Red Panda-mic; Mozilla fires a quarter of its staff

[BachChain]

Mozilla corporation, the company best known for maintaining the web browser Firefox, has been forced to lay off 25% of its approximately 1000 staff, citing economic downturn due to the ongoing Covid crisis. This comes after Mozilla had previously layed off 70 people in January due to lackluster sales of its then recently launched VPN services.

Quote

The coronavirus pandemic “significantly impacted our revenue,” Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post this morning. “As a result, our pre-COVID plan was no longer workable.”

 

Mozilla’s operations in Taipei will be closed as a result of the layoffs. The company didn’t otherwise say which teams will be impacted.

 

The company states that they will be focusing more of their resources on their paid services to increase and diversify their revenue.

Quote

Mozilla makes most of its money from companies paying to make their search engine the default in Firefox. This includes deals with Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia, and most notably, Google in the US and most of the rest of the world. The company also makes money from royalties, subscriptions, and advertising, but those search deals still represent the “majority” of its revenue.

 

Baker says Mozilla will initially focus on products such as Pocket, its VPN service, its VR chatroom Hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools.

Quote

That means reducing investment in other areas, though, such as in building out developer tools.

 

My thoughts

I use Firefox exclusively and would prefer it to continue existing, but I also don't have any use for their new services

 

Sources

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-quarter-staff-250-people-new-revenue-focus

[Quinnell]

Quote

 has been forced to lay off 25% of its approximately 1000 staff,

I am honestly surprised they even had 1000 staff to begin with.  Do they really have that much revenue?  I thought Mozilla was mostly freeware/donationware

[justpoet]

9 minutes ago, Quinnell said:

I am honestly surprised they even had 1000 staff to begin with.  Do they really have that much revenue?  I thought Mozilla was mostly freeware/donationware

They get paid in other ways, for example by google when the default search engine, for their VPN service if you use it, for paid accounts of their encrypted large file transfer service, etc.

[rawrdaysgoby]

Huh I am honesty shocked I thought they would be doing better since everyone is now online.

[Roswell]

5 hours ago, Quinnell said:

I am honestly surprised they even had 1000 staff to begin with.  Do they really have that much revenue?  I thought Mozilla was mostly freeware/donationware

When you have something like 50 different software and platform projects, you need a lot of people. Mozilla Corporation is also not the same thing is the Mozilla Foundation. OP mixed this up. That said, you also need a lot of people to handle 500 million in revenue every year as well.

[LAwLz]

5 hours ago, Quinnell said:

I am honestly surprised they even had 1000 staff to begin with.  Do they really have that much revenue?  I thought Mozilla was mostly freeware/donationware

They do a lot of stuff, not just Firefox.

 

Mozilla does:

Firefox (for like 5 different OSes) and all of its components (not an easy task these days with browsers being so complex, Firefox is 22,5 million lines of code).

Servo (a complete engineering of Firefox's browser engine, being done in parallel with Gecko development).

Thunderbird (email client).

Bugzilla (bug tracking software).

Pocket (kinda like bookmarks on steroids).

NSS (programming library with a ton of security and cryptography related features).

Rust (a fairly programming language).

Shumway (open source replacement for Flash Player).

Heavily fund and staff Xiph.org (organization that develops free multimedia formats and tools, such as Opus, Vorbis, Ogg, Theora, Daala and now helps with AV1 development).

 

 

 

 

Apparently what Mozilla laid off were, among other things, the servo team. That's basically the team responsible for all the major speed improvements that have been happening in Firefox the last 1-2 years. So losing that is a major blow.

Others are saying that they laid off a lot of the security staff but there are some conflicting info on that.

 

Edit: Seems like they did lay off security staff, but it was the staff for securing Mozilla's own infrastructure, not the one doing security on Firefox. So Mozilla no longer have people who does stuff like look for attacks and write incident reports if something were to happen.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

6 hours ago, BachChain said:

citing economic downturn due to the ongoing Covid crisis.

It's not obvious how, though. Especially since

6 hours ago, BachChain said:

Mozilla makes most of its money from companies paying to make their search engine the default in Firefox. This includes deals with Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia, and most notably, Google in the US and most of the rest of the world. The company also makes money from royalties, subscriptions, and advertising, but those search deals still represent the “majority” of its revenue.

doesn't seem like something that would change too rapidly. I wonder if that is truly the case, or just a generic way to avoid discussing different, covid-unrelated reasons 

[RejZoR]

I bet they fired everyone who said their new oversizing/expanding URL bar is retarded...

[LAwLz]

12 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

It's not obvious how, though. Especially since

doesn't seem like something that would change too rapidly. I wonder if that is truly the case, or just a generic way to avoid discussing different, covid-unrelated reasons 

I believe their contract with Google is ending this year and it has not been renewed. That means that they will soon loose like 70% of their income from Firefox.

 

 

Also worth noting that their CEO Michell Baker apparently has a salary of 2,5 million dollars a year. Oh and Mozilla also cut 70 jobs back in January this year. So in total they have laid off around 320 employees this year, or roughly 1/3 of their entire workforce.

[AlTech]

 

29 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Thunderbird (email client).

Not anymore.

 

Thunderbird is now a community run project split off from Mozilla with Mozilla only providing the domain hosting now afaik.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

welp, F. i can see mozilla being completely gone by the end of 2021. firefox market share has been falling off a cliff, nobody is interested in them anymore. 

 

literally the only person i know who uses firefox is my grandma. 

[staticpage]

Not surprising here is the last response I got to critiquing that brand and ya they lost their job. I as letting them know I hated the way they shoehorned pocket in to my start page.

[RejZoR]

4 minutes ago, staticpage said:

Not surprising here is the last response i got to critiquing that brand and ya they lost their job. I as letting them know I hated the way they shoehorned pocket in to my start page.

Either they are so incompetent or just so arrogant. Just look how oversizing of URL bar is universally hated yet they just keep on shoehorning it into a product, then go out of their way to force it on users by removing about:config switch to a point we had to write a god damn CSS file to ger rid of it. Then they returned it through some other switch and it's still enabled by default and hated by almost everyone. And they didn't address jack shit even after constructive complaints. I complained it's ugly, has no function and doesn't even follow their own arguments fr its existence. Then I went on providing them in depth explanations and actual design mockups. Result? Well, it got me banned from stinking Firefox sub. Thanks Mozilla. No wonder you suck if your supporters suck.

 

Now I run my own project Firefox Tweaker, a tool that fiddles with hidden Firefox settings to an extent that's under user control. Without dicking around with dumb clumsy about:config or any of other crap. Because they are too incompetent, arrogant or lazy to let users decide about some things.

[Joseph K]

13 hours ago, BachChain said:

Mozilla corporation, the company best known for maintaining the web browser Firefox, has been forced to lay off 25% of its approximately 1000 staff, citing economic downturn due to the ongoing Covid crisis. This comes after Mozilla had previously layed off 70 people in January due to lackluster sales of its then recently launched VPN services.

 

The company states that they will be focusing more of their resources on their paid services to increase and diversify their revenue.

 

My thoughts

I use Firefox exclusively and would prefer it to continue existing, but I also don't have any use for their new services

 

Sources

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-quarter-staff-250-people-new-revenue-focus

I have had lot's of performance issues and bugs with various website on Firefox for a while. I switched to Chrome recently and it's been completely smooth. Doubt I'll use Firefox again.

[WereCatf]

14 hours ago, BachChain said:

Mozilla corporation, the company best known for maintaining the web browser Firefox, has been forced to lay off 25% of its approximately 1000 staff

Should be firing the people behind the newest Firefox Android - version.

[RejZoR]

22 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Should be firing the people behind the newest Firefox Android - version.

On Android you have a choice of Vivaldi which is pretty good. Also Opera, despite all the Chinese stuff (on iOS there is just garbage Opera Touch that doens't even have bookmarks syncing). I'm stuck with Firefox and its idiocies because I'm on iOS and there either isn't any options or they just suck.

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, RejZoR said:

On Android you have a choice of Vivaldi which is pretty good. Also Opera

Alas, I'd lose the ability to sync easily with the desktop, send tabs from one device to another and so on and so forth.

[thechinchinsong]

It's a shame. I've been considering and testing switching from mostly chrome to Firefox. I hope Mozilla does well since having an alternative to Chrome is always nice. Hopefully this doesn't cause them to lose too much of a competitive edge vs Chrome.

[Đỗ Đức Huy]

Well so now it is either Chrome or Chrome reskin that is going to take over the net then. This sucks

[paeschli]

It's crazy how despite raised awareness of NSA spying upon citizens worldwide, Firefox (which is open-source) doesn't manage to capture a greater share of the browser market.

[Lakobrija]

6 hours ago, paeschli said:

It's crazy how despite raised awareness of NSA spying upon citizens worldwide, Firefox (which is open-source) doesn't manage to capture a greater share of the browser market.

Because literally nobody cares about spying. You're spied anyway, and you can do nothing about it and should stop bothering about it web wise

Edit: typo

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

On 8/12/2020 at 5:20 PM, RejZoR said:

On Android you have a choice of Vivaldi which is pretty good. Also Opera, despite all the Chinese stuff (on iOS there is just garbage Opera Touch that doens't even have bookmarks syncing). I'm stuck with Firefox and its idiocies because I'm on iOS and there either isn't any options or they just suck.

you can also just use chrome on iOS which works perfectly fine. 

[Quinnell]

13 minutes ago, Lakobrija said:

Because literally nobody cares about spying. You're spyed anyway, and you can do nothing about it and should stop bothering about it web wise

Convenience wins out over Privacy or Security for most.  I contend that we should try to limit how much we can be spied on but no one will really bother.

[PlayStation 2]

Me using Vivaldi and not giving a fuck: Interesting

[RejZoR]

26 minutes ago, Ashley said:

you can also just use chrome on iOS which works perfectly fine. 

Yeah, not gonna happen. I dumped EVERYTHING Google like 2 years ago. Not gonna come back. I'd rather not have bookmark syncing then...