Thanks to ShadowAce for the ping!
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."
they could’ve had a fast, light-weight, super-secure browser with built in PGP encryption....but “leadership” decided to monetize it and most of our browsing habits and thoughts-like all the other tech “giants
I just loaded Firefox on my iPhone because Safari would not keep me logged in on FreeRepublic. It works flawlessly. I also run it on my office pc.
Firefox Focus is the best iphone browser out there IMHO
“All downhill since Mozilla forced Brendan Eich out. I droped FireFox about then and now use Brendon’s “Brave” browser.”
I am right there with you. Mozilla claims to be committed to privacy, but IMHO that is an out and out lie. After Brendan was kicked out, they started the Pocket thing, and they want you to turn that on and set up an account with them. If they really cared about privacy, such a thing would not even cross their minds. All Mozilla is good for these days is to produce source code that others (like Tor) can vet and modify for privacy. They should just shut up and fix their buggy sh!t so that trustworthy people can take it over and make something useful of it.
BTW, Brave is great, highly recommended. I just wish Jim Robinson would set up his account and collect the BAT I have been trying to send him.
Mozilla and Firefox lost me when they ditched their well-regarded CEO because he donated to the anti-gay marriage campaign in California. In spite of some advantages, but I do not want to be irritated every time I use Mozilla or Firefox.
“So sad. Penalize free speech of a company executive and then people walk away.”
Get woke. Go broke.
“CCleaner has it’s own browser. No Ads. I’m using it more and more.”
Hasn’t CCleaner been outed as spyware?
Get woke, go broke. They shouldn’t have fired Brandon Eich.
I’ve been using Firefox for a decade. I’ll give Brave a try. I’m a bit concerned about the PITA of setting up all my bookmarks and settings on a new browser though.
I know a lot of Conservatives dumped it after they fired their CEO for contributing to an anti-Gay Marriage amendment drive in California.
Personally I got sick of the constant alerts over problems and incompatibilities with plug-ins.
p
Thanks
Thanks to ShadowAce for the ping!
You were using private mode in Safari
I also use Chrome and Brave and Safari and Edge for various things where they work better than Firefox, but FF is my default.
I hope Mozilla manages to keep rolling -- moving off Firefox and Thunderbird as my defaults would be really annoying.
I’ve been a Firefox user for years and fought to change it back to my liking after almost every update changed the way in looked or operated. I hated the way they eliminated tabs on bottom for putting tabs on top and eliminated “legacy” apps when they changed platform formats a couple of years ago. I stayed with the old format and didn’t upgrade security holes until my company forced us to upgrade to Windows 10.
I searched the net and found scripts that helped me put tabs on bottom where they belong then made the jump and found new apps to replace the legacy ones. Now I like the way it works and looks but shudder with every new update that they may crash my tweaks.
Chrome is a Google spy machine and has no way (AFAIK) to make tabs on bottom so I’ll stick with Firefox. Edge is Microsoft’s browser and I can use it if necessary but don’t think there is a way to customize like Firefox.
I bet i can trace the decline of firefox to the exact day...
Same here. Been using ff forever. I run two versions at the same time pretty much all the time because I’m a tab freak. Usually have 30-50 tabs open in each version LOL. I run regular ff and ff developer version. I like being able to scroll through the tabs instead of them shrinking down to where I can’t tell what’s what like Brave does. FF dev version screwed me on a recent update. I guess it was a major one or they just messed up. Lost everything. Tabs, history, bookmarks etc. I copied my regular FF profile over to it. Gave me back everything but my open tabs.
Falkon is a new one I kind of like but I haven’t used it a whole lot yet, https://www.falkon.org/
Very fast and has a slew of settings. It’s multiplatform.
I run linux which means I can use Chromium which is Chrome before googly gets their hands on it. I just don’t like Chromium/Chrome.
I use “open in new tab” a lot and with ff, it’s one swift motion to right click, move pointer over “open in new tab” and release right button. In all the rest, you have to right click, release right click, move pointer over Open in New Tab and left click. pita
There’s also a lot of addons for FF that have no equivalent in chrome/chromium based browsers.
So true. I'm still upset about that. I'm strongly tempted to Bravely go tilting at windmills but mostly I just stick with Safari and bite my tongue. I've given up on Mozilla and won't use Chrome directly.
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