Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

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192 pointsawkwardpotato181 comments

The 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...

Laura 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-cha...

Usually somebody serving in an interim position doesn’t make big strategic changes.

Are 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?

Obviously she will. Jesus, that's about 2/3rds of the problems of Firefox right there.

How soon before she gives herself a raise? Sorry hackernews, I mean her friends on the board give her a raise?

Because as far as Firefox can tell, that seems to be the job of the Mozilla CEO.

Hey now, Google paid very good money for that antitrust testimony.

Wasn't she part of the board that ok'd the raise for the previous CEO????

I guess that's a wrap then :( Very sad to hear this.

Maybe time to fork Firefox.

Those already exist. The problem is the Mozilla organization has all the money and they piss it away because they are controlled by corporate types who care more about not pissing off their past and future bosses at Google more than pushing open and privacy protecting web standards.

Also, paying tech salaries would mean the suits get to pocket less of the money themselves.

Desktop linux market share is below 2% yet people aren't talking about it being on its last legs like with Firefox. How does Firefox's 3.5% market share prevent people from using it ? Is the 180,000,000 number of monthly active users simply too low ?

But desktop linux market share has never been in the double digits. Firefox once had 30%.

And the low marketshare does prevent people from using it. Because there are sites that only work if you use chrome and maybe safari, because Firefox marketshare isn't big enough to worry about. So users switch to chrome so those sites work, which decreases Firefox market share in a vicious cycle.

The chicken-and-egg is a valid argument. But it applies to Linux as well (no users -> no apps being ported -> no users).

I don't understand the whataboutism.

Linux does suffer from the issue of low market penetration, but it's always had a relatively low market share (and its actually getting better as of late).

Whereas firefox has been on a steady decline for nearly a decade due to incompetent management with conflicting goals, something that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

It's a bit more scary for the average user to install a completely different OS than it is to download a browser they can get rid of in a click or two if they don't like it.

I can understand 2% for linux-based desktop OS, but 3.5% for a browser available on most major OS isn't great at all..

wow you are right, they have 3,5%. I thought they had like 25-30%. Safari had 18% apparently, I know 0 people who use Safari

> wow you are right, they have 3,5%

It depends a lot on the country. In Germany, Firefox' market share is larger since Firefox is viewed as the browser that takes the users' privacy concerns (e.g. tracking, DRM (there still exists Firefox EME-free), ..) most seriously.

According to

> https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germ...

Firefox' market share is about 18.6 % among the desktop users in Germany, i.e. among the desktop browsers, Firefox has the 2nd largest market share in Germany (for all platforms: according to

> https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germany

in Germany, Firefox' market share is currently about 10.4 %).

That explains things, I in fact work as a programmer in germany :)

They even have ads on the subway here

You don’t know anyone who uses an iPhone to browse the web?

Pretty sure that is where that Safari market share comes from.

> You don’t know anyone who uses an iPhone to browse the web?

What you write as a joke is in my opinion not one: when I consider the department hallway in the office where I work at (not tech sector), you will, I think, only find 2 iPhone owners among about 25 people. One of these iPhone owners is the boss, and the other one is a programmer who vocal about not liking Android.

So, depending on your surroundings, it is quite possible that seeing iPhones or iPhone owners is actually a somewhat rare event.

You’re in an emerging market I’d guess. iPhones make up 90%+ of the high value mobile user market.

I work in Germany and I don't know any friend with an iPhone. Of course they exist, but it's a general a disliked phone here for engineers

I'm not in an emerging market. I'm in the US. Of all the people I know, only 3 use iPhones. I rarely see them in the wild, either.

My understanding is that iPhone usage varies wildly between regions of the US. I know that when I go to some areas, I see them everywhere and in other areas, almost never.

> You’re in an emerging market I’d guess.

You are wrong.

Just today, a colleague boasted that he recently bought a new Samsung Android phone and paid about 1500 euro for it (I guess he bought a Samsung Galaxy S24); this is likely more expensive than an iPhone.

But what I rather wanted to tell with my comment above is depending on your surroundings, it can be a very common situation that iPhone fans/users are a small minority.

Except for my mother and sister, actually not no. But I meant on a computer

I know I was meaning that more as a joke but that 18% number is almost certainly PC + Mobile. There is no way desktop Safari has 18% market share. MacOS market share is likely less than 18%

Isn’t that because it includes mobile which is heavily incumbent oriented. I think the FF share on desktop is higher.

iOS is about ~30% of the global mobile market and ~60% of the US market, and most iOS users use Safari as their browser. So you probably do know people who use Safari.

yes, I thought it was on computers also since as you say all mobiles comes with a default browser so the stats are quite pointless because you could just count the amount of androids and iphones and other phones

There exist a number of reasonable Firefox forks right now.

And then convince ~200 million people to use your browser so you can get the same bare bones level of funding via search deals Mozilla is having trouble sustaining on. Things do get in a progressively easier feedback loop after that though.

I almost wonder if the Edge/Brave approach is the smarter approach. Build something on top of Chromium, trading full independence for the ability to focus on differentiation, and then if you ever show you can actually make a more popular browser you're free to take over/break away from/fork Chromium for full independence again at the end. Either way you have a tradeoff.

But building something on top of Chromium defeats the entire appeal of a replacement for Firefox, which is to continue the fight against the Blink/V8 monoculture.

Certainly to some, to others it's just about having a browser which doesn't spy on you, use non-free components, or try to use all of your data for ads. Things are a bit different than the original I.E. battle where a monoculture around a closed source limited platform engine existed and monoculture isn't a neat box for the entire story anymore, especially if you're doing this because you think Mozilla is imminently failing because they can't find the money to maintain a separate engine to user's expectations.

Well, what if you want to.. lets say, keep Manifest V2 compatibility in Chromium? Judging by the compile times, Chromium is one of the largest open source projects out there. Maintaining a backport is going to be a nontrivial effort because your company isn't Google and can't just throw developer hours at the problem.

The amount of work is plenty true but the alternative (on the assumption you're assuming Firefox is failing and needs to be forked or replaced) is maintaining an entire browser and its Manifest V2 instance instead of maintaining a separate back port of manifest v2. Not really much better.

Firefox's future was written when they abandoned the rich add-on ecosystem and tried to compete with Chrome by being user-friendly to normies.

In the end, they lost both the power users and the regular crowd (which will use Chrome or Edge, because those come bundled or are advertised on front page of Google).

It'd certainly be convenient if it were true, but the rate of Firefox's market share decline was completely unaffected by the switch to Web Extensions. There are Firefox forks out there that still keep the legacy add-on interface around, and they of course get comparatively very little use, because very few people actually care.

And, of course, "being user-friendly to normies" has always been among Firefox's chief goals.

It's what got me off FF for a long time. I stuck around on FF 52 ESR(I think?) for ages, the last version to work with pentadactyl.

Then I finally switched to Chrome because it was much faster than FF and my extensions were dead anyway. I switched back a few years ago because FF became good enough again. I wouldn't be surprised if others did the same (and possibly didn't switch back).

When I switched, everyone I provided tech support in my family for also switched. I did not switch them back because I don't think it's worth inconveniencing them at this point.

Obviously my case is a miniscule amount of people, but it wouldn't surprise me if the story wasn't somewhat common.

This is what I did. Just switched back not to long ago.

When I was in college, McKinsey was one of the name-brand, prestigious places students wanted to go and work after graduation. Now it seems to be the laughing stock. What happened?

Nothing has really changed. You just got older and wiser.

MBB consulting is still a prestigious job for most students. It's probably not _as_ sought after as it was a decade or two ago, but I think most students at most business schools would be incredibly happy to get a job at McKinsey after graduating.

And I can guarantee that when you were in school, there were plenty of people who looked at McKinsey exactly like you do now. But most people don't form that opinion until they get out into industry and get exposure to management consultants in the wild.

It always was, you just didn't realize that as a student. At least here in Germany.

Oh, this is going to go the way of Meg Whitman and Marissa Meyer.

Backing 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.

It 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.

They 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.

“Everything else has a lot of overhead because nothing is developed in house“

How does doing less result in more overhead?

Because they're paying other companies to do it for them, and presumably the other companies are trying to make a profit from the deals

I love firefox but I'd never support those initiatives. If I want a VPN I'll just get the full mullvad (in fact I did). The relay is not what I want, I'd want the same thing for web (similar to iCloud private relay for web). Mozilla was working on that but killed it and it was only ever US only so I couldn't use it anyway.

Just let me pay for sync, or just let me donate to the firefox project directly (not the foundation!)

But really their revenue generating projects are very poorly suggested, there's nothing there i would actually want.

I get what you're saying about mullvad, but firefox having a VPN is one more way to get revenue.

I was thinking of signing up for Mozilla Monitor but seeing them already downsizing it is a huge concern.

and here I was, getting ready to sign up to their VPN service

Their = Mullvad.net

yes, but my money would have gone to mozilla, a company that I would like to see do well

literally the only thing i've paid mozilla for lmao. let's see how this works out

Yeah this is insane. I pay for Mozilla VPN now and considered paying for Privacy Guard.

I guess they just don't want our money.

> 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.

> I hope they will give us ability to turn it off.

I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

That's right: we'll decide what's best for you. Stop resisting.

Turn it off? I don’t want it turned on to begin with!

I’m a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix and I am sick and tired of Mozilla using my computer as a staging ground for whatever software they are developing.

I just want a functional, basic browser and whatever addon I want to install, should be an extension.

Personally I have no hopes Mozilla will correct their course but I’m hoping a capable group of hacker finally manage to pull off a fork.

And the ability to turn off whatever guardrails they put on it in an attempt to make it trustworthy.

They 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.

Predicting: swappable on "nightly" versions only and release versions are 100% "I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that"

That's more a Chrome thing than a Firefox thing.

No, that's a Firefox thing: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef...

I see you aren't a Firefox Mobile user.

Aren't those generally burned into the model itself so not really configurable?

Aside from the prompt and any embeddings, yes. But Mozilla's LLM runtime supports running arbitrary llama models, with a vision-capable chatbot interface. So it will be interesting to see if models are swappable in the Firefox AI.

Recently there was some discussion about Jetbrains pre-bundled AI-related plugin:

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-1973/Provide-the-po...

Hopefully Mozilla will do the same, ship the AI functionality as a plugin and allow people to explicitly opt in if they want to use it. Its OK if they show it during on-boarding, as long as there is an option.

There's already AI in there, see the current Translation feature.

Which, I might add, is entirely local.

Perfect example of why this is a bad idea. There is no immediately obvious way to turn off this obnoxious feature, which insists on hogging part of my precious screen real estate. By default, it only has a poorly worded way to disable it for a single language, but no way to simply turn it off forever. (Yes, you can disable it in about:config).

If I want something translated, I'll ask for it. Feel free to add a menu item or a button somewhere to do this, but randomly popping up door hangers really grinds my gears.

On the flip side if I navigate to a page I may not be able to read (due to the language being different to my browser settings), offering to translate it seems like a good and helpful thing. Certainly better than a button I don’t know about buried in a menu somewhere I won’t find.

And if you personally don’t like it, you can disable the feature in the settings. What’s wrong with that?

I assume that they will. They've been better than most at making sure we can disable various things that some users find objectionable.

The last thing that they need is the firestorm that would certainly erupt if they didn't include a way to keep this disabled.

"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.

Firefox is already using AI (fully local) for their new translation feature.

A) 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.

Firefox'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.

I wasn't aware of that, thats actually pretty cool!

Gotta one of the first legitimate uses for AI outside of generating semi-passable scripts and email templates.

That's all very nice, but it doesn't change anything i said.

#2 is just a document classification task, you can do it with DistilBERT.

> #2 is just a document classification task, you can do it with DistilBERT.

I'm assuming there's still an immense amount of effort into ensuring quality and then packaging and distributing it, especially if you're selling as for children, especially if you want it to work on a phone without sending the browsing data to a third party.

Yup, and that’s the thing with the LLM craze - it’s super energy intensive and for the most difficult problems you still need really good hand curated data anyway.

My point is more “we know how to do this already and it’s just a hard problem”.

None of the above. Mozilla is currently working on... chatbots.

Can they get rid of AI? Blockchain was annoying trend but it wasn't wrecking products I actually used.

Yeah, i think it’s tragic that they’re pivoting to the AI fever dream pushed by VCs.

Not without actually removing existing features in the browser (local translation)

The new CEO mantra...nobody got fired for pivoting to AI.

Not yet, at least.

I 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.

This 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.

The loudest people have the least to say, but I think there’s a lot of smart use cases beyond variation on chat bots.

That 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

> launching a confusing spectrum of different services all under the same name

.net all over again.

Yes indeed!

Microsoft is so incredibly bad at marketing. And really not great at products too. People don't pick them because they're the best at what they do, but because they're what everyone else uses and they're acceptable. The whole reason for Teams being adopted so heavily is because it comes with office and it's not bad enough to justify paying for something better. But when having used other products that were actually leading in their class, it's sometimes sad being stuck with it.

In this light I do understand their rush to capture the AI market, being first is just how they work.

This assumes they'll ever actually be ready. I'm pretty sure at this point the "reliability problem" is just not solvable.

you're comment is old but what is the reliability problem? If it's the fact that you can't guarantee the same output for a given input then I agree. There are patterns out there where you prompt an llm with a list of functions, their description, and parameters and then ask it to chose one and the params. Then based on the response you call that function and return the results back to the llm to be used as part of the final response to the user's prompt.

If you can't guarantee the output of the llm how can you ever expect this to always work the same? How can you even test it? It may test out ok 99 times but on test #100 it fails. Any hallucination breaks it or, even worse, produces a confident sounding wrong output. Is that the reliability problem you're talking about?

Squeezing it in before the mass-firings of CEOs who tried pivoting to "AI" with no sense of what value this might actually provide anyone

While 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.

Is it open source? If so, could it be realistically hosted somewhere else?

Yes, 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.

Is 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.

You 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.

These 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.

Yes 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

> 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.

> Is there any sort of corporate structure around one of the forks?

Yes, I have one for Waterfox. I have had one since 2012, first as Waterfox Limited and now as BrowserWorks Ltd (registered in the UK).

When people ask for comparison between forks, as often happens in the community, I’ve actually found it interesting that none of them actually have anyone to hold accountable in a legal sense, and I’ve started to lean into that as a benefit of Waterfox.

A browser is an incredibly privileged piece of software; it’s used to access very sensitive information, but it doesn’t seem to be a consideration a lot of the time about “who” is behind these forks.

I’ve got a few product launches that I hope will get me out under the thumb of middlemen and the murky world of search engine partnerships, and with that, hopefully build up a small team to have sustainable growth and a viable mainstream alternative.

Waterfox will be 13 in March, and one pie in the sky dream was to eventually be able to have a completely detached front end with frequent improvements submitted upstream to the browser engine. So somewhat similar to what you seem to be asking for.

It'd be neat and somewhat funny if there was a privacytests.org equivalent but just Firefox forks.

I would be willing to make a monthly donation, but only if I knew that it was going to the development of Firefox and/or Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is a separate organization and you can donate to that project directly.

The FAQ page [1] says:

"Thunderbird is a project of MZLA Technologies Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation." and

"Gifts to Thunderbird are not tax-deductible as charitable gifts, but are greatly appreciated."

... so I guess Thunderbird is part of a for-profit corporation owned by a non-profit? Why would Mozilla pick this kind of corporate structure?

1. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/#faq

I mean, the majority of work on Firefox is being done by Mozilla. If they stopped working on Gecko, I would be highly surprised if it would get security maintenance, let alone feature work.

Donating to the Tor Browser project could be an idea. The Tor Browser is a Firefox fork, and they are a legitimate org that is on friendly terms with Mozilla. Even to the extent that some Tor features are actually in the Firefox source code, and just disabled by default.

Note also the link to the Mastodon post by Mozilla’s Gabriele Svelto:

https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/111925455266271467

A MBA McKinsey alum will cut just to feel something in the morning, not because it is needed.

I 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.

Interested what problems you’re experiencing? I use Firefox daily on Mac and Windows and can’t think of a single problem or failing page?

I 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.

I don't have any problems on either Linux, Windows, or Android.

So 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

I 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.

Honestly I feel the opposite. Seems mote like a familiarity thing.

Sideberry 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.

Sideberry 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.

That and a lack of a tab bar for tablets have kept me away from switching to FF.

An 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.

I'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?

Does Pocket give them the ability to create useful data for use in their AI efforts?

It certainly gives them the ability to collect a lot of data, which is why I disable it on every install.

The 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.

I follow them on twitter and they rarely tweet. What examples have you got?

Firefox 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.

First 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.

I 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-...

I 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.

Drat, 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-b...

What if they refocused on building an excellent browser?

Sure 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.

Not quite shutting down mozilla.social yet, just scaling back for now it seems.

The 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.

Seems 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.

Could someone explain how does rising interest rates and the current economic environment result in a _nonprofit_ organization needing to layoff staff?

Every organization has budgets, regardless of whether they're for-profit or non-profit.

And this one wants to budget many, many, millions into executive compensation.

The part that develops firefox is for profit. Mostly for Mitchell Baker's personal profit :) And i dont yet see that changing since she left

High 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.

Why would a nonprofit be immune from economic circumstances?

Do non profits operate on no money suddenly?

Their 2022 report (page 8) shows a figure of $6.9 Million for Baker. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...

> 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.

I hope the idea is for the profits from other products to fund Firefox but so far every attempt has failed.

The 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.

Agreed. 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.

The 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.

This would be very sad.

One browser engine would be really bad for the web

Two with Apple still in the game, but that's no consolation to Windows/Linux/Android users.

Genuine question: why is it bad for the web?

Because Google completely controls its development.

I'm having trouble seeing what you mean. Microsoft doesn't employ at least a few hundred developers working on its fork? Ditto Brave? These developers and their managers have no influence?

Why does mobile Chromium still not have extensions? Why was Manifest v3 pushed so heavily? It's not for lack of resources: those are deliberate decisions made for business reasons.

Brave pushed back as hard as possible against Manifest v3, Google refused to budge, and ultimately Google got its way, because Google, the corporate entity, completely controls Chromium's development.

>Brave pushed back as hard as possible against Manifest v3, Google refused to budge, and ultimately Google got its way

OK, thanks for that, but Brave's decision might've been informed by the fact that Manifest v2 seems to make the user too vulnerable to purveyors of shady extensions, and is not really needed except for adblocking (or at least I'm unaware of any use cases except adblocking where Manifest v3 does not suffice). Brave comes bundled with an adblocker that can read the uBlock Origin lists, so whether Brave's aforementioned bundled adblocker uses Manifest v2 to communicate with the browser or some other (possibly private) API might not matter.

Also, just because the Edge team at Microsoft likes web advertising does not mean it has no influence on the evolution of the Chromium-based browser ecosystem.

Brave continues to ship Manifest v2. Technically Brave is a fork of Chromium for this reason, albeit one that hews close to upstream. The reason why Brave had to fork Chromium is that, again, Google completely controls Chromium's development, so they had no choice. Google couldn't care less what Brave thinks if Brave's goals run counter to their own business motivations.

>Brave continues to ship Manifest v2

Pardon my ignorance, then. Your "ultimately Google got its way" led me to conclude that Brave must have indicated that it will stop shipping v2.

Let me summarize. Google completely controls Chrome's development, but at least 2 organizations (Microsoft and Brave) seem willing to maintain their own forks of things in Chromium even if Google abandons those things. Although it doesn't care about empowering users to avoid ads and consequently doesn't care about Manifest v2 (especially since v2 is a big source of malware and spyware) Microsoft does care a lot about Electron, and would gladly maintain its own fork of any code files necessary for Electron if Google decides it no longer wants those code files in new versions of Chromium.

Do you agree with that summary?

What 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?

AI 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?

LibreWolf has been my daily driver for months now. Seems fine.

(I still have Chrome running too, haven't migrated most accounts over yet.)

IceCat is a usable replacement if you disable the add-ons that supposedly keep you safe but totally don't.

Thank you. How is IceCat better than Librewolf btw?

Also, any list of those add-ons?

Are any of the forks targeting the long term release of Firefox?

I have no clue, that's partially why I am asking.

I've recently found out about Floorp. I haven't tried it yet though so I can't give any feedback.

https://floorp.app/en/

Thank 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.

Welcome to the train: Companies Say 'Layoffs' Without Saying 'Layoffs' 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???)

Oxymoron: "refocuses" + "and AI"

But thank god all the other products-and-diversions-that-are-not-Firefox are not on this list.

> downsizes

What an euphemism. Carlin would be proud.

I guess us moving to a smaller place needs a new word. How about "getting cozier"?

Yikes, that says Mozilla Social is shutting down. Wasn't that just a huge focus 6 months ago?

The waves of reactionary fediverse migrants have subsided as Twitter has not in fact burned down, so the interest in it has been lost.

I wouldn't say it was huge. It sounded more like an experiment.

Yeah but nothing that would cost money anyway as it's just Mastodon

Keep this shit out of my browser please.

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