4mo ago

Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division | TechCrunch

techcrunch.com Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division | TechCrunch

This is the second layoff at Mozilla this year, the first affecting dozens of staff on the side of the organization that builds the popular Firefox browser.

The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”

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- I've daydreamed about the Linux foundation or sovereign tech ~~fund~~ agency taking ownership of Firefox away from Mozilla.
  Maybe they could maintain a fork of it instead, I'm not sure. At this point I think it's become a necessary measure. Firefox is quite far back in terms of security features that it's actually becoming kind of silly. I still use it, carefully. I feel less inclined to recommend it to less savvy users in its current state.
  
  Linux Foundation Europe has taken over the rust-based Servo engine that Mozilla started several years ago. It's not ready to replace any other browser yet, but progress has been picking up speed quite a bit the last few months. Could end up being better than a Linux Foundation Firefox fork simply due to the advantage of being a newer codebase with (hopefully) less baggage than Gecko and the added bonus of rust's memory safety.
  
  In was thinking about TLF with servo in mind, though I wasn't aware much progress has been made. Great to hear!
- We're talking something like 500 full-time devs currently working on Firefox vs. a handful of unpaid volunteers working on the forks.
  So, they might survive, but they won't make a ton of progress. And security vulnerabilities would become increasingly difficult to keep fixing.
- As long as people work on forks, they survive. I think the more interesting question is about standardization and feature support in general: if FF and its forks are no longer a real force in the browser world, how will this shape what websites support and code for (i.e. making things slowly lose compatibility with firefox and its forks without major development).
- They likely need a monetization model in order to pay developers.

21 comments