Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people. These are individuals of exceptional professional and personal caliber who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today. To each of them, I extend my heartfelt thanks and deepest regrets that we have come to this point. This is a humbling recognition of the realities we face, and what is needed to overcome them.
I feel for the 250 laid off employees – that always sucks and I hope they will be able to find a new job quickly.
That being said, I have no idea what to make of this corporate speak word soup, and it’s hard to parse what, exactly, is going to change from here on out. There’s nothing concrete here, no announcements, no goals or targets – just vague evergreen wording.
There’s hints that the deal with Google – wherein Google contributes about 90% of Mozilla’s revenue to be the default search engine in Firefox – might expire and not be renewed at the end of this year, which would effectively cut all of Mozilla’s revenue off. That will be an immense shock, and it could easily spell the end of the Mozilla Foundation in its current form – and thus the continued viability of Firefox.
How many of those 250 are programmers?
Many but not all. The Firefox development team was mostly spared but other projects and groups got heavy cuts, including Servo. Management wasn’t spared from the cuts either, including the highest levels.
Still never understood the firefox OS mobile project. It was so obviously a sinkhole for money. I think some web standards came out of that effort, but at a terrible cost. Like, I know you want to make good of any situation, but those gains could have been made with much less cost.
A company uses it as it’s base (they call it KaiOS) and phones are sold at the price of $17.
It’s marketed as a smart feature phone.
Supposedly: “the second-most popular mobile phone platform in India”
https://www.androidauthority.com/kaios-phone-review-979286/
Firefox OS made sense as a FOSS IoT OS/ecosystem, and I think that could have been a valuable source of revenue in the long run. It would have slotted into Mozilla’s Security First model nicely. They could have had the upstream unstable version for free, and a paid stable and/or commercial version. Kind of the way RedHat has Fedora as a running beta test, and RHEL as the commercial offering.
They could have picked up MyCroft and rolled it into Firefox OS too to have a bring your own hardware smart house setup.
I’m not saying it wasn’t a pipe dream, just it would have been nice to have a barebones, plug-and-play IoT kit from a vendor who isn’t gathering data on me.
Can we please stop pretending that Mozilla is some kind of beggar dependant on Google for money? Last time the Google contract expired, Google and Microsoft went into a bidding war on whose going to be the default search engine in Firefox. There is lots of money in search engine placement in browsers, even for underdogs like Firefox.
This is more of a case of Mozilla deciding to drop products it considers “non-viable”. Mozilla is a business now.
I think that Mozilla has always been a business. The fact that it is a US corporation and not just a non-profit is a tell-tale sign ;-), but it also has been behaving like a ‘normal’ company for quite a while.
Companies building open source products are not necessarily evil or “bad”, but in this case, for all the lofty goals and rhetorical speeches, they seem to lack focus and make a lot of questionable decisions… Eg:
– the salary of the CEO is completely out of line with (my) expectations for a nonprofit-like org
– did not manage to wean itself from the Google donation, which is a huge liability with the FF market share dwindling
– choosing to develop a haphazard lot of products with no clear relationship between them except for ‘fostering the open web’, then realizing that most of those have strong commercial competitors and need long-term investment to gain any market share
– dropping some of the aforementioned products after sinking lots of money in them (mobile OS)
– no desire to support software that has a large, well established user base but brings in little money (TB)
– managing to alienate a part of their most loyal userbase by forcing on them UI redesigns and API changes
The funny side of it is that a lot of those decisions remind me of the oss-producing company that I worked for previously – balancing budget when producing open-source is a thought act, esp. when your core user base is made of geeks. Chasing fads is however rarely a sustainable, long-term solution…
Last time FireFox still had market share and thus value to Google/Microsoft.
Let’s have a look at the situation 5 years ago. Depending on where you looked the marketshare was about 15% but they had been in a downward trend ever since Chrome came around. Developers were warning about this decline and were openly discussing other revenue venues and areas of focus: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/firefox-market-share-declines/2259. 5 years later their marketshare has halved and it seems they only have their hardcore base left and even that is declining. They basically have been going down in a steady line of 2% for the last 10 years
Desktop, measurements of July because of the current month and average of year. Added Januari and December to see the trend in that year
2009: 30.5 (27->32)
2010: 30.7 (32->31)
2011: 28.0 (31->25)
2012: 23.7 (25->23)
2013: 21.3 (22->20)
2014: 19.3 (20->18)
2015: 17.2 (19->16)
2016: 15.4 (16->15)
2017: 13.8 (15->12)
2018: 11.2 (12->10)
2019: 9.5 (10->9)
2020: 8.6 (10->8?)
And that is only taking the desktop market into account. Firefox has basically no presence on mobile.
Why do you think Firefox is going to survive at all?
“Mozilla is a business now.”
You better be when you have thousands of employees, hundreds of millions of revenue every year and have (had) half a billion users/customers
That’s exactly what they are though. Some roses are red, the sky is blue, and Mozilla is dependent on Google Ad money for survival.
Google being the default search engine also clashes with Mozilla’s privacy and security stance. “We’re concerned about your privacy and security, but we do set Google as the default search engine which tracks your and prompts you to install Chrome.” 😐
The writing was on the wall as soon as Chrome was released, and Google didn’t need Firefox anymore.
Also, today I learned that Mozilla launched a VPN., As if anyone is going to buy VPN from a US company, which by definition is susceptible to pressure from the US government, and by extension the Content Cartels and the three-letter agencies. If you want to see what can go wrong with that, look at HMA (HideMyA…) and how easily they backstabbed their users.
There is a reason popular VPNs like NordVPN are headquartered in Panama or other countries with no mandatory data retention laws and no treaties with the three-letter agencies. It’s what gives them their reputation of never having stabbed users in the back.
You sure about that? VPNs are a race to the bottom and many of them just sell your data instead.
“They gotta make money somehow”.
If you have a free VPN they clearly have to sell you a whole bunch of ads and sell your data.
The better VPN’s charge quite a lot and have “0-logging” policies, doing everything in memory and nothing on disks. They even talk with web-services like Netflix and Amazon Prime to whitelist their servers so their customers don’t get blocked when watching “movies in Japanese with English subtitles on their Japanese accounts from The Netherlands”*
FireFox VPN is one of those “0-logging” VPN’s, but it is only available in 6 countries (entry-point) and the number of “resurface-points” isn’t great either. And the fact that it is based on WireGuard (GPL licensed protocol) but that they don’t have a Linux client is the final nail in the coffin for my wife
*This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
I don’t trust any US or UK VPN to be true “0-logging”. Either they are breaking local data retention laws (unlikely) or lying to customers about their “0-logness” by abusing semantic loopholes (basically telling to the customer something like “we don’t keep logs dear customer, but we keep something which is functionally equivalent to logs”).
And then there is the issue that the VPN company can be compelled to monitor certain customers, specifically, in an extraordinary fashion. And considering how the content cartels have no problem going after random ordinary people sharing content, you can be that certain customer, and have your VPN company stack a ton of paper against you.
Mozilla VPN isn’t really Mozille-in-the-US-VPN. They just use MullVad which has an extremely detailed overview of every single piece of data that they keep about their customers and that is indeed 0-logging. They indeed go out of their way to store data about anything. Just have a look here: https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/
Sweden is still part of the “extended 5 eyes” countries.
My only goal of a VPN is to access services that I pay for in other countries so I don’t really care about the “eyes” but if you want to read a whole lot more I can highly recommend https://www.comparitech.com/vpn/vpn-logging-policies/
Thom Holwerda,
I don’t think they need so many employees to keep firefox viable, although mozilla might have to be a skeleton of its former self. IMHO the side projects that make up the fat are at especially high risk of loosing resources.. It’s why thunderbird was spun off, it has devoted fans but was a cost with very little revenue potential.
Mozilla may be a kind of bellweather for the open source world. The article highlights the conundrums that many open source projects ultimately face…
When it comes to revenue, there’s donations, sales/corporate service contracts, or advertising/datamining. While donations are clearly the most ideologically compatible, it might not be enough to keep mozilla’s afloat. It’s hard to see users paying for mozilla. Advertising is a nuisance that I dislike, but for better or worse it’s doing better than other business models.
Mozilla might be able to sell home page/search page rights to other bidders, but mozilla is loosing market share to chome (both google and microsoft), which makes partnering with mozilla less valuable over time. Without new but unforseen income from potentially slimy business dealings I worry about the long term viability of mozilla.
I’m also wondering about whether important projects yet somewhat ancillary projects like rustlang are going to be impacted by the layoffs.
Mozilla’s asking price will probably have to go down. But if Google walks away, MS will likely step up. If neither does, then maybe Mozilla can form an alliance with DuckDuckGo, with a joint message about user privacy and the dangers of allowing the Big Five (possibly excluding Apple) and others do whatever they want with your data and transaction metadata.
Personally I use FF at home and Chrome at work.
I have doubts. If MS really wanted to step up, I kind of think they wold have picked Firefox instead of Chromium as the base for the new IE/Edge.
MS doesn’t care about Firefox, but apparently they still care about Bing. And they have plenty of money, although maybe if they buy TikTok they’ll be frugal for awhile.
astro,
Sure such a matchup might make sense in the abstract, however when you look closer mozilla is so much bigger than duckduckgo, with about ten times the number of employees and 28 times duckduckgo’s revenue that it doesn’t seem plausible that duckduckgo would have the resources to fund mozilla. At least not without significantly more layoffs.
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/08/11/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees-in-massive-company-reorganization/
https://growjo.com/company/DuckDuckGo
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/
At least duckduckgo’s current path seems sustainable. Mozilla on the other hand is in a tough spot, even existentially challenged. They may be cornered into shady dealings if revenue continues to dry up.
Arguably mozilla could buy duckduckgo, promote it more and turn the knobs to turn it into a profit center for mozilla. Honestly I think duckduckgo has more profit potential under a more ruthless owner, however it would very likely transform the search engine in ways that undermines its privacy message.
I don’t like the idea of an acquisition, Mozilla already has a tough time managing hundreds of employees across multiple product lines. On the other hand, an alliance based on consistent messaging could make people take notice.
Rust is probably fine. It’s had some pretty good uptake recently, and FOSS works really well for software building blocks (compilers, libraries, languages, etc.).
Maybe the BSDs will become tier 1 platforms in Rust if other industry players are forced to pick up the dev slack.