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Firefox Fail: Layoffs Kill Mozilla's Push Beyond the Browser (cnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the firefox-fail dept.

So much for Mozilla's quest to bring Firefox to new and different places. From a report on CNET: The nonprofit organization told employees Thursday that it is eliminating the team tasked with bringing Firefox to connected devices. The cuts affect about 50 people. Ari Jaaksi, the senior vice president in charge of the effort, is leaving, and Bertrand Neveux, director of the group's software, has told coworkers he will depart too. Mozilla had about 1,000 employees at the end of 2016. The layoffs greatly curtail the nonprofit organization's ability to make Firefox relevant again. Once a dominant choice for internet browsing, it has long been overshadowed by Google's Chrome. Mozilla tried to take the web technology powering Firefox to other devices, but struggled to get acceptance. Its shrinking influence comes at a time when more people are browsing the internet on their phones -- an area where Firefox is particularly weak.

3 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. Just converted to Firefox by jfdavis668 · · Score: 2, Informative

    All our business computers were just converted to Firefox.

  2. Stupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Mozilla is run by the most retarded people I have ever seen.

    1.Why do they even have a thousand employees? What the hell are they doing? They are supposed to be making a web browser, not engaging in political advocacy. You don't need a thousand people to maintain a web browser.

    2.Every few years, Mozilla completely changes the interface and dumbs it down for no particular reason other than to be hip because their software designers are a bunch of yuppies. And it usually involves removing functionality in the process.

    3.Driving away Brendan Eich was asinine and once again demonstrates the lack of tolerance of the left and the fact that SJWs have infested Mozilla. Brendan Eich is a technical genius and he is responsible for many of the core technologies of the web (e.g. Javascript) and you are going to drive him away over some insignificant issue because, god forbid, someone has a political opinion different than your own?

    3.Later this year, Firefox will remove support for extensions. In their place will be a WebExtensions API which is only marginally more powerful than what Chrome can do. Many existing addons will never work under the restrictions that system places because WebExtensions offers no way to do low level customization. Several developers of prominent addons have already announced that they will stop development as a result.

  3. Re:It's astonishing that by CrashNBrn · · Score: 3, Informative

    Same thing happened to Opera, when it switched to Blink, and they released a browser that couldn't even create or manage bookmarks - until 18 months later.
    [Usage Share Data from Wikimedia visitor log analysis report]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
               Opera
              Desktop/  TOTAL
    2011/07   3.32%     4.22%
    2012/07   3.00%     4.50%
    2013/07   2.06%     3.24%     - 4 months after Blink
    2014/01   1.51%     2.83%     - 9 months after Blink
    2015/03   0.65%     2.06%     - 24 months after Blink