Mozilla Fires One Fourth Of Employees And Announces New Money-Making Focus

In Firefox, it has been running for a while not particularly good, the market shares for months and years under the ten-percent mark, beginning of the year it was even overtaken by Microsoft Edge. Mozilla is now drawing the consequences.

Firefox maker Mozilla recently announced that it would have to lay off around 250 employees, the remaining 750 employees will also be given new tasks. Because according to Mozilla boss Mitchell Baker, the browser forge must and will concentrate on one thing in the future: making money.

Mozilla is not a crisis winner

Baker writes in a blog post titled “The world is changing, Mozilla is changing” that the coronavirus pandemic “has significantly affected our sales” and that it is therefore not possible to work with the “Pre-COVID Plan”. The reason for Mozilla’s difficulties is the overall economic situation that resulted from Corona, apparently, Mozilla and Firefox could not benefit from lockdown and home office to the same extent as many others in the IT business.

At the same time, the boss announced realignment or a new focus in the activities: Above all, they want to work on those products that actually make money. In Baker’s PR speech, which is sometimes rather empty of content, this is a focus on the product, technology, community, and economy, and a new mindset is to be created. Mozilla wants to create products that “alleviate software damage” and that “people love and want“. At least the former is a daring claim. Because Michal Purzynski, who is or was part of the threat management team at Mozilla, spoke up on Twitter. Purzynski writes on Twitter that his entire team was killed: “Mozilla is now without threat detection and response to incidents,” the developer accuses Baker of “terrible mismanagement”.

Baker in any case wants to concentrate on Mozilla products like Pocket, VPN, the VR chat room hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools. Firefox plays in the blog post of the Mozilla boss at most a minor role, how one wants to address the steadily shrinking market shares (currently 7.36 percent), Baker did not reveal.