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.

Comments

Probably should have focused more

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[JohnFen]

I don't think that Mozilla's political stances had anything to do with this. I think that it's more deeply connection to decisions that have been made about their product line.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

Yep. I wonder how much of this can be attributed to Mozilla forcing Brendan Eich out of the CEO position.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[orasio]

Mozilla's raison d'être is political. The project had tthe mission of keeping the web open.
Software is the tool to push the politics forward.
It did succeed for a few years, and now it's over.

It's no surprise that now that Firefox is becoming irrelevant, Chrome is becoming more closed, forcing DRM down your throat and all.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? This is the man who invented Javascript we're talking about. He shouldn't be allowed within twenty miles of a computer again.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

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?

Re: Probably should have focused more

[jonnyj]

I personally know several people who switched from Firefox as their main browser as a result of the 'sacking'. It's interesting that a long- term inflection occurred at that point in the Firefox adoption curve. I'm sure that'a not the only factor in Mozilla's decline, but it surely can't have helped.

Unsurprisingly, when I posted that observation on a few sites, I was downvoted into oblivion. It's hard to hear properly when your fingers are in your ears!

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that many people started or stopped using Fx over this issue. Most of the hemorrhaging happened as they started down the path of becoming a Chrome also ran. Why bother with Fx if it's just aping Chrome?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not wrong. It shows their focus is not on software/tech but on feelings. Running a business is not about feelings. It is about getting shit done and showing responsibility for your promises to your customers. Once you decided to go down that route you have immediately alienated at least 50% of your potential. Your customers are thinking 'hey what about the 50 things you promised me and you just chased of one of your best talent?'

They showed they are willing to go after one of the founders of the company just to make a point over something that looked rather petty from the outside. Lets just say it is not on the top of my list of places to try to go and work. I can get that sort of abuse from somewhere else and no in a public forum. You are not going to attract anyone who has even an inkling that you may go after them for something else petty. Think back on everything you have ever put on the net, worked for, or people you have associated with. Consider it fair game to these people. They will and do take things out of context. They can even leave it in context if they do not like what you are doing. You will attract other people who want to fight social causes. That can work at a job like this. However, getting software written rarely has anything to do with social justice.

I have written many thousands of lines of code. At *no* point in my career did I think 'how will this affect the LBGTQ community?'. It just does not come up. Yet mozilla as a business decided it needed to come up. It was a distraction and a detriment to anyone who has been bullied before in life. They see the people doing that to the top guys and they are little peons they are not going to opt in for that sort of abuse. Also any that are in the company, those who feel they are next will leave. They may not even speak up. But they are afraid to. You, in the end game, will end up with an echo chamber of people making grandiose promises and no way to execute because they are too distracted by petty things and have chased off anyone who decents to your opinion.

You think the 'alt-right' is something to be mocked. Maybe it is. I see it as a bunch of people who are tired of their opinions being silenced and with no other way to get things done than to shut up and vote. They are enjoying the hell out of the epic meltdown going on. Why? Because for the past few years they have been gaslighted and told they are irrelevant by a bunch of whiny narcissists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Dagger2]

Who did what now? Eich resigned because of massive public outcry, when it became obvious that him staying around wasn't going to work. Mozilla didn't fire him.

The bigger issue is that Eich was a tech guy. Beard is a marketing guy. Having a marketing guy in charge of my browser is not really my ideal preference.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

I believe that people have a right to a private life in addition to their work life. I don't want my work to be judged on what I do when I'm not at work. Think about what you're saying. You don't want to be inclusive of someone with certain conservative views, but yet you'd be outraged if someone tried to exclude you based on certain liberal views, right? So long as it doesn't interfere with your work, it shouldn't matter. And no, I don't buy the argument that it's different because he was CEO versus a low-level button pusher.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[clonehappy]

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.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[93 Escort Wagon]

Yep. I wonder how much of this can be attributed to Mozilla forcing Brendan Eich out of the CEO position.

I don't think that was the cause of anything; rather, it seems to me that forcing Eich out was a symptom of a larger problem.

For the past several years, Mozilla has seemed to let broad ideology drive its decisions. In addition to the Eich debacle, Mozilla refused to support h.264 for years - even after it was clear that standard had won the web streaming format war. Basically, the company's leadership seems to make decisions based not on what the customer wants or needs, but rather according to the philosophy of those leaders. Certainly they're free to do that; but customers are also free to not use their product when it becomes clear the customer isn't the company's priority.

On a side note... am I the only one who can't figure out why the heck a web browser company needs 1000 employees?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

He was forced out. For all the public outcry against him, there was plenty in support of him. Liberals want their beliefs to win, conservatives want their's as well. That's why this shouldn't factor into the workplace. The only way to succeed is to have a company of only like-minded people which is a scary thought, or you have to shed any beliefs and become a non-person, or we can says nuts to this and let people believe what they want so long as they don't bring it into the workplace.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

For inventing JavaScript he should be tried at The Hague for crimes against humanity.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[networkBoy]

*same* thing caused massive issues at Intel.
CEO historically had been an engineer.
When Craig Barret left and was succeeded by the marketing dept via Paul Otellini shit went seriously sideways.
Paul started this "Yes" campaign where engineering was basically told:
"Marketing will have final say on what goes into product and what will be committed to customers, Engineering just has to do it"
Marketing was told:
"Give the customers everything they ask for"

End result: Product slipping, buggy devices, overall shitty performance, devastated morale in engineering ranks when the blowback was directed at them for underdelivering.

Lesson I took away from that? NEVER put marketing in charge.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[gary_johnson_53]

I think Mozilla should have stood behind Mr Eich. His contributions to Free and Open Source software are enormous. I think it would have been better for all if a man who understood the technology, was the CEO.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[jonnyj]

But the two things - Eich's departure and aping Chrome - are likely related and it's probably no coincidence that their market share fell away at the same time.

When the entire executive of a business is focussed on internal politics, the business quickly becomes rudderless. When the outcome is the loss of an inspirational leader, the period of naval gazing is even more damaging. Combine that with serious annoying a proportion of your previously loyal customer base and your doom is sealed.

Politics and business rarely mix very well.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[rudy_wayne]

Who did what now? Eich resigned because of massive public outcry, when it became obvious that him staying around wasn't going to work. Mozilla didn't fire him.

Technically, that's true. But everyone knows what REALLY happened. Mozilla COULDN'T fire him because it's illegal to fire someone simply because they donated to a political campaign that you don't like. So, behind the scenes, they put as much pressure on him as they could to convince him that he needed to "resign".

As far as I'm concerned, that's even worse and more heinous than firing him.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

Everyone at Mozilla should have stood with him in order to illustrate their commitment for a free and open Internet. Instead, Mozilla is laying people off as they become more and more irrelevant.

garbage article

[buswolley]

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.

Re:garbage article

[Nunya666]

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.

Good for you, but you are in the minority.

Mozilla signed Firefox's death certificate when they decided to abandon their developers and their users by turning FF into a clone of Chrome. Announcing the intentional breaking of add-ons that have millions of users was downright ignorant. Completely redesigning FF so that longtime developers essentially have to learn a new programming language was also ignorant.

Mozilla will die because of their stupid decisions. Unfortunately, only the users will suffer from it. Ignorant management has already been paid, and they'll just move on to another company.

Re:garbage article

[JohnFen]

Sadly, I agree with you.

I still use Firefox, as I have done for over a decade now, primarily because -- despite its flaws -- it lets me do things that no other browser does, and it's the one I trust the most in terms of privacy (although that trust is not absolute). The extension changes sure look like they will kill features important to me, either by making them technically impossible or by making things painful enough for developers that they won't develop for the platform. If that turn out to be the case, then I'll have to get off the FF train, probably to Pale Moon or some such earlier fork.

I don't use Firefox on my mobile devices, though, because it just plain works poorly for me.

Re:garbage article

[serviscope_minor]

Mozilla signed Firefox's death certificate when they decided to abandon their developers and their users by turning FF into a clone of Chrome. Announcing the intentional breaking of add-ons that have millions of users was downright ignorant.

You;d have as many if not more saying exactly the same if they didn't break the extensions though. The old extension model was heavily tied to a browser architecture that has no future. It was either break extensions (and people get mad) or get completely left behind technologically.

Re:garbage article

[steveg]

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.

Re:garbage article

[Dagger2]

It's actually not very tied to anything. Bootstrapped (restartless) extensions are just a Javascript file with two functions, "startup" and "shutdown", that have a reference to an object that allows access to the rest of the code in Firefox. Firefox's Javascript support certainly isn't going anywhere.

(Extensions that require a restart are loaded via XUL overlays, and so are somewhat tied to that particular XUL feature, but it's not like you couldn't port that to HTML.)

Of course, it's true that much of the existing extension code is dependent on current implementation details, but the fix for "extensions break when we change stuff" is not "let's break all extensions and then make it impossible to fix them". That just makes the breakage problem worse, not better.

Re:garbage article

[hairyfeet]

If you want FF the way it used to be? Use Pale Moon, want FF with a newer UI and some whiz bang features added? Use Comodo Icedragon. That is the nice thing about today, we have real choices and aren't stuck in the old "Netscape VS IE" duopoly where you had to choose the least sucky of 2 sucky choices.

Just converted to Firefox

[jfdavis668]

All our business computers were just converted to Firefox.

Re:Just converted to Firefox

[jfdavis668]

Thanks for the update. BTW, my toaster still runs on DOS, so I am stuck using the Lynx browser.

Mobile Firefox

[Thelasko]

I use Firefox on my mobile devices because it allows much better ad blocking than Chrome. However, even with the ads, Chrome is much faster. Fix the speed problem, and it's still an excellent browser. However, it seems like Mozilla is focused on everything but speed.

Re:mozilla == joke

[buswolley]

The joke is someone that wants to use flash.

It's astonishing that

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

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.

Re:It's astonishing that

[CrashNBrn]

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

Re:It's astonishing that

[tender-matser]

The rest of the world was able to pass them by while you demanded that Firefox maintain compatibility with addons

Passed them by towards which end? Neither chrome or an addon-free firefox allow me to even stop/restart animations/timers, rebind keys or inhibit events from reaching the page's javascript.

They even lack features that were standard in ed(1) or more(1) since 30 years ago, like search in page using regular expressions.

At least on linux, chrome won't even let me stop the fucking blinking caret in the address box.

Besides, when will they finish their memory safe rust browser? I just looked at the source code of the 'nightly' branch, and it's still the same XUL/XPCOM garbage all the way down.

Completely unfocused

[orev]

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.

Re: Completely unfocused

[fubarrr]

FYI Mozilla C-levels issue themselves ~$500k salaries. It is this kind of "non-profit". All they do is not to get more users, but more funding and sponsors.

Re:Completely unfocused

[serviscope_minor]

You are mistaken about Rust: it's not a language plugin. It's designed to be the implementation language for the browser, as an alternative to C++. The plan is that the browser will eventually be written in Rust and will run your JavaScript stuff, just as before.

The CEO gets paid too much

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Diversity

[itamihn]

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?).

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

STOP USING CHROME!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:STOP USING CHROME!

[DontBeAMoran]

I don't use Google because I don't want to use a browser made by a company with nearly unlimited funds that thinks they can dictate whatever interface they want on their users.

That's why I'm sticking with Safari.

FireFox... the best browser

[cb88]

At blocking ads on my phone. No other mobile browser allows this. In fact many firefox extensions run in the mobile version...

You're right, I made that mistake with my company

[raymorris]

> 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.

In my experience, this is true. I damaged my business by talking about politics on message boards where my customers gather.

On the other hand, I'm a member of a non-profit which has as one of their core principles that they stay out of politics and advance no particular opinion on controversial issues. The organization focuses on their purpose, not getting distracted by the controversy of the month. This has served them well over almost a hundred years.

Re:Let's be honest here

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to post some packet logs of this spyware behavior? Put up or shut up.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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?

Why's that company so big?

[Sits]

Here's a blog post from Dan Luu on the topic of "Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend". Turns out there's a lot to do in a lot of places...

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[rtb61]

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).

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[FrankHaynes]

As soon as NoScript stops working I will stop using Firefox. There's little else to keep me using this slug.

What??

[execthis]

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.