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?
This sucks to hear as I’ve been paying for their relay service for a while now. I’m wondering if I should work to transfer all emails over to another service…
I was also considering signing up for Mozilla monitor, but now I’m not so sure if it’s just gonna get canned soon or not.
Mozilla monitor is not a great deal
That’s fair I would’ve used it more for supporting Mozilla and because I trust them with that data.
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.
… 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
I don’t like it either, but if focusing on Firefox lets them market Firefox and somehow win back user-share, then maybe it’d be worth it…
And what did it cost?
VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, apparently. We’ll see what else, in time.
Edit: Oh, and downsizing, fuck. Forgot about that part, that really sucks. :(
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Relay will get blacklisted soon enough.
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Does it hold to the same standard as Mullvad tho? Like no logging policy and regular audits?
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It’s hosted on AWS’ proprietary mail service, soooo…
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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.
So you’re not paying and this is the problem. That’s why they’re refocusing.
If I’m the sample size, then they are entirely refocusing on the wrong things, because I’ve never wanted Pocket, I don’t know what Content is even supposed to be and I can forego the use of AI in my browser.
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.
Oh god, AI into Firefox? What’s the reason?
I’m a bit confused what’s the cost of shipping a rebadged version of an existing VPN service is.
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.
I have a bad feeling about this… guess it’s time to learn about possible alternatives :/
There really aren’t any alternatives. Everything else is chromium.
chromium is based on a fork of webkit; webkit proper does remain – I don’t know how much of an influence google has on it though; all I ‘know’ is that it’s Apple’s adoption of a KDE project.
Alternative to what? Firefox?
You’ve got WebKit, and Chrome/Chromium. WebKit began as a fork of KDE KHTML, and Chromium then started as a fork of WebKit.
Firefox’s Gecko engine is the only other major alternative to those two.
I wish they would compete with Kagi and give us a paid search browser.
God no, that’s a privacy nightmare
Their bread is buttered by Google, so that seems unlikely.
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!
Thanks god
seemingly VERY common mozilla L.
AI seems like the latest shiny object they’re chasing. I wish they’d focus on building the most usable browser. I subscribe to the VPN, Pocket, and Relay, but I guess I’ll have to start looking for alternatives? I suppose Mullvad, Omnivore are the way to go, not sure about alternative to Relay.
Instead of relay, just get your own domain like whatever.com and redirect anything sent to any user name to your real email address.
For example, I’m just in my podiatrists waiting room. I have them podiatrist@whatever.com as my email address. You don’t need to configure new fake addresses just make up whatever you like.
That doesn’t work for phone
What do you mean?
Article quote “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.”
Does not scream privacy friendly, imo
on the one hand i agree: trustworthy does not mean privacy. but on the other hand: ai does not necesaarily mean privacy invasion (though experience might tell us otherwise)
In theory there should be an acceptable balance, somewhere. What this would look like I do not know.
In the past, they’ve often spearheaded privacy-friendly solutions, like the translation feature in Firefox, which is already today 100% offline. It’s possible to run LLMs offline, too, for simpler workloads. For example, they could probably use an offline LLM to have that translation feature form readable sentences more often.
