Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division | TechCrunch
techcrunch.com
This is the second layoff at Mozilla this year, the first affecting dozens of staff on the side of the organization that builds the popular Firefox browser.
  • renegadespork@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    731·
    2 months ago

    Now that Google isn’t allowed to pay them default search engine money, I think this was expected.

    Ideologically I think it’s a good thing the US government is challenging Google’s monopolistic practices. Unfortunately, that money was a massive percentage of Mozilla’s income.

    It really was short-sighted of them to put so many eggs into one basket.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      472·
      2 months ago

      Mozilla frankly could use some serious restructuring. If Brave was able to get a decent market share overnight surely a well known company can make a come back.

      Mozilla has a management problem

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        51·
        2 months ago

        Brave has a notable market share? I’ve never seen them in any graph.

        Comparing the two is also a difficult territory, because Brave does not develop their own browser engine. If Google stops publishing the Chromium source code, they’re gone in a few months.

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      20·
      2 months ago

      This is the Mozilla foundation, not the Mozilla corp. The latter has the deal with Google; the former couldn’t make that deal even if they wanted to.

    • Vincent@feddit.nl
      2·
      2 months ago

      Google hasn’t been forbidden from paying Mozilla - yet, at least. They’ve only been ruled a monopolist, but what consequences they will face is yet to be determined, and then the appeals process will follow, so it’ll be a couple of years before there’s any potential impact.

      Mozilla has also explicitly tried to have other baskets to put eggs in (Relay. VPN, Monitor Plus, Hubs, etc.), it’s just that none of those have been as successful.

  • Atemu@lemmy.ml
    59·
    2 months ago

    the idea of putting people before profit feels increasingly radical

    What. The. Fuck.

      • Atemu@lemmy.ml
        84·
        2 months ago

        Nah it’s not news that their ethos has been fading away for a long time now and that Mozilla just really isn’t what it used to be a decade ago.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      10·
      2 months ago

      This is the Mozilla Foundation. They’re legally a non-profit, so this isn’t supposed to mean that they’re reconsidering their stance. They can’t do that. It’s rather just them saying “shit’s hard, yo”.

      • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
        4·
        2 months ago

        The wikimedia foundation as a nice fraction of a billion dollars in stocks in order to not rely on donations

        • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          Yes but the for-profit Mozilla corporation will selfishly maintain control of the golden goose to the bitter end, even if they destroy it. They offer no value without Firefox and they know it.

    • LWD@lemm.eeOP
      73·
      2 months ago

      $6.9 mil the last time they said. And that was in a year where CEO salary was (on average) cut across all for-profit companies, because even businesses react to market forces sometimes.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        31·
        2 months ago

        The CEO who got paid that much has quit. We don’t yet know what the salary of the new CEO is going to be.

        • LWD@lemm.eeOP
          11·
          1 month ago

          And the blame for Mozilla’s lack of transparency rests entirely on Mozilla’s shoulders.

          If you know anything about Mozilla’s finances at all, you know that they always are one to two years out of date. So your response, which I’ve seen before, is ignorant at best, and really disingenuous at worst. I hope for the former.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      21·
      2 months ago

      That CEO is working for the Mozilla Corporation, these layoffs happened at the Mozilla Foundation. The latter is legally a non-profit, so it would be quite limited how much money they could accept from the Corporation anyways.

  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    251·
    2 months ago

    Curious.

    I keep a close eye on the job listings posted to Mozilla’s job board. They don’t post new job openings very often, so I always want to be tuned in when new listing pop up. All of a sudden, a lot of new job openings have appeared for a company that just laid off 36 people…

    Oct 30 2024:

    Oct 31 2024:

    Nov 1 2024:

    Nov 4 2024:

    Nov 5 2024:

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      25·
      2 months ago

      Those are job postings at the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, the layoffs happened at the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

      They’re theoretically connected, in that the Corporation is a subsidiary of the Foundation, but to my knowledge, they practically don’t hand money from the Foundation to the Corporation, because the Corporation has magnitudes more money anyways.

    • Midnitte@beehaw.orgEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      Layoffs sometimes mean freeing up salaries for different positions (e.g. a company pivoting). Curious jobs though, not really sure what to read from those tea leaves…

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      8·
      2 months ago

      My hope is that Mozilla stops working on Firefox and the Linux Foundation creates a new Firefox fork and finances the project. It would be the official Linux browser.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        13·
        2 months ago

        I do not see why you think the Linux Foundation could stomp 500+ devs out of the ground and do a better job. That’s three times the size of the current Linux Foundation. Nevermind that the Linux Foundation is purely non-profit. Paying a living wage to that many devs is pretty much just not going to be possible.

        • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
          2·
          2 months ago

          They are quite successful with Servo. Progress is obviously slow but it always had been. What matters is that progress is happening

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          4·
          2 months ago

          There is no need to at the moment, that’s stopping them. Like with Redis, there was a need to fork it. My hope is that the Linux Foundation does not see any other way than doing it themselves.

    • LWD@lemm.eeOP
      53·
      2 months ago

      Either you die young or you live long enough to turn into the Blink engine.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
    132·
    2 months ago

    I feel bad for the people who were eliminated. The browser has been stagnating for a while now, maybe a smaller team can be more focused on making a better, more modern browser.

    The mobile browser is top notch. The desktop browser has been slowly catching up with the basic innovations of other browsers.

    They definitely need to find a new source of funding.

    • solrize@lemmy.ml
      5·
      2 months ago

      They need to stop bloating the web, so that browser development stops taking billion dollar budgets.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        4·
        2 months ago

        Pretty sure, Google is at the forefront of that endeavor. Apple has no interest in keeping up. And Mozilla needs to stay in the talks for whatever Google proposes to ensure the webstandard can be implemented by others.

          • Ephera@lemmy.ml
            3·
            2 months ago

            Netscape. Specifically the homophobe guy that’s now leading the Chromium-based browser Brave.

            I’m being a jackass about it, because that was 28 years ago. You can’t say they should stop bloating the web and then bring up an example from before Google even existed.

    • Niquarl@lemmy.ml
      2·
      2 months ago

      They need another source of funding, maybe cutting salaries of the Cs would work for one.

      I don’t think this is them focussing back on the browser, especially looking at the job listings posted in another comment. It seems to me it’s just a focus on AI, probably in the hope of making money.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    41·
    2 months ago

    Damn, I definitely won’t stop donating, if they’re this short on money, but that was basically my understanding of what they do, primarily advocacy.

    Is MDN and the webstandards work also part of the Foundation? It certainly feels like it’d be more non-profit-y work. I guess, they do hold ownership of the Corporation, so they could also just tell the Corporation to deliver that.

    But yeah, I’d like some increased messaging of what other work they do, or how much advocacy they can continue to do. Obviously, that’s not an insane number of employees left either way…

    • Vincent@feddit.nl
      2·
      2 months ago

      I believe MDN and standards partcipation is part of the Corporation. The latter definitely, because implementation experience matters for that. The former also has its own monetisation, and has a lot of content contributed by the Open Web Docs foundation.