Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the creation of free software.
With just a little more than two months left in 2024, This has become the year in which Mozilla has undergone a series of internal changes which remains to be seen if they are for the better or worse of the organization.
And is that following the recent resignation of Mitchell Bakerl to the position of executive director (CEO) of Mozilla and with the new appointment of Laura Chambers as CEO who will take over momentarily (it is mentioned that it will be for the rest of the year), in a new strategic move, Mozilla has announced a new staff cut, as it has plans to fire approximately 60 employees and review its product development strategy.
With this move by Mozilla, This would become the fourth episode of mass layoffs carried out by the organization, with 320 employees laid off in 2020 (250 + 70) and 50 in 2017. Considering that Mozilla employs between 500 and 1,000 people, these layoffs will represent approximately 5-10% of the workforce.
It is mentioned that this personnel cut It is intended to reorient Mozilla to focus on specific areas, including the use of artificial intelligence technologies in Firefox, such as the integration of developments from Fakespot, a recently acquired company.
For optimize work processes, it is mentioned that they plan to consolidate teams related to the Pocket service, content preparation and artificial intelligence. These changes are not expected to affect MDN (Mozilla Developer Network), Mozilla Ads and Fakespot, nor will there be modifications in the legal, financial, operational and marketing activities departments.
Regarding the products, investments in Mozilla VPN will be reduced, anonymous email service Firefox Relay, the personal data leak analyzer Mozilla Monitor Plus and the Mozilla.social social network. Although these services will not be closed completely, there will be a reduction in the number of employees assigned to them. On the other hand, Mozilla Hubs, a 3D chat system with virtual reality elements, will be closed completely.
For example, significant resources were initially allocated to promoting Mozilla.social, but further analysis showed that these resources were excessive and that a smaller team could handle the maintenance of the platform by reducing the promotion of experimental features and focusing on the main functionality. The decision was made to reduce investments in services related to confidentiality and security due to the high competition in these market segments and the difficulty of creating a unique offer.
The closure of Mozilla Hubs is due to a recent decline in user interest in 3D virtual worlds, especially outside the realms of gaming and education.
In addition to this, It is worth mentioning that in the Nightly versions of Firefox, which will be used in Firefox 124 starting March 19, Added the ability to show page thumbnails when hovering over tabs. In addition to the mockup, a mention of the link displayed on the tab has also been added to the tab information block. At the same time, the link in the tooltip above the tab is available in Firefox version 123.
Preview of Tab Previews
Default, thumbnail previews are disabled and require the setting to be turned on «browser.tabs.cardPreview.enabled» in about:config. To control the delay before the thumbnail appears, the setting “browser.tabs.cardPreview.delayMs", which is set to 1000 ms by default, meaning the tooltip requires the cursor to remain over the tab button for at least one second.
Among the changes in the Nightly versions, The following also stand out:
- Reduced recovery time for a large number of tabs after a restart: Work has been done to reduce the time it takes Firefox to recover a large number of tabs after restarting the browser. This will improve the user experience when restarting Firefox with many tabs open.
- Reader View Performance Improvements: Improved performance in Reader View, where the Slack app has been disabled. Additionally, the design of the expected reading time has been updated and performance has been optimized by choosing a dark theme in reader mode.
- Increased performance on the Linux platform: An increase in performance has been achieved on the Linux platform, with improvements ranging from 2% to 11%. This was achieved by disabling some unnecessary protection mechanisms against Specter and Meltdown attacks in isolated mode.
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