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Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web
(www.theverge.com)
EFF will pick up the slack.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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Technology
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Mozilla is looking pretty cooked, NGL.
Not surprised honestly, they were always a poorly run organisation that needed to go more worker owned co-op but got run like a tech startup instead.
Why not consumer coop instead?
Either sound great to me. Co-ops are market socialism which is better than capitalism in every way
If you'd like to say, what is that?
Basically a democratic institution where the members are the consumers.
Thanks!
No problem <3
The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30 percent of its workforce and completely eliminated its advocacy and global programs divisions, TechCrunch reports.
“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,” Brandon Borrman, the Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief, said in an email to The Verge. Borrman declined to confirm exactly how many people were laid off, but said it was about “30% of the current team.”
I despise this timeline.
I wonder if the ruling against Google for paying apps etc to have their search engine be the initial default has eaten a lot of the funding Mozilla counted on
given that that's where they got 85% of their money from? yeah, probably.
I've been saying for years that Mozilla is a profit-driven corp, just like any other. If they operated at Google's scale, they'd be evil at Google's scale, as well. It's not the first time they've done something like this, and likely won't be the last.
Mozilla is a not-for-profit. Like hospitals, that doesn't mean they don't make profits, it's just that they have to reinvest most of them into the company and it's employees. Speaking of which, those activities are not free and they're not necessarily done just out of the goodness of their hearts. In these trying times in particular, I think we should start realizing that we have to be advocates and supporters for the things we believe in, or else they'll die on the vine. And when they do, we'll be left with the lowest common denominators that simply treat us all like a product.
Mozilla is the best of the big 4 browsers, it also isn't pushing the whole Manifest 3 crap down our throats. At this point I'm sticking with them until I'm convinced otherwise. I've changed before and I absolutely would again.
As for losing the advocacy group, it sucks, but if I were in a tough position where I had to choose between advocacy and development, I would stick with my core mission - a stable browser with the features that users want. There are other great Internet advocacy groups out there that do great work (and we need them more than ever). Of course, EFF is one.
they have to reinvest most of them into the company and it's employees.
In theory, this would be true. But in Mozilla's case, "reinvesting into its employees" means giving the CEO a pay raise in the same year they did huge layoffs. They may be not-for-profit on paper, but the actions from their execs are exactly the same as you'd see from any other for-profit corp. Being not-for-profit is just an excuse for shitty business practices and doesn't change anything in any significant way, imo.
As for losing the advocacy group, it sucks, but if I were in a tough position where I had to choose between advocacy and development, I would stick with my core mission - a stable browser with the features that users want.
Okay but they often don't give users what they want, like telemetry, 'privacy respecting' adverts and AI etc.
Okay but they often don't give users what they want
You should see the state of Firefox on iPad OS. I started using it earlier this year after they finally rolled out support for multiple windows—a feature Safari added in 2019 and Chrome had only a few months later.
Nice that they finally have this feature, but the browser itself is nearly unusable. It stutters constantly and freezes, locks up, or force reloads with some regularity. In a way that Chrome and Edge (and I assume Safari, though I have never really used that) never do.
Or on desktop OSes, a website I frequented around 2016–2018 used the column-span CSS property, which Firefox didn't get around to implementing until December 2019.
It's been very clear for some time that, whether it's because they stretch themselves too thin or some other reason, Mozilla has been failing to continue to deliver an excellent product for their users.
What's a good browser for Android?
Everything that isn't Firefox is just a skin of Chromium, which is controlled by Google. There are no good options for browsers if you don't want Firefox.
Mull. Available on F-Droid. Make sure to turn on permanent private browsing and clearing data upon quit, if that's what you want.
How does it compare to Firefox feature-wise?
pretty good analysis of Mozilla's situation by TechAltar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw-XYrMFb0A
If you havent ditched mozilla, nows the time. They not only continuously force telemetrics and antiprivacy settings, its quite apparent that they are taking their masks off at this point.
And your alternate options are what?
Why should we ditch Firefox now? Because they have moved slightly in the direction we dislike but are still light years ahead on privacy?
This is the tech version of single issue voting. All the nuance is lost and ignored, and it's just a knee jerk after knee jerk.
Mozilla is doing this because funding is difficult, if you wanted a free and open web then you should have been donating to the foundation. To some degree we all should have. The majority of their funding comes from Google, when that gets cut they have to make huge changes to their organization or they will completely die.
That's the reality we live in all those Mozilla engineers have to be paid money, they aren't working for free. How do you expect a company to function without an income source?
Have you thought about this at all before making statements like those you have made?
Person uninformed about these things here with an uninformed question: What are the chances that the Mozilla Foundation itself can be forked like the code can be?
If you magically generated enough funding, sure. But Mozilla made a deal with the devil to fund itself. Without a similar deal or nearly the entirety of the user base donating, whatever new org would be bound to fail; or at least wouldn't be able to perform all the same functions.