Mozilla Shrinks to Survive Amid Declining Firefox Usage

ITProToday ^ | 18 August 2020 | Christine Hall

[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."

[ShadowAce]

It's not a rolling distro, but they do have major version updates every six months.

It's meant for those who want/like bleeding edge. I use it at home because I am a Red Hat sysadmin at work.

[Bikkuri]

Ya, I remember you being RH, but thought you may have mentioned Fedora before..
I would prefer the every 6 month instead of the every 6 minute :p

[wastedyears]

What’s a red hat sysadmin?

[Elsie]

I truly miss BASIC

I could whip up a few lines of code and actually DO something creative with it.

Trying to get sOmething going with C++ etal is like climbing out of the water and crawling up the cliff at DOVER.

[Elsie]

My first was a Motorola 6800 development kit that I had to solder together and supply my own tape recorder and power supply. Hexadecimal display and keypad and 256 BYTES of RAM.

[Elsie]

Then came OSI...

[Viking2002]

Back in the primordial days of coding, when I majored in Electronic Data Processing in college (yes, there was such a major), I interned for the director of the college computer department. One of the prerequisites to move on to courses in COBOL, Assembler, FORTRAN, and RPG II (have I carbon dated myself yet?) was to pass CompSci 101, which included BASIC programming. The campus mainframe was an old NCR system that was run by punch cards and tape drives. Access was restricted to old 'Jetsons' terminals which required a multi-phase logon. Sometimes you had to wait for hours to get a tractor-feed printout of your program results put in your mailbox at the campus complex, which consisted of a bank of old, 1930's-style mail slots with wristwatch spin locks on the doors. One day, I logged on and sent a program in BASIC to the mainframe, and the resulting readout I was expecting was something like 'Hello there!', or some other simplistic nonsense. I mean, hours of syntax-free coding by hand for something that silly. It never came, but when I showed up at my desk outside the director's office a couple days later, I was informed by him that someone had apparently inputted a logon code that the mainframe didn't understand because two alpha-numeric symbols had gotten transposed, and after an investigation, the culprit was me. The entire campus mainframe crashed and it took them a full day to purge the system and restart it. It goes without saying that I was persona non grata after that, and I delayed my entry into full-time IT for over another decade, until I exorcised the demon haunting my past. The good news was, coding sucked and desktop and network support was a much more preferable environment for me.

[ShadowAce]

What’s a red hat sysadmin?

A Systems Administrator for servers running Red Hat Linux.

I take care of, and troubleshoot, a couple thousand Linux servers for my organization. I make sure they are up and running without issues, troubleshoot issues users may run into, and make sure our systems are up to date and running smoothly.

[wastedyears]

Sounds like something I’d enjoy learning about.

[minnesota_bound]

I like Firefox. Chrome hogs memory and has a lousy toolbar and they spy on you.

I can modify the look of Firefox so the toolbar buttons are bigger, I have tabs below the web address field, change color of active tab, increase text size of the text for bookmarks in the sidebar or dropdown menu.

You can do nothing to change Chrome.

[ShadowAce]

It's mostly enjoyable, though there are times when you run into a problem that you just cannot solve. It gives me headaches. :)

Look into Red Hat's RHCSA/RHCE program. If you can pass those tests, you can pretty much write your own ticket.

[minnesota_bound]

#108 hat’s a red hat sysadmin?
Someone who wears a MAGA hat.

[mrobisr]

Thank you for this article I forgot about this and failed to act appropriately. I have deleted the web browser, added brave, and canceled my vpn through them. You are free to condone any behavior you wish to, but understand there will be consequences.

[Svartalfiar]

Meh. I used Firefox fora couple years, til I found Pale Moon. Used to be a Firefox derivative, now it’s its own fully separate fork.

But help crap I didn’t know Mozilla had over a thousand employees?!?

[daniel1212]

Firefox was a fun browser until it started to eat itself, then the old legacy plug-ins that were so much fun started to mutate and go rogue when they upgraded to stay abreast of the newer Firefox builds. They need to create a Geezernet for us 50+ types who were in IT back in the Wild West days when there were still dial-up modems and BBS sysops. E-mail was straight ASCII and not HTML

I hear you, but you can use Firefox ESR 52, and run Quantum portable (not the standard install) both of which are linked to in one of my posts.