“Mozilla is in an absolute state: high overheads, falling usage of Firefox, questionable sources of revenue and now making big cuts to engineering as their income falls.”
http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
What do you guys think about this article??
I was kinda sad reading about it. Firefox is beacon, and it still should be its focus!
Mozilla has had good revenue until 2020 and that was due to leadership. When revebue goes up, salaries should go up.
A lot of the projects being stopped were projects that don’t directly impact Firefox. It took forever to ship Stylo from Servo and WebRender is not completely shipped. Servo is a nice project but Mozilla should stop doing PoCs in Servo when it can implement stuff directly in Firefox.
Mozilla will not have the same revenue it had in the past. It needs to trim it’s costs and focus on Firefox desktop and Android. This is what is happening.
Don’t forget, this is a David vs Goliath type of situation. If Mozilla goes bankrupt it’s because it has a competitor 200 times it’s size. It’s also because Mozilla refused to collect and sell our data.
Both MDN and Servo seem to spin into new organizations.
I think Mozilla is doing the best it can do to still be alive.
Mitchell Baker has been at the core of the web rebellion since the start. She fought two monopolies since '94. I bet she wasted a lot of weekends in her work. How much should this effort be rewarded? I have no clue. All I can say is that without her we wouldn’t have this diverse web. We would all run ie6 in 2022.
@andreip while I agree that Mitchell has been doing great job, and should be paid well for this, what I highly disagree with, is how she does it.
Why is Mozilla failing? Many reasons. Let me write lenghty post about it as I think its worth explaining. Bear in mind that its my point of view as someone who used Mozilla products in the past. I do not have any (business or other) ties with Mozilla. I also do force noone to share my point of view.
Well, the revenue ( at least good chunk of it) ended, you are correct, due to leadership. Due to Mozilla loosing this leadership in browsers world in favour of Google. Why? Because Mozila have history of making (strategically) bad decissions and taking absolutely no responsibility for this. When users voiced their concern after Mozilla implemented those decisions, there was always someone ( from leadership ) with some shitty answer that clearly showed that Mozilla lost touch with its users completely.
In recent years ( - 5 years back ) there has been no decision that wouldnt spark controversy and out-of-place treatment of users…
Recall all these dramas that Mozilla provoked with their decisions. Some dramas were more justified, some were less, but all of them had direct impact on the current Mozilla state.
And now, the recent one: layoffs: Mozilla said thats its due to saving on corporation’s running-costs. But at the same time, Baker (as a topmost of exec) has had her salary gone up… its egregious on two levels:
So, users lost patience and left… its normal behaviour… and this trend will continue unless either:
come to its senses and perform ( sort-of ) starting over and somehow will convince users to switch-back.=============
Im not saying that Baker is all bad; she has good intentions with solid workmap, but I would do many things differently.
Bookmark context now has remove instead of delete … a minor issue to most, but it demonstrates the complete disinterest in user experience today. Thanks for all those who tried to keep FF going, but it’s been slowly strangled for many years.