Mozilla lays off 70 employees to prepare for tough years ahead (Update: 250)

CyberTech

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Dunno, Firefox is not dying because of this....and if we have tough years ahead most users probably said that years ago aswell (that firefox is not going right way, actually same with the opera..people complaining everyday on opera browser channel that opera 12 was the best , but still they use opera this day)

I dont care about vpn stuff, and its hard to implement paywall to browser itself so its interesting to see whats happening over this year as the google contract probably will lay off

But in my opinion what i have used firefox this year more than ever, i have loved about:config updates alot....the fenix aka new android browser is awesome ( ublock origin etc. included...but still people complaining you cant add any extensions you want to have)

Soooo currently firefox is the best browser for mobile phones, tablets etc. And on desktop its currently hard to find any chromium browser wich does stuff better than ff ( my opinion)

TLDR: Firefox users dont rush, i do alot and its not worth it:rolleyes:

Yea i know i'm not in a rush i dont have problem with FF atm i'm a loyal, as security123 posted a twitter link that they said they killed it as the team they layoff the best people and MS Security hiring three people who left that it seems like there are problem for FF i wait for a few weeks to see what happens
 

Stopspying

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They have features like Rewards/Ads that users may disable. And they've made one or two mistakes which they've quickly owned up to. I don't see anything shady about them as everything they've done has been above board.
Maybe I was being a bit harsh on Brave, true enough they did confess to the mistakes that we know of, but I'm always wary of vendors to some extent, more so when they have messed up before. I am actively using Brave.
 

CyberTech

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The recent news of Mozilla laying off its employees has put a question mark on large portion of the community and a lot of posts asking about alternatives to Firefox have popped up.
I want to tell those people to keep using firefox.

It is true that the position of Mozilla is not very good but the Firefox browser is still the best option out there. If you people start to abandon this lone ranger, it will just lower the market share even more. The only way to save Firefox is by using it and encouraging it.

TOR Browser is based on Firefox and if Firefox dies, so does TOR browser. I am sure you all don't want that.
I feel the only hope for firefox is the privacy community and it should work in the interest of it. We can't let chromium be 100% of the market.
The bottom line is, encourage the use of Firefox. Also we need to have a close eye on its development from now on.

Edit:
A lot of people here are telling that they don't like something or the other about firefox and that's why they choose chromium over it. I agree with you that if you don't like something, you don't have to use it. But again i fear, if tommorow firefox is dead and Google makes a controversial change in chromium. What will you choose? People who track chromium know that Google has been trying to push stuff like the url bar thing, etc etc. Today it listens to the community because an alternative exists, tommorow when there is no alternative, they won't have this fear.

Firefox can be community driven - Well, it is true that Firefox can be taken by the community, but the browsers have become complicated over the years. Also not every computer can build firefox from fork ( took 12+ hours to build on my laptop). We need a big player in the community who can contribute when serious vulnerabilities come up. Linux kernel survives this way because players like Intel, AMD, Amazon etc etc contribute thousands of lines of code everyday. Critical software needs dedicated developers. It will be a hard project to maintain.

Some have rightly pointed the layoffs of critical security members of mozilla. That maybe right. But it is not enough to just make the switch. We need to observe the development and response of Mozilla and then make decisions. This whole layoff thing has triggered a lot of people to look for alternatives. We need to wait and watch closely.




FF users, thoughts on this? is he/she right? i guess!
 

Arequire

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FF users, thoughts on this? is he/she right? i guess!

I agree with the overall assertion that Firefox existing means competition for Chromium, and competition is always a good thing, but there's a single line in there that reeks of delusion to me:
I feel the only hope for firefox is the privacy community
I highly doubt the privacy community (which PrivacyTools may not be a majority representative of) constitutes anywhere near enough people to keep Firefox alive. Also, Mozilla's reliance on Google for financial support renders the idea of the privacy community being Firefox's saviour moot, because even if there were enough privacy enthusiasts to sustain Firefox's continued development, their hostility towards Google means they won't be using Google Search, thus Google has no reason to continue providing financial support to Mozilla as Google won't be getting any return on their investment.
 

Cortex

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If Firefox gave the ability to customise more, something some understandably don't need but in this large hi-res ish monitor it looks dreadful, for me that matters - Chromium based browsers offer decent changes in colours for example - FF for me on a pretty fast PC clunky, & as for privacy, until you look carefully at FF setting you end up with surveys & more - Sorry FF but can't see me using it again & I detest all Google stands for but FF ant far behind - Brave for me though I do feel guilty but I do think Mozilla have been bloody minded recently in lack of changed?
 
F

ForgottenSeer 85179

TairikuOkami

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blackice

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Really? In the previous statement they said, that they suffer financial losses, because they do not have so many donations as before covid. They should just introduce a premium paid version, even with no extra features, just a few bonuses, like a nice badge would do. $5 a month from a million would help.
The foundation and the corporation are separate but connected entities. As I understand it: The donations go to (and are needed by) the foundation which owns the corporation, but is limited in how they fund it as it is a for profit business unlike the foundation. The corporation is the one who runs the browser.
 

SeriousHoax

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CyberTech

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The open-source project behind the Mozilla-founded systems programming language, Rust, has announced a new Rust foundation to boost its independence following Mozilla's recent round of pandemic layoffs.

Firefox-maker Mozilla's decision to cut 250 roles or 25% of its workforce last week has taken a toll on the open-source project behind Rust. Mozilla is the key sponsor of Rust and provides much of the language's infrastructure as well as core talent.

Some Mozilla contributors to five-year-old Rust did lose their jobs in Mozilla's job cuts, causing some speculation that heavier cuts to the team behind Mozilla's Servo browser engine – a core user of Rust – might pose an existential threat to the young language.

Rust's demise would be bad news for a growing number of developers exploring it for system programming – as opposed to application development – as a modern and memory-safe alternative to C and C++.

Rust is now in developer analyst RedMonk's top 20 most-popular language rankings, and it is being used at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google Cloud among others for building platforms. And while Mozilla is the main sponsor of Rust, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have come on board as a sponsor too.

However, discussing Mozilla's layoffs, Steve Klabnik, a Rust Core member, has pointed out that the Rust community is much bigger than the number of Mozilla employees who contributed to the project and were affected by the layoffs.

 

CyberTech

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future-deep-speech.png

Following the layoffs at Mozilla and rumor that the organization would be able to extend its search deal with Google for another three years, it became clear quickly that things needed time to settle down.

Employees who were fired would provide insight on how the letting go of employees would affect certain projects at Mozilla. A week later, Reuben Morais published an article on the official Discourse site of Mozilla about the future of DeepSpeech.

DeepSpeech, or Mozilla Voice STT (Speech To Text) is an open source Speech-to-Text engine that is trained using machine learning techniques. It is designed as a counterweight to closed source services operated by Google, Amazon and other companies.

DeepSpeech uses machine learning techniques that are based on Baidu's Deep Speech research paper and Google TensorFlow for its implementation. The service can be run on a wide range of devices in real time including Raspberry Pi 4, devices that run Windows, OS X or Linux, Android, and iOS.

 

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