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Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI
- brycewray 3y agoNote also the link to the Mastodon post by Mozilla’s Gabriele Svelto: https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/111925455266271467 https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/111925455266271467
- noobermin 3y agoA MBA McKinsey alum will cut just to feel something in the morning, not because it is needed.
- DoItToMe81 3y agoThe VPN is just an upsold Mullvad account, and the social media they run is embarrassingly knee-jerk overmoderated. If there has to be layoffs anywhere, I'm glad they're predominately there.
- pixxel 3y agoI follow them on twitter and they rarely tweet. What examples have you got?
- frays 3y agoCould someone explain how does rising interest rates and the current economic environment result in a _nonprofit_ organization needing to layoff staff?
- SubjectToChange 3y agoWhy would a nonprofit be immune from economic circumstances?
- satvikpendem 3y agoEvery organization has budgets, regardless of whether they're for-profit or non-profit.
- yencabulator 3y agoAnd this one wants to budget many, many, millions into executive compensation.
- tekla 3y agoDo non profits operate on no money suddenly?
- heisenbit 3y agoHigh interest rates means investments are more expensive. Investments aka. expenditures supporting nonprofits by fast growth profit seeking companies (most sensitive and a big factor in the tech eco-system) naturally decline.
- wkat4242 3y agoThe part that develops firefox is for profit. Mostly for Mitchell Baker's personal profit :) And i dont yet see that changing since she left
- silisili 3y agoYikes, that says Mozilla Social is shutting down. Wasn't that just a huge focus 6 months ago?
- wmf 3y agoI wouldn't say it was huge. It sounded more like an experiment.
- wkat4242 3y agoYeah but nothing that would cost money anyway as it's just Mastodon
- dotnet00 3y agoThe waves of reactionary fediverse migrants have subsided as Twitter has not in fact burned down, so the interest in it has been lost.
- beretguy 3y ago> Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” I hope they will give us ability to turn it off. Or at least LibreWolf will turn it off / remove it. I’d rather they add optional small subscription fee to support themselves if they have to than add AI or some other questionable functionalities.
- kbelder 3y agoAnd the ability to turn off whatever guardrails they put on it in an attempt to make it trustworthy.
- creatonez 3y agoThey seem to be inclined towards the idea of running language models on your own computer, given Mozilla released a cross-platform runtime for llama that can make use of either the CPU or GPU. So I won't be surprised if it's swappable.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoPredicting: swappable on "nightly" versions only and release versions are 100% "I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that"
- noirscape 3y agoThat's more a Chrome thing than a Firefox thing.
- coryrc 3y agoI see you aren't a Firefox Mobile user.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoNo, that's a Firefox thing: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firefox#w_what-are-my-options-if-i-want-to-use-an-unsigned-add-on-advanced-users https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef...
- rvense 3y agoIs there any sort of corporate structure around one of the forks? There's no doubt in my mind that if it were organized somehow the community would be able to fund a few developers to work on Firefox alongside Mozilla. I don't want an aggressive split, but I'd like to be able to support the project. I've donated to Mozilla in the past but it apparently was not going to Firefox directly.
- mozempthrowaway 3y agoYou shouldn’t donate. The donations don’t go to MoCo which is the for profit subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation under which FF is developed. All the donations go to MoFo, where they barely covered Mitchell’s salary and what was left went to her pet political projects. People are pretty unaware/misled about how Mozilla is structured/funded. The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep and use Google as the default search engine.
- JohnFen 3y agoThese truths are, in my opinion, a great tragedy. I'd absolutely pay for Firefox if I could, but I can't. > The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep and use Google as the default search engine. Which is a much greater cost than I'm willing to pay.
- wkat4242 3y agoYes exactly, it's so bad that we can't just donate. I donate monthly to KDE and I would to firefox. And no I absolutely won't keep Google
- autoexec 3y ago> The only way you can contribute to FF directly is to keep and use Google as the default search engine. You could contribute with code I guess, or if you just want to throw money at the project hire a developer to fix a couple bugs. As a bonus you get to pick the bugs.
- offmycloud 3y ago
- NoboruWataya 3y agoAn org like Mozilla making a real effort to bring open, privacy-focused AI to Firefox is interesting for sure. But I hope they don't get too distracted by the AI hype train. Interesting that they are still as focused as ever on Pocket.
- gnicholas 3y agoDoes Pocket give them the ability to create useful data for use in their AI efforts?
- autoexec 3y agoIt certainly gives them the ability to collect a lot of data, which is why I disable it on every install.
- gxqoz 3y agoI'm actually shocked that even before these layoffs there was anyone working on Pocket. I have not noticed a new feature in this product for maybe 3 years, with numerous things getting worse. How big is the team? What are they doing all day?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwawa14223 3y agoCan they get rid of AI? Blockchain was annoying trend but it wasn't wrecking products I actually used.
- pupppet 3y agoThe new CEO mantra...nobody got fired for pivoting to AI.
- jsheard 3y agoNot yet, at least.
- chasd00 3y agoI was on a call this morning where a team had decided to break it to their leadership that genai was not the answer they thought it was going to be. I bet there's going to be a lot of that this year.
- __loam 3y agoThis is what is so frustrating about this technology. Everyone seems completely convinced this is going to be bigger than sliced bread but a year later, I haven't seen a truly good killer app. A year ago we had chatgpt, co-pilot, mid journey, and stable diffusion, and today we have basically the some products. I've seen a lot of bad code, a lot of boring prose, and a lot of bad art. Meanwhile there's people breathlessly telling us we'll get agi in 5 years.
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y agoThe loudest people have the least to say, but I think there’s a lot of smart use cases beyond variation on chat bots.
- wkat4242 3y agoThat certainly wasn't Microsoft, they're still full on the "CoPilot" hype train, launching a confusing spectrum of different services all under the same name and all before they're actually ready
- mr_toad 3y ago
- chmod775 3y ago> its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run This always bugged me. Are they expecting Firefox to die? If that happened, there would be little reason for Mozilla to exist. The project lives and dies with the browser. Having a "plan B" is complete nonsense and an unnecessary distraction. I'm glad they're shifting focus back on the browser.
- skywhopper 3y agoAgreed. The goal was to create and maintain an open web browser. If the goal of Mozilla is now to ensure Mozilla continues to exist, that's a bad sign.
- wmf 3y agoI hope the idea is for the profits from other products to fund Firefox but so far every attempt has failed.
- mozempthrowaway 3y agoThe other products are very unprofitable. FF profits actually fund everything else. Search deals on FF are over 80% of revenue yet less than half the company works on FF.
- jsheard 3y agoThe monkey's paw outcome is they re-focus on the browser, but follow Opera and Edge in pivoting to Yet Another Chromium Reskin, massively cutting their development costs while technically remaining in the browser market. Hopefully it doesn't come to that but I'm not ruling it out.
- Atotalnoob 3y agoThis would be very sad. One browser engine would be really bad for the web
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- skywhopper 3y agoSure sounds like they haven't learned any lessons from past trend-chasing. They are shutting down their VR world and their Mastodon instance. This content-free AI promise just sounds like more of the same desperate grabbing for hype, while also cutting jobs and notably not mentioning any actual initiatives to prop up the core product and actual reason for Mozilla's existence. The main difference between the past hype-grabs and generative AI is that genAI is incredibly expensive. So long as Mozilla follows this pattern of chasing the latest hypewagon instead of working on its core product, they will continue to lose relevance. It's too bad.
- zuminator 3y agoNot quite shutting down mozilla.social yet, just scaling back for now it seems.
- pavon 3y agoBacking off of VPN, Relay and Monitor sounds like bad news. They are the Mozilla's only source of income if the Google search deal goes away. Mozilla's financial statements never detailed how much money they were spending on their different segments, so perhaps those projects weren't generating profit, and thus weren't worth keeping even though they brought in revenue. I can certainly see how it would be hard to compete with other business that are focused solely on that market, while Mozilla is trying to use it as a side-gig to fund Firefox. But they were at least an attempt to create alternate revenue streams and seemed like useful products that were complementary to Firefox. I am very skeptical that Mozilla will be able to monetize any AI integration they include, assuming they even build anything worth using given how far removed AI is from their existing competencies.
- mozempthrowaway 3y agoIt fluctuates a little bit but 80-85% of revenue comes from search deals with Google being the dominant one. Everything else has a lot of overhead because nothing is developed in house; it’s just white labeled. VPN is Mullvad, Monitor is OneRep, etc. So even that 15% of revenue doesn’t/barely covers all the product/marketing/etc personnel that work on those teams. Every quarter that segment is behind forecasts - pocket too - mostly because the forecasts are widely optimistic. It’s not a viable business strategy to pursue them much further.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoThey do have their own software for connecting to their VPN, and it is worse than the one from Mullvad. I don't think any significant developer time is spent on improving the software.
- goodSteveramos 3y ago“Everything else has a lot of overhead because nothing is developed in house“ How does doing less result in more overhead?
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
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- krasin 3y agoThe new CEO, Laura Chambers, is an MBA and a former McKinsey consultant ([1]). I would not hold my breath about the future of Firefox. 1. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/details/experience/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/chamberslaura/details/experience...
- n2d4 3y agoLaura Chambers is only the interim CEO. In the original announcement post, it was stated that she would stay for the "remainder of this year", and Chambers later said that she would move to Australia in 2024 [1]. [1] https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-chambers-mitchell-baker-leadership-transition/ https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/mozilla-firefox-ceo-laura-cha...
- stefan_ 3y agoObviously she will. Jesus, that's about 2/3rds of the problems of Firefox right there.
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y agoUsually somebody serving in an interim position doesn’t make big strategic changes.
- Perceval 3y agoAre these "big strategic changes" or are they changes that have been obviously needed for a while and made quickly in order to stop the bleeding?
- huytersd 3y agoOh, this is going to go the way of Meg Whitman and Marissa Meyer.
- __loam 3y agoMaybe time to fork Firefox.
- msub2 3y agoWhile I always marveled at how Hubs survived the 2020 layoffs (which included the people working on WebVR/WebXR at the time), seeing it shutting down is a shame. We used it to run monthly meetups for the WebXR Discord for just about the last 3 years. Very curious what's going to happen to it now, whether it gets handed off to another entity (i.e. Firefox Reality to Igalia) or left to the community somehow.
- mardifoufs 3y agoIs it open source? If so, could it be realistically hosted somewhere else?
- msub2 3y agoYes, both the Hubs client and related backend services (Reticulum, Dialog, etc) are all open source, but it's somewhat difficult to stand up manually. There's Hubs Community Edition which launched late last year that lets you spin up everything necessary in a Kubernetes cluster, which is what I've been working on getting set up on a small Hetzner VPS.
- bluish29 3y agoWhat does scaling back investment means in this case, does it mean shutting down these services? Or does it mean that they will put it on maintenance mode? or just not care about it at all?
- mplewis 3y agoWhat if they refocused on building an excellent browser?
- __loam 3y agoKeep this shit out of my browser please.
- mvdtnz 3y agoI will ditch Firefox the moment they introduce some shitty chatbot no one asked for. I'm already absolutely fed up with the constant problems, missing features and pages failing to work properly.
- mft_ 3y agoInterested what problems you’re experiencing? I use Firefox daily on Mac and Windows and can’t think of a single problem or failing page?
- giovannibonetti 3y agoI use Firefox on Android and, although I love having extensions on mobile, it bothers me that it freezes about once per day. Granted, it restarts automatically on the page I was reading before, so it isn't that annoying.
- freilanzer 3y agoI don't have any problems on either Linux, Windows, or Android.
- piafraus 3y agoSo many people I know don't switch to FF because of missing tab grouping (and no, not a single addon gives the similar fast and nice experience). It's like number one feature and yet they waste time on stuff like this
- 000ooo000 3y agoI would love to use FF but dev tools in FF feels clunky and slow compared to Chromium. It also seems to have some kind of rendering slowness on my Wayland machine that Chrome doesn't have (i.e. 3fps). Not that dev tools is on par with something as fundamental as tab grouping, but I share the frustration of Moz doing silly shit instead of polishing the basics.
- noobermin 3y agoHonestly I feel the opposite. Seems mote like a familiarity thing.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoSideberry provides basically this feature. Its fast. I have over a 100 tabs open right now. I can read the name of every tab, and can group them however I want.
- tuffff 3y agoSideberry is great, but I had to add a custom layout file to hide the default tabbar. In that state I guess it's never getting much traction.
- dotnet00 3y agoThat and a lack of a tab bar for tablets have kept me away from switching to FF.
- breather 3y ago"AI" Well, the company is fucked. I wonder who will pick up the pieces of the browser tech. There are two pieces of tech that AI might apply to: 1) Semantic ad-blocking (this will fuck up their only source of reliable revenue so it won't happen) 2) content filtering for a child-friendly mode. This actually is a good idea, but it won't happen because it'll be easily repurposed to perform bullet point #1.
- creatonez 3y agoNone of the above. Mozilla is currently working on... chatbots.
- russelg 3y agoFirefox is already using AI (fully local) for their new translation feature.
- breather 3y agoA) I don't think that's the type of feature to which they are referring to, B) I wouldn't call that "AI" by the current sense of the word when it can be narrowly described with "automated translation", and C) we've had high-quality translation for well over a decade now with or without Firefox.
- asadotzler 3y agoFirefox's translation is based on LLMs not far off from the AI chatbots in the core tech. It's also nicely local to your machine.
- BonoboIO 3y agoFirefox only exists, so Google can say they have competition. The old CEO brought nothing to Mozilla and was just milking it for money, will this change with this interim CEO? Maybe, but I doubt it. They need to gain market share immediately, if they want to survive and not stay Googles pet browser. They have millions of dollar, use them.
- lostmsu 3y ago> downsizes What an euphemism. Carlin would be proud. I guess us moving to a smaller place needs a new word. How about "getting cozier"?
- pdimitar 3y agoAI in browser? Time to move on after all this time then. Is librewolf good? Or any other browser? I recently provisioned a Linux workstation and I'm very reluctant to install Chrome. The super insecure X11 will not help it stop practically scanning my every key stroke. Any good ideas for a browser on Linux XFCE?
- TrevorFSmith 3y agoIceCat is a usable replacement if you disable the add-ons that supposedly keep you safe but totally don't.
- pdimitar 3y agoThank you. How is IceCat better than Librewolf btw? Also, any list of those add-ons?
- jwrallie 3y agoAre any of the forks targeting the long term release of Firefox?
- pdimitar 3y agoI have no clue, that's partially why I am asking.
- zemnl 3y agoI've recently found out about Floorp. I haven't tried it yet though so I can't give any feedback. https://floorp.app/en/ https://floorp.app/en/
- pdimitar 3y agoThank you, I'll definitely give it a try. I also recently found about the Arc browser for my colleagues and started using it for work because I don't get annoying issues like important websites not working due to too aggressive blocking.
- egberts1 3y agoFirst job of next Mozilla CEO is to fire the board and move the corporate headquarter to Germany. There, I've gone and said the quiet part.
- perilunar 3y agoI like this idea. Germany (10.2%) and Romania (16.6%) have the highest use of Firefox. https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/browser-usage-statistics/#Web-Browser-Usage-by-Region https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/browser-usage-statistics/#Web-...
- eva_cananim 3y agoI strongly disagree. The EU wants to force browser makers to have their browsers trust root certificates issued by EU governments. Mozilla should have already closed their offices in Europe and done everything they can to remove themselves from EU jurisdiction.
- egberts1 3y agoDrat, I just looked up Romania and they too joined E.U. ... in 2007. And the dastardly EU regulation enacted last November 2023: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/article-45-will-roll-back-web-security-12-years https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/article-45-will-roll-b...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Lockal 3y agoWelcome to the train: Companies Say 'Layoffs' Without Saying 'Layoffs' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352293 In this week's episode: * Grammarly Restructures Business to Align With Company Strategy and Accelerate Growth * Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo * SAP shares surge to all-time high after results, plans to restructure 8,000 jobs in push to AI * "JPL Workforce Update" (hey! what about AI???)
- dingi 3y agoSeems like Mozilla still hasn't learnt their lesson. Cut the crap and focus on Firefox. Too bad browsers became too large to maintain an independent community fork.
- karmakaze 3y agoOxymoron: "refocuses" + "and AI" But thank god all the other products-and-diversions-that-are-not-Firefox are not on this list.
- anotherhue 3y agoTheir 2022 report (page 8) shows a figure of $6.9 Million for Baker. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990-ty22-public-disclosure.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...
- iteratethis 3y agoThe mozilla.social downsizing is telling. Mozilla will always be Mozilla. They get about $0.5B each year for free, just by keeping Google the default search engine. Next, they piss it all away on the most fruitless projects and activist blogs, not to forget overpaid leadership. With mozilla.social they were all-in to ride the new wave of alternative social media. And then discovered that Mastodon is just a bunch of hard-left misfits constantly canceling each other. Mastodon is a miserable place and rapidly shrinking. Today it dropped below 1M MAU. Which is half of MAU just a few months ago.