client, and using voice to set reminders and alarms (when it works). Maybe better support for tablet mode in Mail, browser and the Start Menu, and the dark mode lately.

Outside of that list, I'd struggle to name a single thing in Windows, that became better. Number of bugs certainly increased. Specifically, search and language switching are the worst offenders.

TheGrassyKnoll2• 7 years ago

I don't use Windows (linux), so couldn't say how great it is or not, but the shareholders are loving Satya Nadella. MSFT is up about 160% in the last two years.

sstangl4• 7 years ago

I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case.

I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10 years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.

apaprocki• 7 years ago

We... like SpiderMonkey very much. Contact in profile ;)

Redoubts• 7 years ago

Oh lol, almost forgot about your terminal stack.

gregschlom• 7 years ago

Friendly tip: maybe put your contact info in your HN profile?

sstangl4• 7 years ago

Oh, thank you! I added it.

_kp6z• 7 years ago

Sounds like a pretty clueless layoff, I guess I expected better from Mozilla than usual corporate derp. If there was truly no dead weight, surely the management could have scaled back their own comp for misdirecting the company? Very few people understand what it means to be a leader in corporate world.

scarface742• 7 years ago

How much could they have scaled backed their comp to save 70 jobs?

deepaksurti• 7 years ago

Many corporate leaders are Peters at work [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

ksec2• 7 years ago

for misdirecting the company?

As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised.

At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again.

Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.

Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser, But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few senior engineers with a decade of experience.

I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.

gsvelto2• 7 years ago

A fairly large number of managers have been laid off too.

waste_monk• 7 years ago

Just curious, what is the breakdown of "classes" of people layed off.

By which I mean developers vs managers vs other assorted e.g. "tech evangelists" or whatever it's called.

zozbot2347• 7 years ago

I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode.

Just curious, but could Cranelift (or rustc_codegen_cranelift, I'm not sure which would be the closest) also acquire a C-transpiling backend, making it a viable replacement for mrustc? There might be quite a few people willing to fund that sort of work, since it could suffice to bring Rust to a whole lot of platforms that people care about.

sstangl4• 7 years ago

Yes, it's plausible that were Rust to adopt Cranelift as a supported backend, you could use Cranelift as an intermediary to translate Rust MIR (via Cranelift CLIF) into C. Outputting functional-but-horrifying C would not be terribly difficult.

The CLIF format is low level but relatively architecture-independent.

roca9• 7 years ago

There's also https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe

wslh• 7 years ago

Could you be a match for https://eos.io/news/eos-virtual-machine-a-high-performance-b... ?

lachlan-sneff• 7 years ago

Is Dan still there?

sstangl4• 7 years ago

I spoke to Dan to let him know that I'll need to hand off my work, and he didn't mention anything. So I assume he is.

At this point I don't know who was affected.

mylons• 7 years ago

sorry this happened to you.

andreasgal• 7 years ago

Shoot me an email agal at apple. Also feel free to give my email to anyone else affected.

krambs• 7 years ago

That's cool.

samat• 7 years ago

For others who are interested in who's the parent is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gal

pabs3• 7 years ago

Igalia are hiring for WebKit and related work:

https://www.igalia.com/jobs/

hartator• 7 years ago

Shot me an email at julien at serpapi.com.

Avi-D-coder• 7 years ago

How many people are left working on Cranelift?

RavenessaX• 7 years ago

We have many job openings at SpaceX for senior software engineers, please do apply! https://www.spacex.com/careers/list?field_job_category_tid%5...

bemeurer• 7 years ago

If you’re interested in non-compiler, HPC Rust work reach out at bernardo at standard dot ai

awill• 7 years ago

Stupid question, but doesn't Mozilla make around $500MM revenue a year, and have a little over 1000 employees. That seems like it should be profitable.

BrendanEich39• 7 years ago

Your number is high, estimating from user population and search revenue share market rates.

modarts• 7 years ago

That’s terrible, really sorry that happened to you. The good news is that you have an extraordinarily rare and valuable skill set as a compiler eng

pascalpaillier• 7 years ago

Your experience may be invaluable to us -- we're building a homomorphic virtual machine for machine learning, all open source and in Rust. Send me an email to pascal.paillier@zama.ai.

kraken-eng• 7 years ago

Kraken is hiring Senior SW Engineers with extensive Rust experience for our backend services team. The team is remote. Check out the link below to apply or get in touch at leon at kraken dot com

https://jobs.lever.co/kraken/4c864c8f-bde6-443d-b521-dd90df0...

wdanilo2• 7 years ago

LUNA (http://luna-lang.org) - write to us! :)

I'm one of the founders. We are looking for senior compiler engineers (GraalVM) and senior WebGL developers (Rust ) in our team. We are doing a visual programming language for data science and we just got funding of $2.5M. We'd love to chat :)

wdanilo2• 7 years ago

In case anyone is interested, here is a more formal description of positions we are looking for: https://github.com/luna/hiring

joshsyn• 7 years ago

Are you guys moving away from haskell?

zeuxcg• 7 years ago

If you're interested in language runtime work (in C++) e-mail arseny at roblox.com

shanbar• 7 years ago

GitHub is hiring, we have quite a few roles posted, and many more opening... https://github.com/about/careers

artemis1666• 7 years ago

Your experience seems like it would be great for embedded flight software development. Please email tyler.butler at lmco.com if you or others in your situation would be interested in working on NASA's Orion program.

dzlobin• 7 years ago

Facebook is definitely looking for folks with compiler experience. Feel free to reach out at dannyz [at] fb

ntnsndr• 7 years ago

Any word about whether this affects Thunberbird?

sciurus3• 7 years ago

AFAIK no Mozilla Corporation employees have been paid to work on Thunderbird for years now, so there's nothing to cut.

nicolas_t• 7 years ago

I would have expected in that email from the CEO something like, "I will myself take a massive salary reduction and divide my salary by 2". But strangely, it's never something we see during mass layoffs... I mean her salary is pretty much the salary 15 to 20 software engineers.

flybyair2038• 7 years ago

What did Mitchell mean by "Most will not join us in Berlin"?

yoasif_3• 7 years ago

They are meeting for an all-hands meeting in Berlin soon.

thecrumb• 7 years ago

This is sad. I don't really have any interest in whatever 'services' Firefox has in mind but I'd actually pay for a good browser - maybe a monthly fee. I really use no local apps these days - everything is IN my browser so whatever I was paying for apps I'd be happy to chuck towards a secure, updated browser...

overcast5• 7 years ago

Only in fairy tale land does CEO/Executive compensation reflect performance.

manfredo• 7 years ago

Many CEOs derive a significant portion - often even the majority - of their compensation from performance-based bonuses. Compensation not only reflects performance, it is directly tied to it.

bostonvaulter2• 7 years ago

Short-term performance, which can often warp long-term incentives

conductr• 7 years ago

Not always attributable to executives. The company may just have some inertia and the guy who negotiates the best employment contract wins.

nitwit005• 7 years ago

The price of oil goes up, and all the oil company executives get bonuses (it sounds silly, but this genuinely does happen).

A lot of these compensation packages are well intended, but they aren't without problems. People who make bad decisions often get performance bonuses regardless.

jjoonathan• 7 years ago

Yeah, they get a metric shitton of money if the company performs poorly and two metric shittons if the company performs well.

rantanplan• 7 years ago

Yes, Marissa Mayer being an excellent example!

overcast5• 7 years ago

Millions/Billions were paid out in bailout money, to the very same people responsible for collapsing the housing market in 2009. Compensation for that level is complete bullshit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/business/31pay.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/16b-of-bank-bailout-went-to-exe...

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/banks-paid...

dang5• 7 years ago

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22060372 and marked it off-topic.

overcast5• 7 years ago

My comment was neither, and I provided three sources below.

swills• 7 years ago

Something I noticed about Firefox today, when I was trying to troubleshoot something:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601925

There are quite a few places where the browser makes requests and they are not logged in the Network section of the Inspector.

_nickwhite• 7 years ago

To the 70: Thank you for contributing to such incredible software for all these years. Your contribution to my life is not insignificant. Good luck on your next chapter.

To Mozilla: Let's figure out this monetization thing. Heck, I'd pay for Firefox to keep it as great as it is and independent.

alwillis2• 7 years ago

Apparently Brenden Eich, who helped develop Firefox when he was at Mozilla, seems to be innovating with monetizing a browser, first with cryptocurrency and now with sponsored images: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061348

im3w1l• 7 years ago

Sad they for these people, for Mozilla and for the whole web. Hope Mozilla's fortune turns.

Brokedamouth• 7 years ago

I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families - many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic culture, all around.

gred• 7 years ago

Hawaii. Huh. Families haven't been invited to our company Christmas party for the past 7 years.

kamaal3• 7 years ago

Two days back I wrote this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034293

I doubt if this is just with Mozilla. Things like these are come as job perks when you enter management. And this one of the reasons why you must aspire to be a manager and not a programmer on the longer run.

>The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures.

They will always come up with reasons why they need to do this. The most common one is they need to be fresh with brains in clouds so that they can to talk to clients etc well. And they are doing this for the employees good.

“Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”

- George Orwell.

>This is not even included in comp.

Things like this generally go in some top level budget and the are approvals are not even audited at item level spending. Like no asks if you had a $100 dinner. It just goes into a group by statement in some dashboard. This is also why so many managers spend lavishly. It's almost anonymous spending. And money once given is never asked back.

If you think this is saying something. Wait till you discover how comp works in those roles. Pretty much anything given is never audited and its given fairly unchecked. Big bonuses and stock grants are just every day activities.

As in Indian who worked in the US for a while, I've even seen Green cards handed to manager's pets like candies. Again no asks questions, no audits done. Its just how awesome managerial jobs are.

>The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last.

I doubt if military or any people structure works this way.

Don't fall for these pep talk like speeches.

ncmncm2• 7 years ago

Only in the Marines.

t0astbread• 7 years ago

This sounds like you should aspire to overthrow, not become, management.

anon4636374• 7 years ago

I used to work at Stanford, once upon a time. Our boss got us training for a week around Hollywood with a Jag as a rental. Our boss'es boss seriously put in to have helicopter rides to work, and they definitely had $100+ per diem and expense accounts. What's interesting is when your boss has self-approval over their own budget and expenses. They're not really big on accountability so much as expanding prestige and pyramids on their sides of the org charts.

Similarly, Big 4 and MBB tend to have healthy expense accounts and fringe benefits.

PS: One of my coworkers kept a counter for all-hands meetings because previous said entitled boss'es boss tended to go full mission statement by overusing a particular "motivational" word during their carefully-choreographed, dog-and-pony PowerPoint. Dilbert and Dogbert would've both doubled hand/pawpalmed.

jldugger5• 7 years ago

As in Indian who worked in the US for a while, I've even seen Green cards handed to manager's pets like candies.

I wasn't aware greencards were something managers could hand out.

_Codemonkeyism• 7 years ago

"I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures."

Mozilla was captured by career executives and people with an ageneda - and money for years was not spend on engineering but squandered. I've been using FF since Mosaic days on and off (lately on again as Brave doesn't block more and more ads) and I'm said there is no alternative (FF hangs Twitch for me for which I need to use Chrome, WHY?)

Now they lay of senior engineers.

jmchuster• 7 years ago

$500/night for a hotel in NYC sounds relatively cheap. $400 is about the lowest you can find. If you find $350, I would really recommend you not stay there.

anon4636374• 7 years ago

Price and value have very little correlation, especially in such a narrow band. Airbnb NYC Manhattan ranges from $35 to $326 with a high confidence interval, peaking at $95. 5 stars with excellent reviews costs from $153 - 295 on Orbitz. In conclusion, you're talking out of your posterior without evidence or experience.

smeyer• 7 years ago

I think you're out of touch with pricing or have a very high bar for what you consider acceptable in a hotel. When I was in New York last month I paid $125 for a perfectly pleasant room with good online reviews (in the top 20% or so of NYC hotels on TripAdvisor). It was well located in Manhattan walking distance from most of what I wanted to do and I had no complaints.

phonon8• 7 years ago

Unless your criteria is 4+ stars in an excellent location, or at at very peak time of year, those prices are completely out of line.

fapjacks• 7 years ago

Mismanagement.

Let me have Rome for but a single eight-hour workday.

iamleppert2• 7 years ago

Mitchell Baker should be ashamed of her performance at Mozilla. Serious missteps in the development of Firefox led to the rise of Google Chrome, and only recently (and arguably too little, too late) have they seen the light and prioritized the re-development of Firefox.

Nearly all of the other projects at Mozilla that aren't related to the browser itself have been abject failures. They have not only failed in their core product against Google, but have shown that they are completely incapable of innovation in other areas of tech.

Her letter reads like someone who is completely clueless. Getting rid of people while earmarking $40 million for a so-called "innovation fund" with no real strategy?

They are hoping some half-baked VPN product generates enough revenue to make them independent of Google's search deal? Please remember this post when that product fails to deliver. It's not a matter of time, it just makes no sense in any kind of timeline and at this point Mitchell Baker is grasping at straws.

the_duke2• 7 years ago

Firefox did become horribly slow compared to Chrome and lost a lot of market share in the tech savvy community because of it. I also don't understand how they could fall so far behind with their primary product.

(they finally caught up again now, I switched back to Firefox about 2 years ago)

But:

Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imaginable.

Then came the rise of mobile and tablets, with forced Safari on iOS and Chrome by default on Android/Chrome OS, with little incentive to switch...

The bulk of market share loss was inevitable.

Yoric8• 7 years ago

Firefox did become horribly slow compared to Chrome and lost a lot of market share in the tech savvy community because of it. I also don't understand how they could fall so far behind with their primary product.

This happened in 2011-2015 when Google was investing looooooooots of money in Chrome and Mozilla was betting the farm on FirefoxOS. Since then, Mozilla has improved Firefox a lot, but it's hard to compete with a company that has a way larger budget on essentially the same product.

dependenttypes4• 7 years ago

Google pushed Chrome on desktop very aggressively via Google Search and bundling Chrome with every software download imaginable.

That makes me wonder, why did something like BrowserChoice.eu not happen for google?

The_Colonel• 7 years ago

Firefox did become horribly slow

FF was never really fast. Early versions worked OK but that was because websites were way simpler and user expectations lower.

Chrome was a big step in performance and all that time until FF 57 Quantum was Firefox simply catching up ...

thu21113• 7 years ago

I think you're assuming Chrome's very existence was inevitable, but it wasn't.

Chrome was created partly because Page just wanted to do a browser, but that wasn't enough by itself. Schmidt blocked a browser project for years on the grounds that it was a low priority and there wasn't much reason because Firefox was doing fine.

What changed things was Google trying to work with Mozilla to contribute resources, push the web forward faster and running into huge problems again and again. Political, corporate, technical. The Firefox architecture was over-engineered but also the Firefox guys thought they were top dog and kept dropping or ignoring Google's contributions for what looked like spurious reasons. Frustration grew amongst engineers who cared about improving HTML and with Page having always wanted to do a browser, now there was pressure from the top and the grassroots. When they got a few key hires who showed they could do a new browser with a much better architecture, and move way faster than cooperating with Mozilla, events were set in motion.

But there's a parallel universe in which Mozilla welcomed the Google contributions with open arms, in which Gecko had been written in normal C++, was easier to work on/better documented, where the app architecture was more conventional and thus more amenable to sandboxing etc. And in that world maybe Firefox would be even more dominant than Chrome. I don't think Mozilla realised back then they either could learn how to work with the Google engineering teams, even to the extent of giving up some architectural control, or Google would wipe them out.

rileymat2• 7 years ago

I am not certain that Chrome replacing Firefox market share was not inevitable with a reasonable product. Between the promotion on google properties and android name, it had to be bad to not get significant market share.

whatthefoxer5• 7 years ago

Fun fact, they promised hundred of thousand in revenue and got less than 1000.

The people let go weren't the people working on the failures for the most part. It looks like each was told "you have to save x% of money from your current operating budget. This can be lay off or by other means"

So layoffs all around,any engineers, some managers, some directors. This means mostly people who are paid more but not essential, hence you see senior people who worked a long time at Mozilla being let go, because most teams don't run services that cost a lot of money.

Note that this directive come from the new CFO and board. Feel free to look em up. When the previous CFO left I feared this would happen (previous CFO had some integrity)

flurdy2• 7 years ago

I disagree. Though I am not in a position to evaluate her performance as interim CEO, I feel Mozilla and Firefox have moved on a lot in the last few years.

When I returned to Firefox a few years ago initially it felt quite behind Chrome, and few odd things like Pocket etc, but these days I can't see any reason to use Chrome. Love the container add-ons, thew new picture-in-picture works great. The leaner Quantum works better. I appreciate the work they do with Rust and webassembly. etc.

arendtio• 7 years ago

So what would be your strategy to increase the Mozilla revenue?

iamleppert2• 7 years ago

If I were Mozilla, I'd focus my efforts on creating a search engine. Search engine tech and computational resources are available these days and dare I say it's perfectly feasible to create an alternative to Google. In addition to that, create a Google docs or at least good Gmail competitor. They have the technical talent to do it, and they could capture a real market of people who would pay for such products, if done well, that are concerned with privacy and don't want to use Microsoft or Google products.

ex_mozillian• 7 years ago

Look at the changes to the executive team at Mozilla in 2017 and 2018 if you want to see the root of the problem.

Look at the changes Chief People Office Michael D'Angelo introduced (after leaving Pinterest), especially the multi-tier bonus system that crystallized the executive hierarchy and made ironclad the gap between Mozilla leaders and the Mozilla proletariat. How much does he make?

Ask yourself- what value or improvement did Chris Lin, VP of Mozilla's horrid IT, hired from Facebook, bring to the company? And look at his overpaid group of Directors, who do not have a single win between them that improved Mozilla's bottom line. Why did they hire a leader from Facebook? Were they trying to sink the ship?

Ask yourself- with all of Mozilla's failed marketing initiatives, why has the CMO never been held to account?

There was great hope that Mitchell Baker would return and clean house where it was needed, starting with many of the execs. This layoff, with so far no indication of leaders being held to account, is a sign that things are not going to improve.

It's a shame, because the people of Mozilla are the finest people you could ever work with. They don't deserve this leadership. The rank and file at Mozilla are amazing, though some of the best were let go today.

jdance• 7 years ago

As an outsider there are constantly small details that are off in product and marketing that hint to this. Its really sad to see, I keep using firefox and get a little sad every time I see these signs that this company does not know what it wants to do. In many ways it behaves like a public company without long term direction

IGotThroughIt2• 7 years ago

Wouldn't have happened if they hadn't forced Brendan Eich out. Just saying. I know as a patron I trust him and followed him over to brave especially for its privacy offering. Removing founders is hardly ever a good idea.

itsangaris• 7 years ago

"officeoftheceo@mozilla.com", aka Mitchell, has a number grammar issues with their email. It's surprising that someone in such a high leadership position, who communicates for a living doesn't have an intuitive sense of basic grammar—especially for such an important announcement…

Cyclone_• 7 years ago

I don't think they've had any vision ever since Eich left.

siwatanejo• 7 years ago

If any of the ones laid off is interested in working for a startup developing a browser extension with WASM (from C#), poke me via email: andrew.forsure at gmail (remote working is welcome; part-time ok too)

dependenttypes4• 7 years ago

They should have fired some of the designers and managers instead.

mherrmann• 7 years ago

A reminder that you can donate to Mozilla [1]. I think it's very important for a free web.

[1] https://give.mozilla.org/

unlit_spark• 7 years ago

What's this mean? Do their jobs get automatized or is this the beginning of the end for Mozilla?

whatthefoxer5• 7 years ago

I had Mozilla hr straight up tell me they wanted me to hire someone based on color regardless of performance difference even if somewhat large and obvious. For you ladies, they indicated clearly that "we have enough women in engineering".

This wasn't exactly a fun moment. I left Mozilla after this. Most of the reason i post all this here now.

anon4636374• 7 years ago

Too many chiefs, and they can the good braves. Top heavy org chart is going to commence years of random re-orgs to dance around the real problem: management. Firefox is of course even more likely to founder going forward.

jug• 7 years ago

If Google moved to more in-house development of Chromium, there wouldn't be many scraps soon left for proponents of the open web to browse with... It's sad to see Microsoft as well as Opera and Brave picking Chromium for their engine when at least I think Gecko is still very much on par with web standards support. It feels like a more sensible choice, including for their own business safety in case Google does some sneaky move to "streamline their development" and "focus on the next generation of smartphones and Fuchsia OS" or something like that. That would be a power move we used to attribute to Microsoft in the past.

I wish Mozilla good luck although I'm shaken by these news and how far reaching the restructuring seems to be. I hope it's not the beginning of a negative spiral where they end up lacking manpower in development and QA to deliver a stable browser supporting the latest web standards and lagging behind, because then they're truly out. We should see already in a couple of years.

Vinnl2• 7 years ago

Interesting announcement not two weeks after announcing that the MoFo board would be expanded: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/01/08/expanding-mozillas-...

MichaelMoser123• 7 years ago

Mr. Corbet is predicting 'perturbations in the job market' for this year. I wonder if he will turn out to be right (also interesting that this news item did get this huge amount of comments)

https://lwn.net/Articles/807748/

butterNaN• 7 years ago

As someone who looks up to Mozilla as a "dream job company", this is disheartening.

0xdead• 7 years ago

Mozilla doesn't need employees when it has so many people white-knighting it on the internet.

dgudkov• 7 years ago

Mozilla lays off people, yet it still doesn't accept donations. I don't understand it - there are tons of people (including me) would gladly donate to Mozilla to keep it afloat. Yet, you can only donate to the Mozilla foundation, but not to Mozilla Corporation (that develops the browser).

gr__or• 7 years ago

Afaik companies can't ask for donations in the US.

malachismith8• 7 years ago

Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit business

solarengineer• 7 years ago

I diligently donate to Mozilla, Wikimedia, and openbsd. After reading about executives and their largesse on various threads today, I do want to know: do donations to the Mozilla Foundation go towards paying the salaries and various expenses of the executives at Mozilla the corporate?

monadamon• 7 years ago

What was Mozilla thinking?!?

I'm hiring a WebAssembly compiler expert. We're an all Rust shop, too. damon@nearprotocol.com

Mozilla lays off 70

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