Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by JohnBooty on Thursday August 13, 2020 @12:35AM (#24139964)

You're making a number of factually incorrect assumptions with a sprinkling of reading comprehension errors here.

    you'd need to pay for one of their paid products 
    like Pocket

I do. Was using it already when Firefox acquired it.

    It follows like this: here's a great privacy & 
    security product you claim is "ideal" for you

Re-read. I didn't say that.

    appears to be - by your own words - one of the 
    best privacy & security products to come along 
    in a generation?

Those were most certainly not my words.

    more like 20 mins to switch to Mullvad, which 
    even if you didn't know about before, you know now

Wait, is this a revolutionary product, or a mere rebrand of a good existing service that happens to support a worthwhile brand? Make up your mind.

    Deep concerns for privacy & security that are conveniently 
    not reflected in product choices.

I'm no special talent, but you are spectacularly and offensively off-base.

I do support them with product choices, and also with thousands of hours of my time as a web developer over the years, always fighting to support Firefox in the projects I worked on, even when the product owners could not have cared less or were openly hostile to the idea of spending any time whatsoever supporting something that wasn't IE6 or Chrome.

I will not ship web-facing code that doesn't support Firefox.

   With friends like these, who needs enemies.

I'm no special talent, but god damn. I'm not a friend of Firefox - I'm a warrior fighting for them in the trenches every day.

Hope someday I have "enemies" who spend a few thousand hours in the trenches for me over two decades and also throw money my way. Wouldn't mind an army of those.

If it makes you feel any better, I'll probably support their VPN product too eventually if it actually survives their terminal ADHD.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by themacguffinman on Thursday August 13, 2020 @02:09AM (#24140431)

I didn't say it was revolutionary, and it doesn't need to be revolutionary to be a product ideal for you, from a company you find more trustworthy than any other - those appear to be your adjectives, it only follows that this means it's a great privacy & security product for which those are fairly critical qualities. Insult my reading comprehension if I'm wrong, but I might even say those qualities make it the "best" for you.

Good for you that you're really enthusiastic about Firefox usage, that's not my point. My point is that it's quite empty and valueless to dismiss a product like the VPN because you're afraid it might go away despite its apparent quality.

You did say you've never even glanced at the VPN for that reason, and given that Mozilla is apparently refocusing its efforts on paid products like those, an army of users who won't even glance at their products regardless of quality is increasingly useless. Especially if Mozilla experiments with potentially great products, which involves killing bad ones, quite frustrating to see a "will it be there in 6 months" attitude kill any apparent interest.

Edit: not sure it'd help, but an analogy might be: imagine I told you I care deeply about chicken dishes, chicken is my favorite, I choose what to eat based on whether they have chicken, I'm a chicken warrior! You make a high quality chicken dish, and then I say "it looks great, if I ate it I'll probably enjoy it, but I can't even try it. What if you drop it on the floor while serving it to me? What if the dog eats it while I'm digging in?". Would you think my complaint is sincere? I don't know, I've evidently spent too much time pointlessly arguing about this.

[ Parent | on HN ]