Mozilla lays off 70 employees to prepare for tough years ahead

[harlan4096]

A Techcrunch report suggests that Mozilla laid off at least 70 employees to better prepare for the challenges that it is facing in the coming years.

Mozilla, which is bests known for its Firefox web browser, depends to a very large degree on a deal with Google. Google pays Mozilla more than 90% of its revenue for being the default search engine in the Firefox web browser in most regions.

The deal is problematic for a number of reasons: first, because Google operates Chrome, the main contender in the browser market and dominating force at the time of writing, and second, because Google's business model, advertising, clashes with Mozilla's mission to strengthen privacy on the Internet.

Mozilla started to implement Tracking functionality in Firefox but the efforts don't go far enough for many users; probably the main factor that is preventing Mozilla from implementing better controls in Firefox is the organization's reliance on Google.

The overall number of employees that have been laid off may even be higher as Mozilla has yet to decide how employees from France and the UK are affected by the decision.

The organization has about 1000 employees worldwide. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker cites the slower than expected rollout of revenue generating products as the main reason for the decision. Mozilla revealed plans to diversify the organization's income through other products to reduce the dependency on Google.

A strong focus is on subscription-based products. Mozilla revealed Firefox Premium, an Enterprise-exclusive service that provides better support to subscribers, and a new VPN/browser-proxy service that is currently undergoing beta testing.
...

Continue Reading