Posted on 08/19/2020 4:20:43 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Mozilla has been watching the user share of its flagship Firefox web browser shrink for a while, so it was hardly a surprise last week when the company announced it was doing some belt tightening that would result in another round of layoffs.
What was a surprise were the numbers involved: The company is laying off about 250 employees, for a staff reduction of 25%, and is completely closing its operations in Taipei, Taiwan. In addition, 60 employees will be shifted to new jobs, and the company will reduce spending on such things as developer tools, internal tooling and platform feature development.
Last week's layoffs were the second staff reduction Mozilla has had in 2020. In January, the company laid off about 70 employees – including some senior staffers – as a way of dealing with falling revenues due to steadily declining Firefox usage and market share numbers.
"Pre-COVID, our plan for 2020 was a year of change: building a better internet by accelerating product value in Firefox, increasing innovation, and adjusting our finances to ensure financial stability over the long term," Mozilla's CEO Mitchell Baker wrote in an email to employees announcing the layoffs. "We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our all-hands (meeting)."
The latest round of layoffs, according to Baker, are to deal with added pressure put on the company by the continuing pandemic.
"Our pre-COVID plan is no longer workable," she said. "We have talked about the need for change – including the likelihood of layoffs – since the spring. Today these changes become real."
While the pandemic might have hastened the problems at Mozilla, the problems the organization is now facing might have been inevitable. For about a decade, the company has been watching its Firefox usage rate – and its primary source of income – shrink.
The browser's market share peaked in July 2011 with Firefox usage at 34.1%, according to W3Counter; five months later, Mozilla inked a three-year deal with Google that brought the company $300 million yearly as a minimum revenue guarantee for searches from Firefox. That was followed in November 2017 by another agreement between Google and Mozilla, following a brief flirtation between Mozilla and Bing, but no dollar value was announced at the time. By then, Google's own browser, Chrome, was leading the pack, with a W3Counter usage rate of 59%, against a Firefox usage rate of 9.3%.
That 2017 agreement was set to expire later this year, but Mozilla recently reached a deal to extend the partnership. The terms of the latest agreement are not known, but a renegotiated contract is likely to see revenue shrink further, since Firefox was last measured at a 4.5% market usage rate.
"Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges," Baker wrote in a blog that went up shortly after employees were notified of the layoffs. "How can we lead towards business models that honor and protect people while creating opportunities for our business to thrive?"
Despite the declining Firefox usage rate, the company still has Mozilla VPN, a virtual private network service that was officially launched last month. Initially offered as Firefox Private Network, a Firefox extension that gave users VPN access through the browser, the new rebranded $4.99 monthly service allows users to connect up to five devices (currently limited to Android, Windows 10 and iOS, but with Mac and Linux clients on the way) for full operating system access to the VPN, even through competing browsers.
The company may also try to increase its monetization efforts with Pocket, a content curation service it purchased in 2017 that can be accessed directly from the Firefox browser as well as through client apps on mobile devices. Although the service is free to consumers, it offers a limited amount of sponsored content.
"Going forward, we will be smaller," Baker said. "We’ll also be organizing ourselves very differently, acting more quickly and nimbly. We’ll experiment more. We’ll adjust more quickly. We’ll join with allies outside of our organization more often and more effectively."
Better yet, brush up on your BASIC. LOL
I too downloaded and installed Brave, it took all my chrome bookmarks and settings. works really well. I need to play with it..
your not the only one who remembers Mosaic.
Lol.. I used that one for a bit, but prefer old school so I don’t forget (again) how to do HTML... (guess I still need to update how to use HTML5, not sure of the differences yet).
Netscape, for it’s time, was a great browser. Shame it had to stop.
With my stiff arthritic finger and limited html knowledge, I used the BBcodeXtra FF extension, which is also available on FF quantum, as bbCodeWebex. The Custom option enables you to make scripts to do such operations as pasting what you have copied into html formatting etc. In
Firefox, select the top paragraph and right click and choose View selection source to see the coding for that.
Atari 1200 XL. WITH the cassette tape drive and joystick, thank you. All the programs were on essentially game cartridges, and the tape drive was to save very rudimentary word processing and spreadsheet pages. It was the computer equivalent of the human appendix. Useless. Graduated to the XT clone after that. That’s about the time I went full Victor Frankenstein and started splicing mismatched body parts together to make my First Creation. Once I went uptown and got a real 486, I set The Monster up in my late dad’s den for he and Mom to use. I still have an ancient e-mail from him saved in my old Yahoo account somewhere. Dated about 1998, I think. He passed away the following year, but he at least got his first hands-on with this little thing called computers and the Internet. He could tie up the phone line with that thing. It was like the Encyclopedia Britannica and The National Archives had arrived at his door, gift wrapped.
Yeah, I remember the 486 (DX2, that many said it was worthless if you weren’t running a server; which is the same thing most said when x64 came out too)..
Going back to the TRS80 and the cassettes, I remember getting a weekly magazine (PC weekly?!) and trying out all of the BASIC programs that were interesting (remember that one with the gorillas on the building chunking bananas at each other?).. about 2 hours to type it all in, then another 30 minutes or hour to save it on a cassette >,<
Is the problem related the FR Tree Viewer by Cynwoody or the “Greasemonkey” extension that allows it to work? (JS?). If Greasemonkey related, then there is a Brave extension that does the same thing called “Tampermonkey”.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/tampermonkey “Brave” is based off of Chrome (w/o the spy stuff obviously) thus the Chrome extension store.
They do have it for windows and I knew that but now that I look at it, they have 32bit and 64bit(experimental)
https://www.claws-mail.org/win32/
My favorite is Evolution but that is definitely Linux only which is what I run. Haven’t done Windows in 15 years.
Yeah, my 486 was the first I owned that had a ZIF socket for the processor. The 386 was soldered to the board. The 286 WAS the board. LOL Remember the old Pentium II 350 and 400 MHz processors that were on Slot I cards and had those big, bulky aluminum heatsinks? Yep. Been there. Another Edsel.
After the newer (post 47?!) FF update, cynwoody integrated his add-on to be able to install directly to FF, without greasemonkey/tampermonkey ( had both installed). I remember having issues after the update, and he explained it to me, at the time.
Brave, if I remember correctly, has steps to install Chrome add-ons, which I followed, but it still isn’t showing up :/
I may look into it again later.
(Oh, P.S. I don’t think it would be a FRTree viewer issue, unless it has something to do with permissions..)
Aren’t you running Fedora?
Yay! :D
Played around with it a bit more.. FINALLY got it working on Brave.
Now, I need to see if they have uBlock and uMatrix for Brave.
Yes, I am.
I hear ya. I loved the interface.
Share peoples’ data, pay the consequences.
Fedora is rolling updates, right?
If not, I am thinking about trying it out.. (hate the Arch rolling :p)
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