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.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/46655413

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.”

  • Marthirial@lemmy.worldEnglish
    213·
    2 months ago

    Their question is: how much would you pay for not using a Chromium based browser?

    People switching to the browser and zapping all ads, demanding open source and vitriol for any kind of monetization. How can they survive? They would have to become a subsidized utility, which not even the Internet as a whole has achieved.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      I wouldn’t mind paying money for a good browser. I paid for Opera back in the day, and browsers are significantly more complex (and cost several orders of magnitude more to develop) now compared to back then.

    • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      There was a poll a while back on mastodon and the majority answered they’d be ok with 5$/year to support Firefox.

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        The kind of people you find on Mastodon following Firefox news are not the same as the average person. They are a bubble.

        A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.

        • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.

          …people or dollars? ‘Cos i don’t think “hundreds of millions” of people are chippin’ in, it’s Google that’s financing “hundreds of millions” of dollars…

          But yeah, that target audience is a bubble, normies don’t care.

          • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Dollars.

            Google is giving hundreds of millions because they fear regulators getting involved.

            A handful of people who follow Mozilla on Mastodon saying they’re willing to pay up to a meagre $5 per year won’t do anything.

    • panicnow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      2 months ago

      I get not wanting to use a google, microsoft or crypto laden browser, but I would be willing to use a well supported browser that used chromium as the page rendering engine. It seems to be extremely difficult to get another engine to be competitive in the marketplace. Maybe the resources would be better spent putting the chromium engine inside a different container. I’m sure there would be drawbacks, but I think there would be compatibility benefits too.

      • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
        11·
        2 months ago

        used chromium as the page rendering engine.

        I believe WebKit is Chromium’s rendering engine, as is Gecko for Firefox.

        Opera used to have their own but now they’re just rebranded Chromium.