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Firefox Fail: Layoffs Kill Mozilla's Push Beyond the Browser (cnet.com)
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.
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Garbage.
Mozilla probably should have focused on writing software and staying out politics rather than screw up their fund raising potential by going full on SJW.
Let this be a lesson to companies and non profits a like, its really better to stay out of politics which are beyond your area of direct interest. You will only get hurt.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I use Firefox almost exclusively and I am very happy with it.
I don't see how this article is relevant to Firefox anyway. Who was going to use firefox on a TV, or toaster IoT anyway?
THis is Mozilla being smart so they can put more resources into the projects that matte more, including firefox for mobile and desktop.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The joke is someone that wants to use flash.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
high ranking Mozilla employees don't understand one very important thing about Firefox: it was this popular because it was powerful with its add-ons/extensions.
Throughout its history Mozilla has made changes to Firefox which rendered thousands of add-ons broken, they changed its look and feel without giving an option to go back, and limited the user's freedom in other ways.
You don't fuck with your user if you want the user to keep using your product. Yet Mozilla is frightening us with the complete abandonment of XUL which will kill Firefox's most powerful add-ons which are able to do the things which WebExtensions API are unsuitable for. Even recently introduced e10s rendered four of my add-ons dead - they are marked "enabled" yet don't work at all.
It's a sad story really. Once a powerful web browser, now a weak shadow of itself.
This was obviously a mistake from the beginning, and everyone knew it. Mozilla has been acting like a fat and happy company rolling in cash instead of a company in a competitive marketplace. Firefox is slow and crashy and I'm almost at the end of my rope with it, and it's very frustrating for them to be constantly distracting themselves with stupid projects. Firefox OS? Rust? Some IoT thing? Come on Mozilla. You actually thought you could make a dent in mobile OSes when even Microsoft couldn't? Do you really think you *need* to invent a new programming language just to write a better browser? Do you really think you have any relevance /at/ /all/ in the z-wave motion sensor in my house?
Wake up or die.
I use Firefox on my laptop and my phone because diversity is good. If everyone used Chrome, we would have a monopoly again (anyone remembers IE?).
For the love of God, people, stop using Chrome, Chromium, and all other Chrome derivatives! Google, erm, "Alphabet", has too much influence so as it is. Chrome is nothing but their way of leveraging influence on web standards. We let a company get a monopoly on the web browser before and it was a unmitigated disaster. We cannot let it happen again. Google might be Microsoft but it would be just as bad for the web in its own way. And all talk about "but but but Chromium is free... blah blah blah" is non-sense. Without the backing of Google, Chromium development would freeze up and the browser would die a slow security hole death.
I'm pretty sure that Mozilla has spent the last few years demonstrating that they lost that ability long before these layoffs.
Turns out Mozilla can't compete against the world's largest advertiser who push chrome at very opportunity. And they're double fucked on Android because while technically you can install a second browser, now the google search bar always opens links in Chrome (with a well hidden option to then open in firefox) even with Firefox set to the default browser.
They're locked out of Apple and they're completely marginalised by Google on Android and massively out advertised and Microsoft is pushing their own browsers on Windows. The fact they have any market share at all is a testament to how great a browser it is.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Wasn't the death spiral evident when they tried to turn Firefox into Chrome, but there was already Chrome?
It's a shame, because I've always been a fan of Firefox in general, just not of the numerous missteps Mozilla has made in recent years. They seem obsessed with rebranding, and moving the UI around, and adding clutter with half-related features a lot of people didn't want or need, and making everything work the same way across 73 different platforms. (Their strategy has been similar to another once-great giant of the PC world that is now struggling in spaces it used to dominate, now that I think about it.) Sadly, none of those things matter very much to someone running traditional FF on a desktop or a mobile app equivalent.
I wish they had instead put all of that effort into defending their position as the open/free browser that was customisation-friendly, while implementing solid support for the important new features in the fundamental web technologies. All of the evergreen browsers are awful when it comes to quality of implementation and stability/regressions, but Firefox has suffered from not ticking the new features boxes either, so what is its USP in 2017?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Reading the summary and I'm like "What??" Firefox is the best browser by far. More customizable, better looking, better features. There's no comparison with any other browsers. Chrome's extensions suck. Opera and Vivaldi are ok but somewhat rough on the edges and also their extensions suck. You can use Chrome extensions (which suck anyhow) with Opera and Vivalidi but it's a cludge and they might not work well and are not stable.
As for mobile, it's basically the same thing although Firefox stands out even farther than any other browser, except perhaps Dolphin which is not nearly as trustworthy an organization as Mozilla. One thing that really sickens me about mobile Chrome is the baked-in Big Search search engines and inability to add DuckDuckGo. That alone was enough for me to immediately abandon using it and to not take it seriously as a browser. Google is not nearly as trustworthy/honest as Mozilla.
Yes Chrome's performance can be better but when you start using a lot of extensions and put it under resource load it is just as unstable/crappy as anything else. No browser is absolutely perfect.
Yes Firefox seems to have gone through a period of performance issues when under resource load (yes I often have 100+ tabs open) but seems to be improving as of the very latest releases.
I don't know what the summary is about but it really doesn't seem objective. Firefox is clearly the best browser.