What's going on at Mozilla these days?
What's going on at Mozilla these days?
Their current userbase is not their target userbase. They are trying to reach a more mainstream audience but all of their attempts to monetize are seen as useless by their current userbase.
- They want to increase revenue w/ ads - A loud swath of FF users are tech savvy and have adblocking enabled
- They want to pivot towards AI - A loud swath of FF users see AI as gimmicky
Repeat ad-nauseum
120It really is strange. They really should be copying the success of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia.
Especially right now as Google is truly finally breaking a lot of adblocking and pushing a fight with adblockers in the YouTube space.
It's a perfect storm of opportunity to stand out as a solid, differing offer, but they're going to blow it as usual.
62I'm willing to bet that the people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren't the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla. People in online forums talk a big game about wanting to pay for products and not be the product. But it seems like people don't really want to pay any meaningful amount of money for a browser.
32Big difference to the Wikimedia Foundation is how much money they need. The Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox) has around 750 employees.
Optimistically, only 500 of those are devs and work on Firefox. If you pay those a wage of 100,000 USD, that makes 50 million USD of costs just for wages.
Firefox has less than 200 million monthly active users, so everyone using it would need to donate $0.25, or alternatively 1% of users would need to donate $25, yearly.
That's a lot of money to hope people donate, and this is a very optimistic ballpark estimate.
7
The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.
In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.
Mozilla's job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:
- Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
- Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
- Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
- Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
- Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
- Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
- Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
- Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
- Front-End Engineer, Firefox
- Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
- Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
- Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab
For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I'm not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don't think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.
There's also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.
In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:
- Buying into the AI hype
- Flirting with "more ethical" ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user's side of just blocking it all
- Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
- Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
- Paying company leadership too much
I don't really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it's by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that's pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.
32I really wanted Mozilla to solve the unintrusive ads problem. A couple of years ago it seemed they were the only ones barely capable of working with it and not being destroyed.
But it looks like I overestimated them. They seem to be getting destroyed.
6
I just want to point out that recent court rulings on Alphabet's business may threaten the future of Mozilla because they may not get revenue from making Google the default search engine.
11Can we start a petition to NOT add AI bullshit to our browser?
Just point to all current shitty machine learning models and how fucked up they are
24They've had to hire three new interns just to carry around my enormous pile of tabs.
46Capitalism, fucking everything up, same as everywhere.
28wasn't there a thing that google was paying them tons to be default search and that likely will soon stop due to antimonopoly cases.. so they need a new cash cow.
22Google pays them millions to be competition to stop an antitrust lawsuit.
15This was always the conspiracy. I don't really buy it though. Having firefox' user base default to Google search is worth something.
5
They shut down recently actually
-3What caused you to ask? I feel like this is a very loaded question
14They recently announced that they are shutting down their mastodon instance.
10Idk I feel like I always have something to complain about firefox, and google, and edge, and computer software in general.
But lately Firefox has been coming across a little out of touch with the user base. Assuming firefox users are power users, where is tab manager? why ai chat and pocket :( Firefox already has jank on certain sites compared to Chrome and if they're also feature poor I start to grumble about it.
1
It's been fighting King Kong.
8They're trying to be the MSN of the 2020s but their userbase has zero interest in advertising or AI slop. It's not going well and they refuse to focus on their core product.
12Not much, what's going on with you?
10The best we got on the browser front. Use forks tho.
7Just Mozilla things. /s
5They're selling out.
-2