Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.
Yo, wtf. Their VPN, Relay and Monitor are basically the only Mozilla services I’d use and pay for. To me this sounds like this is the wrong direction. What do you guys think?
Thanks god
This is management speak for… our shit isn’t working, we’re trying to diversify our revenue but so far just wasted heaps of money. We’re going to cut everything to extend the curve but this marks the start of our death spiral.
This is a bit left field but… my big idea is that mozilla should become a payment gateway for donating to other opensource projects. They can skim a few percent off everything. Great alignment with Mozilla’s values & history. All open source projects will end up promoting mozilla. Mozilla has the right brand and user-base to leverage.
Suppose my new tab page showed me a bit of an overview about some opensource project, the people involved, and the people who use the project, and suggested a donation of $1. I would genuinely like that. After a few small donations they could suggest I charge my account with $50 which I can then donate to whatever projects in the coming months as the mid takes me.
Holdup! I genuinely like this idea! On first startup it could ask for it, whether you would like to see this or not.
What they could do as well, is host their on git (forgejo is the name i think) and this donation built in. Basically what github is doing but without microsoft.
That one’s good enough to suggest to them!
Can see why they’d maybe be wary of getting into appraising open source projects if taking payments, but maybe something they could collaborate on with EFF & others. Maybe also that “alternative to” project, which doesn’t currently focus on open source stuff but naturally covers quite a lot of it.
AI seems like the latest shiny object they’re chasing. I wish they’d focus on building the most usable browser. I subscribe to the VPN, Pocket, and Relay, but I guess I’ll have to start looking for alternatives? I suppose Mullvad, Omnivore are the way to go, not sure about alternative to Relay.
Instead of relay, just get your own domain like whatever.com and redirect anything sent to any user name to your real email address.
For example, I’m just in my podiatrists waiting room. I have them [email protected] as my email address. You don’t need to configure new fake addresses just make up whatever you like.
That doesn’t work for phone
Honestly adding more features and services is the wrong answer. They need to strip down Firefox in terms if UI and software bloat. A smaller (ish) codebase would be easier manage.
… and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance.
In what way did they invest anything significant in the mastodon instance? I had been sort of waiting for them to do something interesting with it after all the fanfare with which it belatedly arrived. As far as I could tell last time I looked it was just a bog-standard and rather small instance that hadn’t visibly changed since some engineer took a day or two to set it up last year. What’d I miss?
I think they figured out that its unlikely to make any money. I’m not sure what there plan was as social media companies can do nothing without it being controversial
Company I don’t like lets go of employees: ❌❌LAYOFFS❌❌😡😡
Company I like lets go of employees: ✨✨downsizing✨✨😇😇
I wish they would compete with Kagi and give us a paid search browser.
Their bread is buttered by Google, so that seems unlikely.
I think that we don’t know the whole picture but if they’re canceling VPN, Relay and Monitor it’s because they’re not making enough money on those services. I also think the new CEO feels they’re spread too thin and need to focus resources on core products, which might be a good thing. They’ve gotten a lot of flak for trying different things.
This sucks to hear as I’ve been paying for their relay service for a while now. I’m wondering if I should work to transfer all emails over to another service…
I was also considering signing up for Mozilla monitor, but now I’m not so sure if it’s just gonna get canned soon or not.
Mozilla monitor is not a great deal
Yo, wtf. Their VPN, Relay and Monitor are basically the only Mozilla services I’d use and pay for.
If the “'d” means that you’re not paying for it… That might be the problem 😢
I’m already paying for Mullvad, the VPN service Mozilla is whitelabeling, so Mozilla VPN is unattractive to me. I’m already using Relay, but not to the extent that any paid features would make sense for me (yet). Monitor, I think, is a great tool, but I don’t feel comfortable with giving data brokers all of my PII just for them to delete SOME of my PII. Maybe this will change, though.
So you’re not paying and this is the problem. That’s why they’re refocusing.
If I’m the sample size, then they are entirely refocusing on the wrong things, because I’ve never wanted Pocket, I don’t know what Content is even supposed to be and I can forego the use of AI in my browser.
Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.
I don’t like it either, but if focusing on Firefox lets them market Firefox and somehow win back user-share, then maybe it’d be worth it…
And what did it cost?
VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, apparently. We’ll see what else, in time.
Edit: Oh, and downsizing, fuck. Forgot about that part, that really sucks. :(
this sounds like a cookiecuter CEO who only focuses on hype topics like mobile and ai instead of privacy services has taken the wheel, sad news. thats why i have trust issues when it comes to companies
seemingly VERY common mozilla L.
They are having the wrong direction since years. If anything, this is the same direction.
I have a bad feeling about this… guess it’s time to learn about possible alternatives :/
Alternative to what? Firefox?
You’ve got WebKit, and Chrome/Chromium. WebKit began as a fork of KDE KHTML, and Chromium then started as a fork of WebKit.
Firefox’s Gecko engine is the only other major alternative to those two.
There really aren’t any alternatives. Everything else is chromium.
chromium is based on a fork of webkit; webkit proper does remain – I don’t know how much of an influence google has on it though; all I ‘know’ is that it’s Apple’s adoption of a KDE project.
