I worked in banking and a few startups before joining Mozilla, and neither the culture or technology were ever great. Mozilla has both of these things, and a mission statement that still makes me want to get out of bed in the morning (work for mankind, not for the man).
Is it a sinking ship? Only if we're not up for the challenge of fighting back corporations that want to lock the web being walled gardens. Time will tell, but someone should fight the good fight, even if it's a lost cause.
Plus, you get cool t-shirts, and work from home, which is definitely a lifestyle improvement for me.
Edit: Out of curiosity, I checked to see my defaults and the Homepage is still apple.com. However, the "opens with" settings are set to Favorites (top of the list, probably the default) which explains why it opens with a blank page. So the change was probably whenever they added the Favorites page feature; most likely to compete with Chrome/Firefox/Opera/etc.
Either way I'm going to settings and making it reopen the tabs I last had open.
#firstworldproblems
It definitely is a fight worth fighting. And most people will agree that having several good web-browser options is important.
What bothers me is the strategy that Mozilla used, to try and compete with Chrome by giving Firefox users a browser that looks like, and feeling like Chrome.
I wouldn't want to work for an organisation who makes such ill-advised choices.
Yawn. What did we do this time? Make it faster? Follow platform guidelines or modernize the design style? Adopt an extension model that can be combined with replacing the browser internals? Use rounded tabs? No wait, scratch that, they're square again.
I think he meant a few checkboxes, for choosing things like round corners etc. which should not be too hard. Really necessary?
Maybe not, but you should realize, that you have a shrinking core group of users, while liked Firefox because they could modify it the way they wanted - and therefore did not liked it, when frequently changes broke their setup.
So does not particularly well thought out criticism.
There's also shrinking core group of users, who liked Firefox before it fell back on many areas, crippled by having to maintain compatibility with add-ons that relied on internal workings. We realize that very well.
Configurability comes with an exponential testing and maintenance burden. So no, it's not just adding a few checkboxes. It's what happens with those afterwards.
Which is unfortunately an inherent problem with our legacy customization approach.
And it is clearly not something the vast majority of users want, if they left Firefox for another browser that appears to them less customizable but more stable. We have run numerous user studies about what users actually care for and they have all informed what Firefox is going to be in the future.
EDIT: Looking at bugzilla, looks like the author of Tab Groups decided he was going to put together a report about a year ago, and then never did, so Mozilla doesn't even have any documentation of what functionality would be necessary to implement it, and there's currently nobody interested in implementing it.
Also, Mozilla knows perfectly well which functionality is needed to implement Tab Groups because it was an actual feature of a browser before they decided "it should be a plugin". And now it's impossible to even write a plugin for it.
It's one or the other.
Either the API gives very deep control, and it must evolve as the browser evolves, or it does not, and it can stay stable.
Experience says that Firefox was on the wrong side here by offering complete access, thereby either blocking the browser to evolve, or forcing add-on authors on a compatibility treadmill, effectively getting the worst of both worlds.
Maybe it's possible to do better. But we haven't managed to do so, and neither has our competition. So it's probably not easy.
Firefox has been widely panned the last few years, but that may have been somewhat harsh, and ungrateful to Mozilla as an organisation.
Yes, Chrome has been running laps around them. But that's mostly the result of Google's willingness to outspend them.
There are currently two platforms that have/had the potential to significantly harm Google's cash cow of search ads: iOS and Facebook. A lot of the time that was previously spend on the "open web" suddenly moved into these platforms. Sometimes, apps replaced search, such as for purchase decisions, where people started searching in the Amazon app instead of google.com.
That made Chrome the single most important technology for Google: they needed to push the browser to be competitive with iOS and whatever Facebook was doing. Playing a game, or streaming movies needed to be as fast, easy-to-use, and safe as doing those things with native apps. Developing for the web needed to be as attractive as developing for native platforms.
In that situation, it's no wonder that Firefox lagged behind–the world's best, and richest, software company was developing a browser, with what is likely to be a budget limited only by the diminishing return of ever-larger teams.
There's really no guarantee that Google's incentives will forever remain to be aligned with the users' as they are now. To pour all this misguided disappointment on Mozilla and gleefully cheer their demise is foolish, because sooner or later, it will be important again to have an independent, open, OSS browser.
It's also somewhat illoyal, considering Mozilla's past accomplishments for the web.
I've been working at Mozilla for a few years now, although this is my first job I'd say this is really great already. One Venn diagram I saw in the past was about choosing your job and the title read: pick two among "interesting", "well-paid" and "ethical". Well, I think you can easily get all three when working at Mozilla, or at least that's my experience of it.
Also, I'd suggest that some people have very high expectations when they start at Mozilla, hoping it works like a perfect anarchist (in the actual political sense) and democratic organization. It's not the case: Mozilla Corporation is a company (duh!). So it's slightly less corporate than the regular public company (e.g. there are no shareholders), but it is still working like a regular company: vertical hierarchy, meritocratic do-ocracy, OKR, you name it. Some people don't like that and tend to be more virulent towards Mozilla than they would be towards any other corporation, hence the bad opinions on Glassdoor, in my opinion.
I've been with Mozilla for five and a half years. It's not all been roses--I've weathered a team disbanding and a bad manager--but in the aftermath of each, I've ended up in a better place, and I feel like there are still ample opportunities for me to grow technically and inter-personally.
It feels good to work for a non-profit that's directly defending the neutrality and interoperability of the Web itself, both through advocacy and the direct action of building a modern browser that's competitive with products produced by, literally, the three largest publicly traded corporations (by market capitalization) in the world.
Not only does the mission feel good, the salary and benefits are competitive, and the remote / autonomous / trust-driven culture is worth its weight in gold. I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything to work here, and it's fulfilling work.
Is the ship sinking? I don't think so. Our marketshare percentage has lagged behind market growth, but our absolute user numbers are stable and significant. We're back to focusing on core product improvements, and multi-year experiments like Rust and Servo are paying enormous dividends. If you've used Firefox, Visual Studio Code, Dropbox, or npm in the past year, you've hit code written in Rust. We're also racking up wins in other areas: LetsEncrypt started at Mozilla, and Google's recent abandonment of Native Client was a direct result of the work Mozilla put into asm.js. WebVR and A-Frame.io are taking on a life of their own after incubating at Mozilla. And I'm very, very encouraged by the improvements we're landing in Firefox 57 and beyond: there's plenty of room for growth, and we're aggressively pursuing it.
Mozilla was a turbulent place a few years ago, but the past two years have felt better than ever. Join us!
I've been at Mozilla for ~11 years, worked from home for many years, now splitting my time between the Berlin office and home. I feel good about the work I do and don't intend to change jobs anytime soon.
There have been some leadership / management issues but it's not all bad. Admittedly some people (e.g. those working on Firefox OS) were effected more than others.
There's a Berlin office? Wait, what am I saying, of course there's an office for an organisation like Mozilla in privacy-obsessed Germany.
... are they hiring? EDIT: Yes!
https://blog.mozilla.org/places/2017/04/27/new-berlin-office...
Anyway, that's happened to me at times, and I've seen it happen to other people. I think the dynamics this creates inform a lot of the Glassdoor reviews. I think it's emotionally easier if you have a transactional job: the company pays you, you do something that makes the company money, or at least do what your boss says to do. The pros and cons of emotional detachment are beyond the scope of this comment.
Financially Mozilla is doing fine, and probably will continue doing fine. It's not on my list of worries.
The culture was in tumult too, “old guard” vs. new. Some reviews were written by people who made terrific contributions at one time, but couldn’t turn the corner and took that anger out the door with them.
We re-org’ed (so many re-org’s!). We have an amazing executive and director-level team. We’re well-run, in great financial shape. Our culture has changed (inevitable), and I like where we’re going together. We’re lined up behind Firefox, and we’re doing terrific work again.
I tell interviewees that working here can at times feel like living in a Reddit thread. There are amazingly thoughtful, generous, and mind-glowingly smart people working on the hardest problems across continents and time zones. Sometimes there’s acrimony or trolling. We’re all here because the things we create together can only be made here. We go head-to-head with competitors 50-100x our size. I could go to those companies, and I wouldn’t have a fraction of the impact and the responsibility I have at Mozilla. No company is a fit for everyone, but for someone like me, it’s hard to imagine being happy anywhere else.
My personal experience has been very positive. I'm working full time on projects that impact the shape of the Web, I have good work-life balance and incredible number of highly challenging problems to solve.
I've been with Mozilla since they were a 40 person startup, through the crazy days of releasing Firefox 1.0, sudden growth during Firefox OS days (I spent 2 years working on it!), and now I work on Firefox 57 and beyond. It's been a great, if bumpy, ride and I can't stop enjoying it :)
I've seen bad culture fits, I've seen clusters of bad management and projects that "felt weird". People who got into Mozilla through those usually ended up leaving, but I'd say it's a vast minority of cases.
And wrt. "sinkin ship" - It depends on us. Working for a non-profit has some downsides. We need to stay open, inclusive, some things happen slower, we get much more "negative feedback" from people who feel more entitled to judge our work etc. But it also comes with some huge benefits. I never optimized anything at Mozilla for profit, our leadership sees money as a tool, and we can focus on what we solve with the tool. Some of my long-standing projects are way too "altruistic" to ever exist at Google, Apple or Facebook, because they don't impact the revenue stream. We can and use the Mozilla Manifesto to reason about decisions all the time, and thanks to all of that - the Web community really supports us. So, if we can get amazing products, we may not have the marketing budget of big companies, but we have the support of the global community. And releasing amazing products is something that depends on us, not any external factor. Right now we're pushing for Firefox 57 and I do believe we're on the right track to succeed (yes, I disagree with Andreas :)).
My take is that if you have the "NGO" muscle in you, enjoy spending a lot of time on big problems, like the open-source community model of work (which we drift towards with most projects, although there are pockets that are slow to open up) and are not money-driven (not because they pay bad, just because you can get better money as a hired gun at some corpo ;)), Mozilla is worth giving a try :)
This is quite far removed from "remote hiring limited to some particular countries". A large part of Mozilla's workforce is spread out through Europe, so there can't be too many exceptions.
I'm not sure what the industry standard is wrt adjusting salary based on location, but considering the cost of housing in the Bay area or NYC, it seems fair to pay the folks who live there more than, for example, me who lives in the boonies of Florida.
It's true we don't hire everywhere. Most people are from the EU, United States, and Canada. There is an office in Japan, China, Taiwan, and a small group in New Zealand, with some people scattered about in Australia. The timezones in Asia are really rough, so I believe there's reluctance to hire there for positions where the team is not already located in Asia.
Outside of those countries I think we've used Elance (which is Upwork now?), but I think that's discouraged for new hires.
On the one hand, the people are skilled and super nice and I think you do good stuff when working there.
On the other hand you work on big old software projects with all the tools that grew onto them over the years. So if you on the technical side of things, you better like maintenance work, hehe.
It depends on what you work on. The Servo people feel differently ;-)
Which, by the way, we are hiring for a remote position: https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/734415
This codebase still has life in it though, and the proof is in how far Gecko has come in the last year. Go run Nightly for a bit, compare it to Chrome or current Firefox. It's a big deal.
lolwat?
The ship already sunk once, it just keeps resurfacing every time the water drops because the competition suffers from the CADT Model wrt their attitude towards the internet.
From 2003: CADT == "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers"
> I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.