I note they just cut 25% of their workforce. That's not a sign of a healthy company, unless they had 25% excess people in the first place, and then it would be a sign of bad management. So I'm going on the assumption that they are letting go of people they could ill afford to miss.
> Others in the thread think they can survive by focusing on Firefox (you disagree obviously.)
I disagree because the writing has been on the wall for a long time. The diminishing market share tells a pretty clear story. What is happening now is that Mozilla will try to jump from one shrinking ice-floe onto another that they hope will be more stable and may even give them room to expand again. They fail to recognize - again, my opinion - that this lack of focus is one of the drivers of the exodus in the first place.
> Some (like me) think they can survive by building new things people will pay for. (you think they are a 'one trick pony.')
That's possible, but survival of Mozilla the software house making a lot of other stuff that generates revenue which is not the browser is none of my concern nor interest. I can see why as a Mozilla employee it would be your concern. But I see no difference between that work and that of any other software company. The browser is where the difference can be made.
> A CEO who disagrees with your opinion isn't ignoring facts
If that CEO has a great plan on making Mozilla survive and manage to stave off further decline of the browser market share then I haven't seen it. So either that plan does not exist or they have already given up but are just not telling you (or me, for that matter).
> and a CEO who doesn't charter a strategy towards something other than catastrophic failure is not a good CEO.
That depends on how avoidable the catastrophe is.
Losing the browser would be a catastrophe, losing the rest would not even register, for everything else that Mozilla does that I'm aware of there are alternatives. But a browser with still some market share that is privacy focused and not beholden to some large advertising agency or hardware provider is a unique thing.
I think the big difference between our points of view is that you are looking from the inside out and I'm looking from the outside in. You have by virtue of your position more information at your disposal, but your interests and mine are not necessarily 100% aligned.
I would prefer for FireFox to be available as long as possible, you - apparently - would like Mozilla Inc as an entity to survive. Those two are not necessarily joined at the hip. Though obviously if Mozilla Inc survives FireFox may have a better chance of survival too.
But it looks to me, reading between the lines here, that Mozilla effectively announces that they feel that the browser as a source of revenue is a dead end and that if they do not move into other markets that the company will go under.
This, a thousand times. I care about Mozilla as the makers of Firefox - the browser for the users.
1. Firefox dies and Mozilla dies
and
2. Firefox dies and Mozilla survives by making a chat app
These are identically bad to me as a user. In both cases, the only project users care about from the company is gone.
And here is the main point: for some reason Mozilla and their accountants seems to think that Firefox is just a source of income and that their main goal as a non profit is something else, while all the time the most important work they have done to improve the world has been to create an alternative and better browser that isn't owned by big media.
That's idealism.
The difference between a non-profit and a corporation is that while a corporation seeks to provide return to the shareholders, a non-profit seeks to provide a good life to people who run it.
Until three years ago or so I think that's what I thought was the idea of Mozilla.
This is a non-profit ran by those that raise funds i.e. the non-profit parasite class. Those kinds of non-profits are famous for throwing charity galas that cost $250,000 to produce and raise $260,000.
It is just so extremely frustrating when I wish someone well and they - in my opinion - take the wrong choices.
Here's a sort of thought experiment, which I really don't know the answer to. How much of Firefox development (by hours, lines of code, commits, pick your metric) is done by Mozilla employees as part of their day jobs? And how much of that development is ~useless for the maintenance and improvement of the core browser? (Stuff like Pocket and the "discovery" feature on the new tab page, all the time spent on the URL bar changes, etc etc.)
It might turn out to be the case that most, or even all of core Firefox development could be done by the community. At the very least I'm willing to put out there that maintaining a web browser does not require half a billion dollars a year. (It's rather hard to imagine that 100 full time devs making $250k a year each couldn't handle basically all of the core development, for example.)
The problem with Mozilla is that it's a business, for all intents and purposes. With an open source project, as long as ongoing development is financially maintainable you don't have to care about marketshare. Mozilla cares about marketshare because it affects how much Google will pay them for search traffic (and how much they get from in-chrome advertizing).
When Oracle proved derelict in its duties managing the development of OpenOffice, the Document Foundation was formed, largely by people who were already spending their time on OpenOffice. They forked OpenOffice into LibreOffice almost overnight. Major longstanding pull requests were quickly merged. New people who previously hadn't wanted to contribute stepped up to support a community project. And the result has been all to the good! The Document Foundation still manages the project, and in 2019 did so with a total income of less than a million Euros.
To me this is proof that large open source software projects can quietly evolve into two camps: one is the employees of a governing corporation, and the other is the community. And the community might be doing most / all of the core work required to keep the project running, and the employees are mostly doing stuff that benefits the company. And suddenly there's a community fork - and it just works, without any hitches. I don't know if this would be successful in the case of Firefox, but I expect (and hope) that people would try if there was ever a hint of Mozilla abandoning it.
(For another example, consider KDE e.V., which manages an enormous open source project on a budget of under 600k Euros a year as of 2018.)
Maintaining a browser is an immense undertaking. With 50 full-time contributors, you may just about be able to provide a functional chrome to Blink (then WebKit) that doesn't suck too badly and keeps up with the performance and web standards requirements that Google in particular keeps pushing forward.
100 people is in no way enough to make both production-quality browser chrome and browser engine on your own, become the cutting edge for performance and privacy improvements, keep up with and participate in standards development, plus whatever auxiliary supporting efforts are necessary when your browser is the main product as opposed to supporting a cashflow-rich ad or app store business.
Sure, you can build a Chromium derivative for early adopters or crypto enthusiasts with a handful of people and a bunch of VC money. But what Mozilla does is more important, and has a much larger scope. They may survive with 100 people for a while, they would be a far cry from being relevant though.
Animations Team
Binding Team
Device Team
DevTools
DOM Team
Ecosystem infra
Input Team
Layout Team
Paint Team
Rendering Core
Speed Metrics Team
Style Team
Web Capabilities (Project Fugu)
Worker Team
For doing the "best job possible", you can probably blow up team size by a lot, there are numerous tasks that would benefit from more attention and I'm sure Mozilla are already making hard trade-offs at their current staffing levels (which obviously include a lot of people outside of Firefox engineering).
On the other hand, 10-20 years ago, there were a lot of alternative browser projects that were moderately active and able to keep up with 90% of the web.
KDE e.V does not fund any development. It's just there to help with legal matters, organizing conferences, sprints etc.
KDE's development is primarily by volunteers and a handful of developers paid by various interested companies.
These companies have historically included TrollTech/Nokia/Digia/Qt Company, Red Hat, Novell (Suse), Canonical, and nowadays mostly Blue Systems,
Right - my question is what would happen if Firefox development moved to basically the same model. A sibling comment to yours claims 50 full timers isn't enough to develop a browser, so maybe it wouldn't work.