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
Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:28PM (2 children)
Really, none of the alternative browsers seem worth using at this point, but in my experience Falkon does *most* things right. For some reason I cannot get it to work on sites like imgur or reddit, but that may be just my attempt at locking it down.
Much like how no one runs Windows for Windows itself but for the applications, I only keep Firefox around for certain plugins, uBlock Origin being the big one. If the Falkon devs port that, and perhaps replace their inbuilt ad-blocker with it, it will go a long way to making the browser usable. The underlying rendering engine is essentially Chrome anyway.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Teckla on Friday August 14 2020, @05:55PM
The so-called "alternative browsers" are always behind on security patches -- sometimes dangerously behind. It doesn't seem like a good idea to use any of them -- and that includes Falkon.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 20 2020, @02:26AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.