Mozilla has fired Chief Product Officer Steve Teixeira after cancer diagnosis

LWD@lemm.ee to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 243 points –
mastodon.social

sigh

41

It's truly wild how hard of a heel turn mozilla has taken. I'm going to cancel my recurring donations to them, and get off all of their products.

People are digging up a bunch of old shit right now

It’s obviously orchestrated

Is Mozilla in on it too? Because they're the ones who orchestrated laying off Steve Teixeira.

this week the chat has all been “Mozilla are going in the wrong direction , They’re selling out, they using AI, they’re hiring ad experts”. - all over xitter all over lemmy.

Now someone dug up this old story about teixeira Suing them, because he claims they demoted him because of cancer. A

With the scarcity of facts available at this stage , one thing we know is that both AI and advertising were championed by…. Texeira - ex of Microsoft, twitter and Facebook.

So, an alternate but equally plausible narrative, might be “Teixeira strayed to far into commercialisation, received a shitty performance review, and got moved out of his role”

Yeah especially if you look on reddit, it's a handful of accounts with a very concerted effort.

Don't get me wrong it's shitty behaviour, but it's also fairly obviously some are getting paid to suddenly do this.

holy shit you donated money to these wackos?

with so many OOS projects out there in need of funding, so many devs roughing it up, you donate to the advertising company Mozilla that has zero cash needs, they give million dollar bonuses to their executives every year.

Literally giving money to wacko rich executives

It's almost like they are intentionally trying to get in trouble.

I feel like the CEO of Mozilla is paid by Google to be as fucking stupid as possible.

To be fair I believe being as fucking stupid as possible is a prerequisite of being a CEO of anything.

I hope discovery finds something obvious to this effect, or we're all going to have a bad time in the near future

Honestly. Even my most cynical assumption was that Mozilla would subtly pressure him to leave the company, making life harder for him in ways that wouldn't be possible to legally prove.

I haven't seen anything this egregious since Elon Musk fired Halli.

Jesus isn't rule number one of an employee suing you is to NOT FIRE THEM?

Seriously Monty Burns did this. Monty fucking burns. A cartoon villain

*Monte Carlo

Season 2 - Bart gets hit by a car. Bart gets hit by Mr Burns while skateboarding. Homer uses Lionel Hutz to sue his employer, Mr Burns for 1 million dollars. On receiving notice, Mr Burns tells Smithers to fire Homer. Smithers asks "Do you think that's wise, sir? Think of the headlines"

Mr Burns imagining a newspaper headline that reads "Burns fires ungrateful employee"

I just canceled my MDN Plus subscription. Man, Mozilla has been so disappointing recently. I have to wonder if Google infiltrated them or something.

It doesn't really matter if they've been infiltrated, because they're so dependent on Google's cash. The money corrupts, even if there are no specific moles.

Ok wtf is Moxilla doing? They know their company is built on good community perception, right?

I mean they've been pedaling AI crap for a while without negative backlash.

Similarly they tried to ride the Blockchain train back in the crypto scam days and also didn't face any backlash.

They've publicly vouched to become an AI company and an advertising company without backlash.

I think most Firefox users don't care

I think most Firefox users don’t care

Oh we care, but there's no alternative besides Chrome and Safari and those companies are even worse (Google definitely is, anyway, Apple is debatable)

Luckily there's still alternatives like Librewolf that unfortunately still use Mozilla's browser engine.

I do hope the Servo project will be ready to use in a production browser soon.

If Mozilla really starts to go downhill, what are the chances we get a Linux kernel-style community fork that we can rely on instead? Curious why that hasn't happened before -- perhaps because Mozilla has always toed the line of not-quite-awful enough?

I just hope we can keep an alternative browser engine alive. Would be nice if some rich person would just set up a funding model that can pay a few devs to keep it going indefinitely without ads or spyware.

Because developing and maintaining an entire browser is a huge task. That's why we don't see much competition in browsers (I mean independent browsers). Also Mozilla isn't doing that bad, the browser is still really good. It's not the technical side that is a problem, its mostly marketing and the image of Mozilla.

Don't you like the Ladybird Browser and the browser based in Servo projects as alternatives?

They're literally happening right now, not ready for prime time but with continued development and support they'll become usuable

Prolonged, multi-level fuckery with dozens of witnesses - and that's just with what they did to this one guy.

Yet another thing to add to my growing pile of reasons that Mozilla is enshittifying. I wonder what tomorrow's reasons will be?

Slight sidetrack, I thought Mastodon was federated with Lemmy? Or is it just Boost that can't handle Mastodon links?

You can read Lemmy threads in Mastodon clients (although it is messy and gross), but not vice versa. I couldn't tell you the reason why.

I genuinely believe that the Mozilla board is secretly working for Google. They already get most of their funding from that search engine deal, is a backroom agreement to slowly run the organization into the ground in order to push the last holdouts to Chrome that hard to believe?

I don't think they're working for Google but I'm convinced that they're trying to setup their own advertising business

Trying to get some of that sweet ad revenue money

but Google controls so much of everything that of course they're indirectly funded by Google, so it may look like they're working for Google

In this Tecnofeudalist reality that we live in, we all indirectly work for our feudal lords Google / Meta / Amazon. We are granted their grace and allowed to exist in their server space and use their internet cables. In return we have to work the land and give our data as a tribute.

Teixeira worked for nearly 14 years at Microsoft in areas including developer tools and technologies, before serving as Facebook’s director of program management and design, and Twitter’s vice president of product.

According to the suit, Teixeira joined Mozilla in August 2022 with the understanding that he would ultimately be positioned to succeed Baker as Mozilla CEO.

[...]

Teixeira, 52, was diagnosed in October 2023 with ocular melanoma, a rare but treatable form of cancer. He took an approved 90-day medical leave through early February under the Family Medical Leave Act, the suit says.

Shortly before Teixeira returned, in early February, Baker stepped down as CEO, returning to the role of executive chairman. Chambers, a Mozilla board member, was named to serve as CEO for the remainder of the year.

So he's basically fine, he just missed his chance to become CEO.

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/mozillas-product-chief-sues-the-firefox-maker-alleging-discrimination-after-cancer-diagnosis/

You missed this paragraph, which is curious.

After he returned, the suit says, Teixeira was asked to carry out and falsely take responsibility for a decision to make job cuts that were planned in his absence. He questioned the need for the layoffs and raised concerns about the potential to disproportionately impact women and people of color, the suit says.

Mozilla was trying to use him as a scapegoat, putting profits ahead of people.

In the post OP linked from Teixeira, he claims they terminated his employment.

No no, guys Mozilla are the good guys. They never did something nasty like bundling tons of spyware and 3rd party calls with Firefox nor adding unique IDs to every installation.

adding unique IDs to every installation.

I wasn't familiar with that so I did a quick search. For anyone else interested here is some info about it:

"Internet users who download the Firefox web browser from the official Mozilla website get a unique identifier attached to the installer that is submitted to Mozilla on install and first run."

[...]

"Firefox users who prefer to download the browser without the unique identifier may do so in the following two ways:"

  1. Download the Firefox installer from Mozilla's HTTPS repository (formerly the FTP repository).

  2. Download Firefox from third-party download sites that host the installer, e.g., from Softonic.

"The downloaded installers do not have the unique identifier, as they are identical whenever they are downloaded."

In the comments section someone says:

"It seems that getting Firefox from GNU/Linux repos (Debian, etc.), doesn’t come with unique IDs."

Stupid move posting about it publicly while the case is still open.

Yeah I don't know how this is in other countries but over here that can seriously damage your case as the other party can claim your motivation is fame (and hence money), not justice. You generally never do this, and it's one of the things lawyers are very serious and strict about.