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posted by chromas on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the here-today,-gone-tomorrow dept.

Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

The Mozilla Corporation announced today it was laying off approximately 250 staff members in a move to shore up the organization's financial future.

The layoffs were publicly announced in a blog post today. Employees were notified hours before, earlier this morning, via an email [PDF] sent by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation Chairwoman.

Baker's message cited the organization's need to adapt its finances to a post-COVID-19 world and re-focus the organization on new commercial services.

[...] In 2018, the Mozilla Corporation said it had around 1,000 full-time employees worldwide. Mozilla previously laid off 70 employees in January. Several sources have told ZDNet that the recent layoffs accounted for nearly a quarter of the organization's workforce.

Main casualties of today's layoffs were the developers working on the company's experimental Servo browser engine and Mozilla's threat management security team. The latter is the security team that investigates security reports and performs incident response. The security team that fixes bugs in Mozilla products is still in place, according to sources and a Mozilla spokesperson.

Changing World, Changing Mozilla

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Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:35AM (6 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:35AM (#1036053) Journal
    "Firefox was always lame."

    I must disagree.

    It became lame about version 4. It became totally lame when they abandoned version numbers and started with the marketing numbers. So roughly 10 years ago.

    At this point it's an object history in how not to manage a software project.

    The people who need to learn their lesson, won't.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:38AM (4 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:38AM (#1036054) Journal

    :-) But, we still have Seamonkey. So all is well

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:43AM (3 children)

      by Arik (4543) on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:43AM (#1036057) Journal
      Is it?

      Doesn't that depend on Gecko?
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 13 2020, @10:29AM (1 child)

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday August 13 2020, @10:29AM (#1036080) Journal

        The nice thing with Open Source is that if the original developer fails to deliver, others can take over.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:27PM

          by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:27PM (#1036230) Journal
          But that takes money. More than 90% of Mozilla's funding is through the deal with Google. Without it, they would have closed shop within a year or so. So how are you gonna finance the salaries of hundreds of developers? There are no companies with deep pockets who need Firefox, unlike those who pay Linux devs.
          --
          SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:27PM

        by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:27PM (#1036229) Journal

        It could depend on PFM, as long as it works... Really it's the stability of its interface and options that keep me hooked. Cookie manager could use some work though. And bookmarking, you know who had the absolute best bookmarking? Internet Explorer, it just stored a shortcut to the page on your disk. It was perfect. I could manage them in a regular window like any other file. Using a database is stupid and kludgy

        --
        La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @06:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @06:39PM (#1036654)

    It was originally an independent project to strip off the bloat of using javascript and html/xml markup to generate the user interface running on top of... either gtk 1.x or very early 2.x in order to have cross platform compatibility. It was fast with a small memory footprint, and the initial source of tabs on Netscape/Mozilla Browser (they were still using the browser window paradigm where each open page was its own window).

    The switch to XUL happened after the project had become popular and they offered the developer a job, before moving someone else in to manage the project, then start pushing the XUL crap on firefox as well (( think they started with the interpreted garbage that had made the post-Mozilla browser suite so slow, but were working on the JIT javascript support around that time.) End result was the customizable and plugin friendly Firefox that we all accidentally pitched to our friends because most of us were still using the native widget client with none of the XUL overhead. Then systems jumped up in memory and cpu performance during the late p4/athlon xp and early core2/athlon64 era and most of the people who hated xul finally switched because there wasn't a compelling reason not to. As an aside: If i remember correctly, there were a lot of xul related exploits during that time, which firefox avoided, while general javascript/media handling exploits worked on both, but generally didn't get as far on firefox. XUL changed all that for the worse.