Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division
(theverge.com)236 points by doener 7 days ago
236 points by doener 7 days ago
> While Mozilla Foundation declined to quantify the number of people being let go... The Register understands the current headcount is closer to 120, so presumably around 36 people stand to lose their jobs.
Compared to their other investments, how much money are they actually saving by doing this?
I think it’s a fair question, but I don’t think it invalidates the validity of looking at this particular division and evaluating if it brings the company more value than it costs. It’s like when I cancel Netflix. Compared to my other spending it’s not a lot, and to be honest I won’t even notice the savings. But if the value isn’t there, why spend money on it?
Granted I’m not moralizing about the actual value or correctness of this decision, I know nothing about Mozilla’s inner workings or the work of this division in particular.
A job for advocacy division is to, uhm, advocate for the product and mission.
We all know how that has worked out in the last decade or so (down to <3% market share from 14% in 2014 and 31% in 2009, though I wonder about absolute numbers as number of Internet users has gone up).
It's fine for Mozilla to recognize this as a failed approach (or team), without dropping their mission altogether.
At Mozilla, they advocate for a free and open Internet, user privacy, and more. That's part of the organizations mission. See the OP for more information.
The Internet has never been less free and open than it is today. Their advocacy has utterly failed.
> The Internet has never been less free and open than it is today.
In what ways? I'd say it was less free and open when Microsoft controlled almost everyone's browsers, when user data was sent in the open (https wasn't standard), .... It was less free and open in early days when users was restricted to specific types of work; for example, I think conducting business wasn't allowed.
> Their advocacy has utterly failed.
What have they advocated for that has 'utterly failed'?
One huge success that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in this discussion is the Let’s Encrypt project which was started by Mozilla staff and has had remarkable success in setting up a public key infrastructure that makes it free – and easy – for server admins to configure TLS on their web servers. 20 years ago HTTP was the default protocol for web traffic; now HTTPS is the default.
Firefox is a tool they use to achieve that mission: success of it should correlate with them achieving free and open internet.
If that is not the case, and they have achieved their mission with Firefox being a non-factor, they should instead stop funding FF development.
They can't be preaching one thing and doing the exact opposite.
Pyre Browser is 44% faster than firefox and our running costs are $20 a month. It reduces global energy consumption by 60tWh and allows free speech across all domains. We dont need an advocacy division - we have already freed the internet!
And you are going to open a casino in 2025! Maybe Mozilla should do that too! (see 'roadmap' at https://pyrebrowser.com/docs)
Is there an alternative to Firefox that is not controlled by big tech? One of the saddest outcomes of what seems to be the inevitable demise of Firefox would be that there would be no viable alternative to big tech browsers.
Konqueror has been written in webkit since back when it was called KHTML. It's where apple got the original source code to make Safari.
The KDE folks did some impressive work back then. That the world basically runs on derivatives is quite the achievement.
But you can't say anymore that Konqueror is an alternative to big tech.
I wish we still had a live khtml developed by KDE today but we don't.
We don't have any non big tech alternative today. Firefox is funded by Google.
There's hope with servo and ladybug.
Netsurf seemed like a very nice codebase but somehow it seems to remain small and too limited for most uses.
WebKit has mostly splut from Blink. Really as long as you aren't using a repackaged Chromium you aren't getting all of Google's harmful features by default and are resisting the monoculture.
Safari definitely isn't the best option to diversify into (Apple shares lots of Google's harmful ideas such as their own version of Web Environment Integrity) but I consider it a significant step up from Chrome.
Why don’t they do so now if they don’t even use it anymore?
[dupe]
The workers should fire the execs and convert Mozilla into a democratically controlled worker-owned company.
90% of 2010’s Mozilla employees are gone. Most core employees are gone. Most Firefox-era developers are gone.
Most PM and directors were brought in after firefox got big.
They can’t even find a CEO.
The people who made Mozilla great are now working somewhere else.
That's incredibly sad. I wish those people had forked Firefox and created their own company to rival Mozilla. I would have switched.
There is Zen browser, which is a fork of Firefox. Though no idea who's developing it.
A bunch of randos, which doesn't really inspire much confidence.
That is the problem that got them into this situation in the first place.
No consistent leadership vision or direction - do everything and anything their staff wanted, almost none of which was actual tech. They hired activists - not technologists.
Look at the results.
>No consistent leadership vision or direction
On the other hand, random side-projects are necessary for finding new ground before it craters you - like how Microsoft was absolutely cratered by the "smartphone" thing and their too-little-too-late Windows Phone.
You can google Firefox market share, Thunderbird market share, Mozilla's financial standing over the past two decades, all of their failed social justice endeavors, etc.
The company rotted from the inside by allowing the inmates to run the asylum. Now Mozilla is severing the limb responsible for endless side-quests - but probably way too late.
FTA: "Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We’re revisiting how we pursue that work, not stopping it"
How about you just make the best damn web browser imaginable?
One of the most important and influential technology companies ever ate itself into a failed advocacy group with a couple mediocre tech hobbies. What a joke...
I’ve been following them for over 20 years. Mozilla’s problem is idealism. One project to the next. At the end day, you have to pay your bills.
Hopefully they'll replace them with people who'll make firefox better.
I doubt it. This company seems to have major structural problems, and cutting some stuff here and there isn't going to fix it. Its expenses are huge, and it pays its executives obscene amounts of money, and meanwhile they've been wasting tons of money on stuff like Pocket, AI crap, and now they're pissing off supporters by getting into ads.
I think what we really need is for a new company to get started in some other country, where the cost of living and the cost of executive salaries is much, much cheaper. Have that company fork the Firefox codebase, and then only concentrate on Firefox (Newfox? Betterfox?) browser development and maintenance, and nothing else. They could work more like Wikipedia, just taking donations and building up an endowment with that to fund themselves, and keeping their operations very lean so they don't need that much money to begin with.
What they should have done was build an endowment when they were getting crazy google money. It obviously wasn't going to last forever.
Yes, definitely. It would have been easy back then to build an endowment if they hadn't blown money on so much BS and prepared for a future where they wouldn't have all that money coming in. I think it's too late for them now, and I don't see how they can possibly trim things down into a lean, efficient organization, especially not in the US. That's why I think someone in a cheaper country needs to fork the thing and take over Firefox development. This will probably have to wait until Mozilla is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy though.
Either they need to do drastic cuts & focus on fundamentals. Or a fork with less funding entanglements can. Or an alternative project like LadyBird can.
What's wrong with Firefox? It's my daily browser and works great. What am I missing?
Now that few people use it, major sites are not just no longer testing on Firefox they are actively blocking it. Slack, for instance.
A lot of people here will react to the advocacy cuts, and the idea that advocacy make up such a large portion of the workforce.
30 percent seemed like a lot, but I think it's just 30 percent of the foundation's direct staff. I suspect the corporation employs more people than the foundation? So stuff like development is not included in that count.
I do wonder if the cuts are because of anticipation of lower search revenue from Google with tech restricting legislation on the horizon and google's focus pivoting to AI.