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Mozilla to lay off 250 employees

Community Tech Policy & News
#1

Mozilla corp is giving the axe to around 250 employees

Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people.

they already let go of around 70 employees this year. Interestingly it looks like they may be laying off entire teams with the suggestion that they’ve ditched their entire threat management team https://nitter.net/MichalPurzynski/status/1293220570885062657#m

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#2

The non press version

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#3

Wow, if you told me they had only 250 employees, I would have been surprised.

#4

That’s quite a slimming. They aren’t looking to sell are they?

#5

This is why I’ve stuck to using minimalist forks of chromium like Bromite. Firefox just never seems quite on par with performance and features. The UI has always looked clunky to me as well, even the new one. I’ll admit I’m not a fan of the new rounded search bar on chromium though.

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#6

I’m hoping the threat management team was a sub-team of a larger security team that can take on the work, because that’s concerning otherwise.

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#7

I have been using Mozilla and FireFox since the transition from Netscape. It is sad that they had to let people go, but being a Not for Profit, they just don’t rake in the doe as much as their publicly traded competitors. Could you imagine what the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corp. could do if hey had a bigger budget.

Having been on the receiving end of layoffs that were all of a sudden, my heart goes out to those people that may have left something better to go to Mozilla. I imagine that they are going to be reaching out to more volunteers to help with bugs and security. I watch a couple of coding streams on Twitch that contribute to Mozilla in the way of bug fixes.

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#8

I believe that is a quarter of the staff.

#9

Imagine if NVIDIA bought ARM and Mozilla. :heart_eyes:

They receive a lot of contributions from what I understand. I suspect the same is going to happen if not already.

#10

Last few years, I suspect Mozilla has done more harm than good.

So… meh

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#11

How so?

#12

Recently, Mozilla:

  • Deprecated the plug-in interface, disabling ALL browser plugins and replacing it with nothing (leaving it in only for Adobe Flash, of all things).
  • Broke all existing browser add-ons, requiring a rewrite of them all as webextensions with fewer features, or just going away.
  • Forgot to renew their SSL signing certificate, breaking all add-ons.
  • Deprecate useful features like RSS, ftp, etc.
  • Keep throwing in more ads and annoyances.
  • Keep copying Chrome UI despite all the user outcry
  • Keep hiding configuration options previously available.

Don’t get me wrong, I still use Firefox… Chrome is worse… but that won’t be the case if Mozilla continues to sabotage themselves.

Frankly, I still find it hard to believe web browsers needs 4GB of RAM and up (Chrome as well as Firefox). I remember Opera fitting on a 1.4MB floppy. It’s still possible to create a lightweight web browser, sacrificing just a few web features, but nobody does it.

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#13

Thanks for the heads up.

I am not an extension guy so the extensions thing did not effect me, but from my understanding, the breakage was due to security. That was the major thing that I was aware of.

I agree that the Mozilla foundation is good at sabotaging themselves. FireFox OS.

FireFox Mobile (which I use) is utter trash unless you are running nightly. Wanna the battery quick on your device. Run standard FF mobile.

On the flip side, I feel that FF and Brave are the most innovative browsers out there right now. And Mozilla Foundation is making the same mistakes that the Gnome developers are doing. Dumbing down the interface to appeal to a market that are not power users and do not care about the tech that is under the hood.

Over all FF is still my browser of choice. Out of the companies out there building web browsers, I think they are less evil and are taking the AMD approach to open source.

#14

Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

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#15

Nobody needs it, a $199 Chromebook can run chrome smoothly.

Anyway it’ll be interesting to see if this does anytu for mozilla or if they’ll be bought by some Chinese company next year.

#16

So they’re low on money and the begathon didn’t work is what I’m getting here.

#17

Sure, but how much less RAM would one be able to get by with if it weren’t for needlessly bloated applications like this?

Browsers gobble up more memory than Java IDEs nowadays, of all things…

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#18

if the average use of RAM was less I’m sure they would use less since development skews to what is logically available.

I agree that applications should only use what they need, but they need this much currently then it should be fine.

#19

If I remember correctly it took place just shortly after Google removed the Dissenter extension from their store, and Mozilla stalled at first but then they took it off too because muh hate speech. And then you were still able to download and install Dissenter manually pretty easily, and then Mozilla changed their signing policy or something like that. Could just be coincidence. Personally, I think if Gab/Dissenter were politically-correct then it wouldn’t have happened.

#20

You think they switched their entire plug-in platform to a new technology because they didn’t like one plug-in? That seems a bit much. Mozilla is Mozilla. They switched because they thought the new plug-in system was better

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