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Comment by varbhat | Hacker News Reader

What's the focus of Mozilla now given the layoffs of Rust,MDN,Wasmtime and Servo?

Is Mozilla/Firefox becoming VPN company?

My wholly unqualified opinion as forever firefox user:

They are going to push their VPN, Pocket and Lockwise like never before. They are also going to focus on their incubator hoping for a big win.

Firefox the browser will start to stagnate, and in five years or so they'll switch to WebKit.

The focus is now not the browser or the browser engine. It's selling Fix-the-Internet type products that have a dash of security theater baked in.

I can't find where I read this, but I remember seeing some article about how Pocket was essentially dead, i.e. nobody's really working on it.

Good. The partnership with, acquisition of, and integration of Pocket was an embarrassment.

It was also an indication of just how bad Mozilla's management are at trying to make money. We'll see a lot more business theater like this before the team are replaces with people who know what they're doing.

The implementation may have been bad, but I thought it was a unique way to add some revenue. Pocket seemed like a useful product that would appeal to the technical focused userbase Firefox has. It's sad that it didn't work out for Mozilla.

I feel disappointed with the failure of companies like Mozilla and canonical to thrive. They have the right values, the talent, and good products. They just don't seem to be able to make money. It feels like the only way to make money is by spying on your users, or doing other unsavory things like Apple does.

If they'd ever got around to actually open-sourcing the thing like they kept promising they would, I expect people would've been more on-board with it.

I would've been happy to pay a modest subscription for a fully open-source Pocket stack with better archive management.

They're refocussing on the user experience of the browser. They're stopping their more developer friendly endeavours and research projects such as servo.

The VPN client and Pocket are just ways to make money to fund browser development. Firefox itself does not and can not make money (and not from lack of trying). It turns out people don't want "ads", "nags" or "suggested content" in their browser.

In the long run, these changes will hurt the user experience of firefox. If you ignore developer tools and similar, then developers will be less will be less willing to develop for and test on your browser, especially if your browser already only has a minority of user share. And it doesn't matter how cool your chrome is, if websites don't work in a browser, user's aren't going to use it.

This has been said many times outside of the tech circle: 2020 is all about survival. Orgs need to stay lean so they can navigate through this pandemic and the resultant economic crisis. Just because Mozilla is pausing these efforts now doesn't mean they're stopping for good.

Maybe these are all short term necessities for Mozilla, and when things get back to normal they'll pick up where they left off. One can at least hope.

The reason that has been said outside of the tech circle is because it doesn't really apply to big tech, whose stock prices just hit a new all-time-high a few days ago. We can debate the reasons why that is or whether it's a good thing, but it can't be used as an excuse for Mozilla's failures. How can, say, Dropbox make a ton of money during covid when people are forced to use computers but Mozilla can't? Also, how can you say Mozilla is doing this to stay lean when the CEO makes $2.5 million a year?

Firefox has always made the Lion's share of the income and Safari makes billions per year on the same Google search deal so the model did not disappear or change on them. What happened is Firefox usage share went down the drain (particularly due to mobile usage share being something like 0.5% but desktop isn't too hot either) so they can't negotiate the same deals they used to or cash in on the rising value of the search deal.

There's sort of a catch 22. There should have been a lawsuit against Google for their anticompetitive tactics for promoting Chrome, but you can't bite the hand that feeds you.

Even if they won it would have been a one-time settlement. That would give them a couple months of runway. And that'd be the last money they ever see, unless Microsoft would throw them a bone with a Bing deal. You can't undo history. Chrome users aren't going to switch to Firefox.

> They're refocussing on the user experience of the browser.

What does that even mean concretely ?

Isn't Wasm supposed to be the cornerstone to give user faster (and ultimately better) experience in the browser ?

If recent history is any indicator, it means they will be even faster to rip out the parts of ff that made it unique, and copy changes that happen in the Chrome UI.

I understood the exact opposite, that they are moving out from the "focus on the firefox browser" mantra because it is not a competitive strategy anymore and they want instead to find and build new products.

They need to find a build new products to actually make a decent income. Firefox alone doesn't do that. They are still committed to the core browser.

When their other products sell, they would probably just use a chromium fork with FF branding and some tweaks to make it resemble FF to sell nostalgia like Ubuntu.

Iceweasel was a thing.

Ok. They're lost. Again. Or should we say More ?

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