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."
I downloaded and installed Brave this morning after I posted this thread. It allows you to import all your Firefox bookmarks, and I've noticed that it also imported most of my settings and autocompletion fields.
I did have to install the couple of extensions I use--NoScript and AdBlocker, and autoscrolling is now an extension rather than built in. Overall, though, I am liking this browser a LOT more than when I tried it out a few years ago.
KancelKultur Karma!
Firefox shot itself in the head when they changed to a model of near-daily updates. Sure, they keep the bleeding edge folks happy, but for mainstream users it’s too big of a hassle having to dismiss the popup every time the browser is used.
When I open a browser, I want to use the browser. Not wait for a download and installation.
And with the benefit of an extra set of spyware built in. No one that cares about security should use Edge.
Firefox’s decline started when they started their rapid release. Then they changed their coding to ruin many add-ons/extensions.
That was around version 47 or so.
Edge is one of those ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ browsers. Microsoft essentially coded their own version of the most widely used features of Chrome and Firefox and added them into their browser. You’re correct about Chrome - it’s a spyware monster and no matter how you tweak it, it’s a resource hog. I’ve tried dozens, if not hundreds of times over the years to tame it for end users, but about the only quick-n-dirty fix any of us could conjure up was to increase the page file size and tell the user not to have 10 apps open at once. (Try telling that to an engineer. God bless and good luck.) 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 use Firefox , I can make it look and do what I want to do . All those Google clones are boring
t in 2020, the most popular web browser is Google Chrome, with 49.3 percent of the recorded share of visits. This is a far cry from IE's once dominant share of 96 percent back in the infancy of the web,..Apple's Safari browser comes in a distant second with 31.6 percent....29.5 percent of smartphones are Apple devices, compared to 23 percent Android devices. So most of the Safari use actually comes from phones, not PCs. The big surprise is the third place winner. Internet Explorer. Despite the fact that Microsoft has been urging people to switch to Edge, IE is still the third most widely used browser, capturing 5.7 percent of the market...Edge loses out to IE, capturing only 4.2 percent of the market, and bringing up the rear is Firefox, with a mere 3.6 percent. The remaining 11.3 percent of the market share is divided up between a constellation of tiny, seldom used browsers that nonetheless have niche followings
Besides the (detrimental in many ways) massive switch from desktops to mobile devices for Internet searching, the decline of Firefox is what happens when you follow the crowd, both into political correctness and ignorance or carelessness, and thus handicap a swiss knife, utility truck browser, in seeking to imitate Chrome, which the simple masses flock due mainly mainly because if advertising, or speed, and or because they care little for customization and enhanced functions. Those who even know what TabMixPlus enabled know some of what I am speaking of.
I use about 6 browsers, each for a purpose (one mainly for forums, another for shopping, etc...) and use multiple profiles of Firefox ESR, and Waterfox and Basilisk due to the extensions that enable far more functionality than the 2nd best Firefox Quantum (portable) or the inferior Chrome (portable) etc. I would say Vivaldi is better than Chrome, Opera and others
I miss that awesome extension.
Have recently been using DuckDuckGo browser on my Android phone and IPad. Very fast and very effective at blocking ads.
Yeah, that worked out.
My wife is still using FireFox on her MacBook Pro but I switched to Safari on my iMac. Our machines are just browsing...
My browsing life: Netscape, Opera, Firefox, Slimjet, Brave.
Through all of this I have used Thunderbird for email.
Very satisfied with the Brave/T’bird combo.
I use Mozilla. And I’m debating ending it.
They put BLM banners and “don’t you want to take unconscious bias training?” on the bottom of the page every time you start it up.
Get woke, go broke.
Agreed.
I haven’t used Firefox for the same reason, Eich’s removal. I use Palemoon and SlimJet (Mozilla/Chromium) now.
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