Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.
Yo, wtf. Their VPN, Relay and Monitor are basically the only Mozilla services I’d use and pay for. To me this sounds like this is the wrong direction. What do you guys think?
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This is management speak for… our shit isn’t working, we’re trying to diversify our revenue but so far just wasted heaps of money. We’re going to cut everything to extend the curve but this marks the start of our death spiral.
This is a bit left field but… my big idea is that mozilla should become a payment gateway for donating to other opensource projects. They can skim a few percent off everything. Great alignment with Mozilla’s values & history. All open source projects will end up promoting mozilla. Mozilla has the right brand and user-base to leverage.
Suppose my new tab page showed me a bit of an overview about some opensource project, the people involved, and the people who use the project, and suggested a donation of $1. I would genuinely like that. After a few small donations they could suggest I charge my account with $50 which I can then donate to whatever projects in the coming months as the mid takes me.
That one’s good enough to suggest to them!
Can see why they’d maybe be wary of getting into appraising open source projects if taking payments, but maybe something they could collaborate on with EFF & others. Maybe also that “alternative to” project, which doesn’t currently focus on open source stuff but naturally covers quite a lot of it.
Yo, wtf. Their VPN, Relay and Monitor are basically the only Mozilla services I’d use and pay for.
If the “'d” means that you’re not paying for it… That might be the problem 😢
I’m already paying for Mullvad, the VPN service Mozilla is whitelabeling, so Mozilla VPN is unattractive to me. I’m already using Relay, but not to the extent that any paid features would make sense for me (yet). Monitor, I think, is a great tool, but I don’t feel comfortable with giving data brokers all of my PII just for them to delete SOME of my PII. Maybe this will change, though.
and scale back investment in its Mozilla.social Mastodon instance.
Well shit, I guess I’m never getting off that waitlist. Of all the services being effected by this news the mastodon instance is a relatively minor loss but I was really hoping it’d work out and thrive in a similar manner to Vivaldi’s instance.
Yeah I had hoped it would kind of create a focal point around which mozilla supporters could gather.
I think that we don’t know the whole picture but if they’re canceling VPN, Relay and Monitor it’s because they’re not making enough money on those services. I also think the new CEO feels they’re spread too thin and need to focus resources on core products, which might be a good thing. They’ve gotten a lot of flak for trying different things.
They are having the wrong direction since years. If anything, this is the same direction.
this sounds like a cookiecuter CEO who only focuses on hype topics like mobile and ai instead of privacy services has taken the wheel, sad news. thats why i have trust issues when it comes to companies
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product strategy, TechCrunch has learned.
Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago.
Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.
Mozilla started expanding its product portfolio in recent years, all while its flagship product, Firefox, kept losing market share.
And while the organization was often sharply criticized for this, its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run.
Firefox, after all, provided the vast majority of Mozilla’s income, but it also meant the organization was essentially dependent on Google to continue this deal.
The original article contains 234 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 29%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Honestly adding more features and services is the wrong answer. They need to strip down Firefox in terms if UI and software bloat. A smaller (ish) codebase would be easier manage.
… and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance.
In what way did they invest anything significant in the mastodon instance? I had been sort of waiting for them to do something interesting with it after all the fanfare with which it belatedly arrived. As far as I could tell last time I looked it was just a bog-standard and rather small instance that hadn’t visibly changed since some engineer took a day or two to set it up last year. What’d I miss?
I think they figured out that its unlikely to make any money. I’m not sure what there plan was as social media companies can do nothing without it being controversial