The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”
Ailing company? Cut it to pieces, that’ll probably fix it. I’d like the idea better if I could believe there’s a chance in hell they’d choose the right 30%.
Sorry, but no. The people making the cutting decisions are not going to cut their own jobs; and they are always part of the problem. It’s why companies only get more shitty over time.
RIP Mozilla Foundation 🪦
Not dead yet 🙏
the advocacy is the reason why i continued to support mozilla/firefox.
this is horrible. :(
Yeah, I’m sort of hoping the folks they laid off weren’t actually the advocacy folks, and they’re just additionally doing the restructure and moving the advocacy folks into the other departments.
But yeah, I don’t fucking know what to think of it. I do have a base-level of trust that they’d make a sensible decision in some dimension. But I’d really like to know more where they’re headed now…
that would 100% be the right move but i worry
That’s sad.
Does anyone have a non chromium browser that still works on the modern internet they can suggest?
Open source and linux required for me but any suggestions are welcome.
I’ve been tooling around with palemoon but I’m definitely interested in any different architecture that’s not Mullvad.
None that will continue to exist, if Mozilla falls apart…
WebKit wise, I think otter releases have stalled, epiphany and konquerer are plausible options though?
Is that the place where they fire people while increasing the CEO salary or is this something else, the Mozilla setup is so confusing.
Kind of expected when Google was declared a monopoly in the courts.
Google has the deal with the Mozilla Corporation, whereas this is the Mozilla Foundation. It should have relatively little influence, if any…
Good catch - you’re right.
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I’ve daydreamed about the Linux foundation or sovereign tech
fundagency taking ownership of Firefox away from Mozilla.Maybe they could maintain a fork of it instead, I’m not sure. At this point I think it’s become a necessary measure. Firefox is quite far back in terms of security features that it’s actually becoming kind of silly. I still use it, carefully. I feel less inclined to recommend it to less savvy users in its current state.
Linux Foundation Europe has taken over the rust-based Servo engine that Mozilla started several years ago. It’s not ready to replace any other browser yet, but progress has been picking up speed quite a bit the last few months. Could end up being better than a Linux Foundation Firefox fork simply due to the advantage of being a newer codebase with (hopefully) less baggage than Gecko and the added bonus of rust’s memory safety.
In was thinking about TLF with servo in mind, though I wasn’t aware much progress has been made. Great to hear!
We’re talking something like 500 full-time devs currently working on Firefox vs. a handful of unpaid volunteers working on the forks.
So, they might survive, but they won’t make a ton of progress. And security vulnerabilities would become increasingly difficult to keep fixing.
As long as people work on forks, they survive. I think the more interesting question is about standardization and feature support in general: if FF and its forks are no longer a real force in the browser world, how will this shape what websites support and code for (i.e. making things slowly lose compatibility with firefox and its forks without major development).
They likely need a monetization model in order to pay developers.
