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."
Tech Ping
I’ve mostly switched to Brave after using Firefox for years.
All downhill since Mozilla forced Brendan Eich out. I droped FireFox about then and now use Brendon’s “Brave” browser.
Interesting read. Besides Chrome, who are the other emerging competitors? Is Microsoft’s Edge browser actually in the race? I’ve been using FF for over a decade and have it set just the way I like it. Not sure I like the idea of a web without them.
I’m still using Firefox and don’t plan to switch. Of course I’m also using Windows 7 and don’t plan to switch. Resistance maybe futile but screw Google.
“All downhill since Mozilla forced Brendan Eich out.”
Absolutely no mention of this in the article at all, but it’s true. I’m waiting for Brave to get up to speed.
Get woke, go broke.
Edge Chromium is rapidly catching Chrome due to being more secure and faster.
CCleaner has it’s own browser. No Ads. I’m using it more and more.
Actually, I do like Opera, but given they were sold to the Chinese makes me leery about using it full-time. I do use Opera on occasion when Firefox will bark about a webpage and not display it. I'm not talking about security warnings. Firefox just comes up with a blank webpage or section of a webpage.
I use Thunderbird email from Mozilla. I like Thunderbird features like filtering, folder set-up, rules for email distribution to folders, and its cost - $0. Are there other email managers available comparable to Thunderbird?
Edge is now based on Chrome. MS is dropping support for legacy Edge and Internet Explorer sometime soon.
Same here. I was a Firefox user for years and thought it was much superior to IE, then they started to issue new builds for what seemed like every fifteen minutes and it killed my Internet sessions, so I switched over to Brave and haven’t looked back. Chrome, fuggetaboutit.
For later
I started looking at other browsers at that point, too.
I sort of settled on Brave fairly early, even in its first general releases.
I still use FF for some stuff.
I've recently been looking at Iridium, too.
Once the favorite add-on functionality from FF hits the Chrome-based browsers, the FF decline will really be steep.
Yeah, the parts of FF I missed most was an HTML plugin I used for FR, and the bookmarks organization methods were superior. I have since tweaked my Safari & Brave to my liking.
I could have written your post, as we’re in exactly the same tech boat.
So sad. Penalize free speech of a company executive and then people walk away.
ditti
8/17/21 is the drop dead for IE11 and legacy Edge
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