Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division
theverge.com
theverge.com
30 percent seemed like a lot, but I think it's just 30 percent of the foundation's direct staff. I suspect the corporation employs more people than the foundation? So stuff like development is not included in that count.
I do wonder if the cuts are because of anticipation of lower search revenue from Google with tech restricting legislation on the horizon and google's focus pivoting to AI.
Yes; the corporation is, last I knew, about a thousand, and the foundation about a hundred.
Compared to their other investments, how much money are they actually saving by doing this?
Granted I’m not moralizing about the actual value or correctness of this decision, I know nothing about Mozilla’s inner workings or the work of this division in particular.
We all know how that has worked out in the last decade or so (down to <3% market share from 14% in 2014 and 31% in 2009, though I wonder about absolute numbers as number of Internet users has gone up).
It's fine for Mozilla to recognize this as a failed approach (or team), without dropping their mission altogether.
In what ways? I'd say it was less free and open when Microsoft controlled almost everyone's browsers, when user data was sent in the open (https wasn't standard), .... It was less free and open in early days when users was restricted to specific types of work; for example, I think conducting business wasn't allowed.
> Their advocacy has utterly failed.
What have they advocated for that has 'utterly failed'?
DRM is rampant.
Network neutrality is moribund at best.
Power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few megacorps so you and I can't, for example, run our own email servers if we expect to actually be able to communicate with users of Google or Microsoft.
AI companies get rich doing things that would be illegal for you and me, such as hoovering up copyrighted works without paying for them.
Surveillance is pervasive.
That's just off the top of my head.
> We're back to a browser monoculture, Chrome, and Google controls browsers
Don't forget Apple's browsers, including all the iPhone users.
This is a deeply flawed analogy, and the two situations are superficially similar at best.
The UI is just poorly suited for protracted discussions, to the point that I'm not interested in continuing this comment chain.
I agree, although I'd say that we need a mozilla-like effort that is effective.
> Don't forget Apple's browsers, including all the iPhone users.
Sure, but Apple's world is effectively a monoculture itself. If you don't buy into Apple and their ecosystem, the existence of those things is irrelevant.
Not in this context: Someone claimed above that the web browser market was a monoculture of only Google Chrome. Apple browsers has a large market share, so it's not a monoculture.
> In what ways?
In the past the internet was a collection of a multitude of relatively open and decentralized sites. Now, it's utterly dominated by a few large platforms, frequently focused on exploiting user data to the fullest. Everything else is pretty marginal.
I don't see how Mozilla could have shifted the needle on the rise of big web properties. In fact, I want a browser to be completely agnostic, so if Mozilla had, e.g., prevented the rise of Facebook, then I'd probably conclude that they were anti-open.
What I do want is web standards. IE built its moat, partly, by breaking standards. To be charitable, perhaps standards were moving too slowly.
The sane thing is ming again with chrome. Now, by my choice not to use a chrome engine, i have patches of nonfunctionality. I feel like we've been trojan'd.
The word 'easily' does a lot of work there. How easy? Many standards work well. The Internet, an incredibly successful engineering project, is built on standards.
Apparently centralization is what most regular folks rather adopt.
also internet has become more and more centralized compared to it's heyday. even that alone makes it less free and open.
Apple has a large market share, unless we exclude mobile users.
Now it's Google, so that situation hasn't changed any.
> What have they advocated for that has 'utterly failed'?
Privacy and keeping the web open, mostly. The privacy situation is worse now than ever, and the open web is continuing to shrink.
> It was less free and open in early days when users was restricted to specific types of work; for example, I think conducting business wasn't allowed.
When was this? I've been on the internet since before it was open to the general public, and I don't remember a time when users were restricted to specific types of work, nor a time when conducting business was not allowed.
I'm not sure what you are referring to: What open standards have they tried and failed to influence, and where have they succeeded?
That's most definitely a reference to the comitees Mozilla is part of, i.e. the W3C, but never actually meaningfully influence their decisions. Google just does whatever it wants, and the rest need to chase their implementation or become less relevant as website start using the new features.
> and where have they succeeded?
I thought their point was that Mozilla doesn't...?
If their argument that Mozilla has failed at everything, then it's ridiculous. If they want to evaluate Mozilla overall, then that includes both Mozilla's successes and failures.
If that is not the case, and they have achieved their mission with Firefox being a non-factor, they should instead stop funding FF development.
But you can't say anymore that Konqueror is an alternative to big tech.
I wish we still had a live khtml developed by KDE today but we don't.
We don't have any non big tech alternative today. Firefox is funded by Google.
There's hope with servo and ladybug.
Netsurf seemed like a very nice codebase but somehow it seems to remain small and too limited for most uses.
You're technically correct, it's an independent browser, but I find that moot if it's just a repackaging of a big tech render engine.
Safari definitely isn't the best option to diversify into (Apple shares lots of Google's harmful ideas such as their own version of Web Environment Integrity) but I consider it a significant step up from Chrome.
Most PM and directors were brought in after firefox got big.
They can’t even find a CEO.
The people who made Mozilla great are now working somewhere else.
One wonders if that is the overarching strategy of those who fund OSS.
The difference is that it's less impactful since it has a near uBO-level blocker built-in to the browser.
I think that's the right thing to do. Honestly V3 is pretty reasonable. It's just that uBlock Origin is so important and trusted it should be an exception. It should be built into the browser, only conflicts of interest prevent this. Can't trust an ad company to maintain an ad blocker.
No consistent leadership vision or direction - do everything and anything their staff wanted, almost none of which was actual tech. They hired activists - not technologists.
Look at the results.
On the other hand, random side-projects are necessary for finding new ground before it craters you - like how Microsoft was absolutely cratered by the "smartphone" thing and their too-little-too-late Windows Phone.
The company rotted from the inside by allowing the inmates to run the asylum. Now Mozilla is severing the limb responsible for endless side-quests - but probably way too late.
FTA: "Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We’re revisiting how we pursue that work, not stopping it"
How about you just make the best damn web browser imaginable?
One of the most important and influential technology companies ever ate itself into a failed advocacy group with a couple mediocre tech hobbies. What a joke...
And not that it's the product of any of the people who were let go, but developer.mozilla.org is a pretty valuable and high-impact resource. It's more "advocacy for a free and open Internet" than it is "making a browser".
Difficult if you compete directly with your main money source
Why do I use a Microsoft product to develop in Rust? Mozilla could have built the best-in-class Rust developer experience, a la Jetbrains.
Just another mismanaged, incoherent side quest.
Besides - what were Mozilla's actual goals? Find ways to not make money?
People would throw money at a competent, coherent, privacy-centric, non-Microsoft collaborative office suite. Mozilla had Thunderbird, messaging apps, file sharing apps, etc - and somehow never got organized enough to form a single coherent strategy that would make money. Instead they were all one-off half-baked products that were DOA.
It's dumbfounding. GSuite did so well because it's not Microsoft. Today we have many offerings, from Zimbra to Zoho and more - just imagine what someone with Mozilla's reputation and morals could have done for SMB's in this space, before anyone else moved?
Well, it's really hard.
I think what we really need is for a new company to get started in some other country, where the cost of living and the cost of executive salaries is much, much cheaper. Have that company fork the Firefox codebase, and then only concentrate on Firefox (Newfox? Betterfox?) browser development and maintenance, and nothing else. They could work more like Wikipedia, just taking donations and building up an endowment with that to fund themselves, and keeping their operations very lean so they don't need that much money to begin with.
They could fork Firefox or Chromium, poach some current developers, hire some more, and assert a strong presence on standards.
Do I think a government can fund a group of developers to fork some existing code and run with it? Yes, I do. Radical concept, I know...
Why do you keep bringing up Chromium anyway? We're talking about Firefox here.
As opposed to CERN being easy to build!? I'd say is totally doable, but it doesn't promise filling anyone's pockets at the moment so traction is hard. Who knows, maybe in the future..
As with many things, it's just like Dark Helmet said in Spaceballs: "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
Not to say that the US (or Mozilla or Google) is evil and the EU and LATAM are good (LATAM in particular is a really screwed up place, with a few exceptions that aren't as broken like Chile), but while the US obviously has its problems and does really stupid stuff (see the current election), other places do incredibly stupid stuff too (see Germany disarming, shutting down all its nuclear power and trying to make itself dependent on Russian fossil fuel energy). Honestly, I think the main reason the US is still doing as well as it is (see the strength of the USD) is because everyone else is so busy shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun.
So yes, I totally agree: theoretically it should be pretty simple to just fork Firefox (or Chromium, though I think the former is a much better choice so we don't the whole web dependent on a single browser engine, if for no other reason), poach some current devs, hire some new ones locally, and then become the new "open standard". But good luck getting some national government (or even a group of them, like with the EU) having some vision and backing such a move.
They aren't necessarily working for Mozilla now, because they can see right through a lot of obviously bad moves Mozilla has made, and ridiculously overpaid executives.
"Go where the biggest paycheck is" is people who care more about career than mission. Why would you even want those people, unless you can't get the mission ones.
Honestly not a bad plan.
For example, why is the address bar so tiny on high resolution screens? One would think this is an easy fix that would improve the UX for many people. Yet years go by with unresolved issues in the trackers.
Because in the year of our lord 2024, we for some reason still don't know how big a pixel is. Making a textbox 1cm tall should be trivial, but is for some reason either impossible or never done.
So Slack was blocking me entirely because it thought I was using an out of date Firefox but using the default user agent string it works again.