Slashdot Mirror
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.
are nothing but spyware IMHO.
I've been a FF user for a very long time and don't see any reason to even think about switching.
but to what? Oh, Pale Moon is one option.
I'm not donating money because it looks really bad when a CEO who gets paid an excessive amount starts begging for money. If they reduced their pay to reasonable amounts there would be money for more staff and more donations
It creates a trust problem too. If they're willing to do unsavory things to people based on their beliefs, your web browser knows a lot about you. Who is to say that they wouldn't use your browser history against you at some point?
Care to post some packet logs of this spyware behavior? Put up or shut up.
Exactly. All this talk of politics is a red herring. Firefox is becoming irrelevant because they have abandoned the features that make them valuable and embraced features that really don't matter. Or are annoying.
Firefox is still my browser of choice, *despite* all the "improvements" they've made over the last few years. To borrow a phrase from long ago, "It sucks less." At least compared to all the rest.
There are no good browsers anymore. Firefox used to be one, but they're driving the "It sucks" bandwagon as hard as they can, and by the time they finally vanish, there will be nothing left to mourn. For now, they're the best of a bad lot.
Their politics is fine. Good, even. It's their software choices that are the root of their downfall.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
There's no explaining this to someone who has been indoctrinated into believing they always have the "moral high ground", whether or not they actually do.
Most smart businesses will shit bricks if their CEOs, employees, representatives or anyone associated with their brand does ANYTHING, even in the slightest, to offend or otherwise piss off even small groups of their customers.
Even if a group of people only represent small portions of your customer base, a 1-3% drop in your market share can equate to a tanking stock price, boards replacing executives, layoffs/downsizing, etc. But if you piss off roughly half of the country? Well that's OK because they're deplorable and you don't want such unwashed Nazi KKK member redneck backwoods uneducated stump-jumping hillbillies giving you money anyway.
Then wonder why your customer base is steadily dropping, because those deplorable people are only a fringe minority of nutcases, right? Right?? Again, a smart business stays the fuck out of politics and tells their representatives to do the same. Notice you don't see the largest blue chip corporations playing this identity politics bullshit, at least out in the public view where everyone can see it. Do you see Verizon posting BLM nonsense? Do you see IBM letting their employees off to march against Trump? Even if those megacorps are the ones behind the scenes pulling the strings, they're smart enough to keep their fucking name off of it!
Point being, it doesn't make sense from a business perspective to get involved in this kind of public virtue signalling or identity politics. The blue chip companies understand this, the new money trash think they're invincible. Any company that does (looking at you Silly Valley), should expect their stock price to drop and people to slowly migrate away from their products. You see, most people who stop using Mozilla aren't going on Twitter or Facebook to broadcast how wonderful of a person they are because they're boycotting a product. They just silently note to themselves that this company isn't worthy of their business and they move on. When you've got large portions of the population keeping track of these things in their heads and making conscious efforts to actually use products that support their beliefs (or at the bare minimum, keep their mouth shut about what they think), you'll see the death of these companies that only cater to the virtue signalling trendy hoards on social media while paying customers look the other way.
I don't think it had much of anything to do with the kind of politics you're talking about. Firefox rose to prominence by being the better alternative to Internet Explorer. Then along come Chrome, and it's not long before Firefox is just copying everything Google does with Chrome, probably leading a lot of people to ask themselves why they are using Firefox instead of Chrome, and not having a good answer. They've reduced the interface to looking almost exactly like a Chrome clone, they have dropped a number of features people liked, and some things I've seen suggests they may be planning to drop their single biggest selling point in extensions. If Firefox loses NoScript, and some of the other extensions that simply aren't possible on any other browser, what is left as a compelling reason to continue using it?
No death spiral, a google scam. Basically google used insider information to steal as much market share as possible from mozzila, no ifs buts or maybes. Mozzila targeted the wrong market. People do not really browse the internet with mobile phones, they only get want they want at the time. It generates a lot of hits because of numbers of people but per person, outside of filling an immediate need, the browsing does not really happen, simply a very bad reading format, too small. Browsing - "to access and view (website content) with a Web browser, usually without looking for something specific" http://www.dictionary.com/brow..., only really occurs on a bigger screen formats.
So Mozilla needs to focus on browsing information (not targeted information retrieval, in and out and done), that leisurely trawl through the internet on the big screen, whether that be a desktop, an all in one big screen computer (55" and up) or next gen virtual reality glasses.
The mobile phone and tablet, are internet search devices not internet browsing devices. Also they need to ignore google's bullshit, goggle is not their friend, goggle is a disingenuous predator and should not be trusted (proof of this, the purposeful attempt to surreptitiously corrupt elections in their corporate favour, really, really, dangerous anti-democratic stuff because it was done in secret and specifically targeted the subconscious of people, sick stuff indeed, as evil as it gets).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As soon as NoScript stops working I will stop using Firefox. There's little else to keep me using this slug.
slashdot: A failed experiment.